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Mr. Hugh Haynes Bailey S Middleton — |
Hugh Middleton
Prefix:
Mr.
First Name:
Hugh
Middle Names:
Haynes Bailey S
Last Name:
Middleton
Father: Arnold Safroni Middleton
Mother: Alice Eliza St.John
Died: circa 1979
Cremated: circa 1979
Profession: Executive
Hugh Middleton has 2 children listed here: • Frank Arnold Middleton • Michael Hugh Middleton
- Married once
Esther Lodewijkx at: London, England on 06 Jun 1946
Biography
Source
Hugh survived WWII and met Esther whilst on duty in Holland. He spent many years as an executive in various corporations but also ran his home, this Victorian mansion in Streatham Hill, London, renting out the upper floors and living on the ground floor. His education was interrupted by the war, and like so many of his peers was prevented from following in his antecedents' footsteps. Spent his working years working long hours to provide for his family and retired to a home in Chislehurst, Kent, where he loved to stroll the byways of the Kent countryside.
Source
Hugh Middleton did make one contribution to his father’s writing in that he wrote a preface to his father’s final book of poetry published by the ‘Fortune Press’ in 1950 - the year of his father’s death.
FOREWORD
A SAFRONI-MIDDLETON, novelist and composer of music, is the Author of several well known South Sea travel books. He comes from a literary family, and is the sole surviving son of Charles S. Middleton, writer of the first complete Percy Bysshe Shelley Biography, published in 1858. Aspiring in early boyhood to become a violin virtuoso, he changed his mind. Soon after leaving school, he shipped as an apprentice before the mast of a full-rigged sailing ship, outward bound for Australia. His uniquely adventurous career took him into many lands. His inherent love of music never left him. He declares that though he has studied the violin under eminent masters, including Pablo Sarasate, he went deepest into the heart of music when he studied his violin in the " wide conservatoire" of the forests, mountains and rushing rivers of unexplored Wild Papua. In his memoirs, published by Grant Richards, London, he writes: "Wrecked on the wild shores of Papua, and the sole survivor of the crew, I became frightfully depressed. Still endowed with the high enthusiasm of youth, and wishing to forget, I stuck my prized Kreutzer Violin Eludes in the fork of a thousand years old mahogany tree and practised on my violin, until my audience-astonished cockatoos-went screeching away, to fade in the sunset's blaze over the nameless mountains."
So adept did he become through practising in his mountain studio, that he eventually secured positions as 1St Violin in the crack orchestras of the Australian seaboard cities, and finally became first violin in the old Carl Rosa Opera Company. He is the author of many well known South Sea novels. " Sestrina," published by Methuen Ltd., London, and G. Doran Company, U.S.A., being his most successful South Sea novel. His stirring Government Military Band marches, Entr'acts, Waltzes, etc., etc., are well known to listeners of the B.B.C. His famous National Military March" Imperial Echoes ", has, for many years been the signature tune of the B.B.C. Radio News Reel. The selected new, and revised poems of this little volume are representative of the author's virile style and hold the authentic note of true experience and of memory transmuted by high imagination into poetry.
H. B. S.-M.