John Ivimey, the author of Boys and Music: Memories and Stories of Wellington, Harrow, Dulwich, Cheltenham, Marlborough from 1888 to 1933 (Marlborough: Country Paper Offices, 1936), was twenty when appointed assistant to Alan Gray at Wellington in 1888. Trained as a Corporation Exhibitioner at the Guildhall School of Music under Gadsby, this was his first appointment. During the next forty-five years of a career not exclusively spent teaching in public schools, he was to hold posts in no fewer than five of them, finally becoming Director of Music at Marlborough in 1918 until his retirement a quarter of a century later.

Boys and Music, the unassuming volume of reminiscences he then wrote, provides a rare single source of factual detail about conditions in a range of famous schools. It provides an arresting contrast to A. H. Peppin's solemn survey, but equally conveys an impression of the circumscribed, stereotyped, often narrow world within which the musicians struggle to overcome philistine prejudice and snobbery was slowly succeeding. [BR]