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John Addison 1941.
John Mervyn Addison was born in Cobham, Surrey, on 16th March 1920. Coming from a military family, it was assumed he would follow the same path and he was, therefore, sent to Wellington College, a school with a long tradition of sending young men to Sandhurst. Instead, after leaving school, he enrolled at the Royal College of Music (RCM).
However, the war intervened, and he
enlisted as a private soldier before being
selected for officer training. Addison
was commissioned on 10th May 1941 into the 23rd Hussars, another newly formed armoured regiment which was only in existence between 1940 and 1946. The regiment landed on Juno Beach on 13th June 1944 and was involved in some of the heaviest fighting during the closing months of the war. Wounded in the battle for Caen and, later, taking part in the operations to relieve Arnhem, Addison finished the war as a captain. In 1946, he returned to RCM and studied composition, piano and clarinet, during which time he was awarded the prestigious Sullivan Award for Composition. After finishing his studies, he was selected to remain at the college as the youngest professor of composition.
Initially, Addison worked as a composer in the classical mode, writing pieces for the Cheltenham Festival, The Sadler’s Wells Ballet, and the Proms and soon became the music poster boy in culture-hungry post-war Britain. Concurrently, he started another sideline which eventually became his primary line of work. In 1950, he co-wrote the score for the film Seven Days to Noon, starting a career that would see him composing the themes for almost 60 films. At first, he was viewed as a specialist in ‘angry young men’ films – the gritty kitchen sink dramas that were popular at the time, such as A Taste of Honey and Look Back in Anger. However, he soon became the ‘go to’ composer for war and action films with scores for films such as The Cockleshell Heroes, Reach for The Sky and The Charge of the Light Brigade.
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