In certain corners of the Westminster village, what was once regarded as the lunatic ravings of Dominic Cummings have begun to seep into the mainstream. Britain is broken, so echo pubs up and down Whitehall, because a system that rewards failure, blocks talent, and invites venality has produced a Parliament of media-obsessed show ponies and a civil service where domain expertise hinders advancement.
If today’s Westminster is filled with too many amateurish professionals, the original ideal has not yet been extinguished elsewhere
One upshot has been the rise of a quasi-Bolshevik start-up culture imbuing nerdy topics like system design, tech and AI, nuclear, planning and infrastructure reform with an unprecedented sexiness in Wonkland. From Civic Future to Looking for Growth, the bright young young-ish acolytes of this movement both left and right are united in their hostility to amateurism in public life.
But ‘amateur’ was not always such a dirty word. The Victorian ideal of the gentleman amateur was a connoisseur, engaged in serious pursuit of the chosen vocation, highly skilled and knowledgeable – only with noble, unsullied motivations like love, honour and public-spiritedness rather than need or personal gain. If today’s Westminster is filled with too many amateurish professionals, the original ideal has not yet been extinguished elsewhere.
On Saturday, an unpaid army of busy NHS doctors, civil servants, City lawyers, and actual professional musicians will gather in North London to sing a stunning selection of choral works by some of the greatest English composers for the Hadley Choir’s inaugural concert. Rest assured, you can expect superb bang for your buck. These are all ex-choral scholars from the finest Cambridge college choirs (including Gonville and Caius, King’s, Trinity, Pembroke, and Christ’s).
As is so often the case with the best things in life, this project came about by accident, in a boozy burst of nostalgia. At a choir couple’s wedding last year, a few of us realised how much we missed singing together and decided to form an amateur choir of our own.
The enthusiasm we received was both heartwarming and unexpected. Everyone we contacted gladly cleared their schedules for the chance to see old friends and new, make beautiful music, and indulge in that other great English tradition of patronising the pub afterwards. One married pair living outside London even volunteered to do a six-hour round trip as long as they could bring their infant to the rehearsal.
It’s easy to take our rich choral tradition for granted. Britain is blessed with an unusually dense network of cathedral and university college choirs, which has trained generations of choristers to sing to a professional standard. China’s sports school factories may churn out child Olympians, but at least we can offer the celestial treble solo in Once in Royal David’s City.
Our secret weapon, though, is our ability to read at sight. First year undergraduates who can’t work a washing machine and live off microwave meals are supposed to be able to bash out Byrd polyphony and Howells motet for double choir, something that wouldn’t be expected at comparable or even professional choirs in other parts of the world. Trust me when I say your sightreading can’t not improve when you’re rattling through multiple sets of canticles a week, especially when every slip-up is instantly met with a gorgonesque glare from your conductor.
My time as a college choral scholar was one of the best experiences of my life. As a History student with few contact hours, being forced to sing five times a week provided me with some much-needed discipline, human contact and spiritual nourishment. Though raised by my Baptist minister father on praise-and-worship bangers (in Korean or English, depending on which church I was attending that week), years after my teenage descent into Nietzsche-fuelled atheism, I rediscovered a cultural faith of sorts through the music and poetry of the Anglican liturgy.
For many of us in the choir, singing evensong amidst the old stones became an embodied ritual: a comforting point of concentration at the day’s close when we could release our sundry earthly stresses and surrender our egos (unless, of course, you happened to be a soprano with a solo that service). I can still recall the passionate beauty of the Magnificat by heart.
College choirs also make the perfect matchmakers. Young and randy, with plenty of common interests and no real responsibilities, welded together by the shared joy and trauma of back-to-back rehearsals, a little bit of frisson as you frisk around in the vestry – lubricated by the free-flowing alcohol – is inevitable. You’d be amazed how scrawny, useless boys with their breakfast still faintly visible on their jumpers are transfigured by the generous glow of the candlelit chapel, their attractiveness spiking tenfold, even as you’re showered in the spittle of their overly enthusiastic ‘prrrrrrrrrraise the Lord’. But they also provide a precious community of lifelong friends ‘rooted and grounded in love’, as Ephesians 3:17 puts it, a priceless good in this ever-commodified world.
And that is what the Hadley Choir is really about. No pay, no gain, no utility – just the shared love of music, friendship, and joy. So if you are free this Saturday, 21st February, and fancy some Elgar, Stanford, and Vaughan Williams, to name a few, make your way over to St Mary Brookfield, London, NW5 1SL, for a 7.30 pm start. Have a glass (or two), take in the magnificent church, and, for one sublime evening, experience the original ideal of amateurism at its best.
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