HOPE, ASHWORTH  

Ashworth Hope was a successful solicitor with several offices around the north-west of England. He spent some time in the Far East but returned to retire in Somerset in the 1930s to a home large enough to have a music-room that the BBC in the West used for broadcasts of concerts featuring the likes of Campoli and others. For the last years of his life he regularly watched Blue Peter marvelling perhaps that a harmless little hornpipe he had written in the 1930s would become as familiar to the nation as the National Anthem itself.

© 2006 Philip Lane