Page 255 - They Also Served

sandals, his aristocratic family must have despaired of their wayward son. Managing parallel careers as both a cartoonist and a musician, Lyttelton favoured collaboration with New Orleans musicians in conflict with the Musicians’ Union, which forbade working with US artists. In 1956, he had a hit with Bad Penny Blues, which was the first British jazz record to reach the top 20 in the charts. Fourty-four years later, he appeared alongside Radiohead in front of a crowd of 50,000. From the 1950s to the early 2000s, the Humphrey Lyttelton Band toured the UK, and such was his influence that Louis Armstrong referred to him as ‘that cat in England who swings his ass off’.
Lyttelton also carved out a third career as a radio presenter, hosting The Best of Jazz on Radio 2 from 1967 until 2007 and I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue on Radio 4 from 1972 to 2007. The show was a deliberate attempt by the BBC to move away from the staid middle-class game show format, and Lyttelton’s deadpan delivery of ever-more- outrageous double entendres was a regular feature. Outside work, he was a talented calligrapher and president of the Society for Italic Handwriting. His eccentricity extended to his obsession with privacy, and he designed his house with blank walls on the outside and all the windows looking over an internal courtyard. When he was asked to collaborate on his obituary being compiled by the writer Steve Voce, he commented wistfully, ‘I wish I could be there to read it when it’s published’. A lifelong socialist, Humphrey Lyttelton turned down the offer of an OBE in 1974 and a knighthood in 1996.
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