Andrew Lloyd Webber - Unmasked

I took the train next morning and went straight to my parents’ flat. Granny really wanted to know how I had got on. I explained about the cat. She looked exasperated and muttered something about how one day cats would be my undoing. I naturally took a different view. But I was masking huge jitters about the outcome of my interview. It wasn’t exactly textbook. So I phoned Magdalen College and asked if there was by any chance a list yet of new undergraduates for next year. Eventually I got through to a very important-sounding woman who said she was the bursar’s secretary. I asked her if the list of next year’s undergraduates was ready yet.

“I am afraid we only have the list of scholarship winners but the list of the names of the new undergraduates will be published in two days’ time.”

Two days was a long time to wait. “By the way to whom am I talking?”

I mumbled my name.

“Oh wait a second,” she said, “you are Mr Lloyd Webber, just let me see. Ah yes. Mr Lloyd Webber, congratulations. You have won a History exhibition.* We so look forward to seeing you at Magdalen next year.”

I was speechless. Granny blinked back a tear. Here was I, a boy who had wasted a complete year at Westminster and I had won the only open award Westminster had to Oxford that year. I said goodbye to Granny, ran to South Kensington station where the train to Westminster took an eternity to arrive. I ran down Tothill Street into Dean’s Yard and to my long-suffering history master’s classroom. He had just finished a lesson. I told him the news and he went ashen. All he said was “Bless you, my boy.”

It was then that I realized just how far he had stuck his neck out to get me a scholarship to Westminster and how terribly I had betrayed his trust. I spent the rest of the day contemplating the ineffable powers of the cat.

It was just before Christmas when my agent Desmond Elliott unleashed a project that was to dominate the next two years. Desmond ran a small publishing company called Arlington Books which specialized in niche areas such as cookbooks. He also represented Leslie Thomas, an author who a year later had a huge success with his novel The Virgin Soldiers . Leslie was a “Barnardo Boy,” in other words an orphan raised in a Barnardo home. These “homes” were founded by a Victorian philanthropist Dr Thomas Barnardo. He had witnessed the plight of orphaned children in London’s Dickensian East End and, future wife on arm, started a rescue home that mushroomed into one of the world’s leading charities for homeless kids.

Desmond immediately divined in the Barnardo story a massive post- Oliver! musical. Kids, jolly cockneys, Dickensian locations, a hero who nearly lost the love of his life in his crusade against the Victorian establishment – this, Desmond decided, was stuff that would make Oliver! look like Salad Days . Leslie was supposed to come up with a storyline and I was to knock up a few tunes so Desmond could stitch up a producer. It was to be called The Likes of Us . Connoisseurs of musical theatre disasters will already have twitching noses. Years later a musical about Dr Barnardo (not mine) did reach the West End. Tom Lehrer was in the audience and was heard to mutter “a terminal case for abortion.”

There was a minor snag to creativity. I was still at school. Nowadays nobody would dream of having pupils who had outlived a school’s usefulness hanging disruptively around the cloisters. But January 1965 saw me back in College one more time. I simply had to get out. So I invented a story that I had been offered a part-time job by an antiquarian bookseller. It was an elegant solution for all. In February I was free and I wanted to start work on the musical. The trouble was there was not a lot of input from Leslie Thomas. With hindsight I wonder how much he knew about it. Leslie is a novelist not a scriptwriter.

IT WAS A WEIRD feeling suddenly having time on my hands, waking up not knowing how to fill the day. When you are old you fill blank days by doing pointless things like writing autobiographies, but that wasn’t on my radar at the time and Oxford was months away. So I spent the early part of the year looking at buildings. It was then that I cemented my knowledge of Britain’s inner cities.

Today there’s much talk about the new generation looking forward to a worse future than their parents. Based on some of the things I saw in 1965, it would have been hard for the new generation not to have had a better future than their forebears. It was common for four families to be stuffed into a clapped-out small terraced house sharing one toilet at the back of a stinking misnomer of a garden. If the era of Rachman, whose name was so toxic that “Rachmanism” entered the Oxford English Dictionary, was supposed to have been over I didn’t notice it. He was the notorious British slum landlord who bought run-down properties in rough neighbourhoods and packed them with immigrants before in 1962 he did something unusual, i.e. not for profit – he dropped dead.

Coming from a protected, albeit bohemian environment, I admit to being shocked and not a little frightened by how quickly large city areas were changing character out of recognition. Once I was backed onto the rickety railings of one of the terraced houses that surrounded St Mary Magdalene in Paddington by a not particularly threatening, if extremely large, Jamaican guy pushing me “de weed.” A gang of three passing white yobs surrounded us, opining articulate bon mots such as “He may be a fucking poncy posh nancy-boy but he’s white and you take your fucking black hands off him.” Something told me this was not the moment to engage in conversation about High Victorian Gothic. Today the houses around St Mary’s are long gone. It’s odd to reflect that those that survive in Notting Hill and Paddington now sell for millions of pounds.

I SPENT EASTER WITH Auntie Vi at La Mortola which was in full Mediterranean flower mode. She was spending a lot of time in the kitchen from which emanated cries like “God bugger the Pope,” followed by a lot of meticulous writing up of recipes in a notebook. I tinkled away dreaming up tunes for the Barnardo show on her blue piano while I gazed at the virulent purple bougainvillea that had flowered early on her terrace that spring. But still there was no story outline from Leslie Thomas and I began to concoct one myself. Back in London, out of the blue I received the following letter.

11 GUNTER GROVE LONDON SW10

April 21, 1965

Dear Andrew

I have been given your address by Desmond Elliott of Arlington Books, who I believe has also told you of my existence.

Mr Elliott told me you “were looking for a ‘with it’ writer” of lyrics for your songs, and as I have been writing pop songs for a short while now and particularly enjoy writing the lyrics I wondered if you consider it worth your while meeting me. I may fall far short of your requirements, but anyway it would be interesting to meet up – I hope!

Would you be able to get in touch with me shortly, either at FLA 1822 in the evenings, or at WEL 2261 in the day time (Pettit and Westlake, solicitors are the owner of the latter number).

Hoping to hear from you,

Yours,

Tim Rice

Naturally I was intrigued. I thought it might be unwise to call his work number so I dialled the FLAxman. In those days all phone numbers were prefixed by abbreviations in letters of names or towns. The numerical equivalents still survive, for example in London 235 is short for the “BEL” of BELgravia. A school friend’s uncle had a 235 phone line which until his death in the noughties he answered with “BELgravia whatever the-number-was.” He also referred to Heathrow Airport by its 1938 title the London Aviation Station and pronounced the Alps “the Oorlps.” Once he moaned to me that a sojourn in his country house had been upset by his company holding a board meeting on a Wednesday. “It will ruin two weekends!” he fumed. But I digress.