Mortimer (Mordecai) Simmonds had the manners of a gentleman and the abstraction of a scholar – though he was neither, having been sent to work ‘in the print’ at thirteen years old to support a widowed mother and four sisters in Bethnal Green. In the inky-stink din of a newspaper press, he befriended the lower echelons of journalism and ascended the proof-readers’ ladder to join the sub-editors’ desk of a literary supplement, itself a passport to Hampstead salons. There he met in mid-war and was persuaded to marry my mother, the dowried and somewhat dowdy eldest daughter of an Anglo-Sephardic dynasty, the Medolas, who offered to set him up in the business of his choice. Bookishness beckoned, the more so after two years on the Somme, but he failed to find the kind of books that would give him aesthetic satisfaction and would also make money. His business career was going nowhere when a friend gave him a spare ticket to the Queen’s Hall on 4 May 1921, a date he would commemorate every year of his life. The soloist was Fritz Kreisler, back for the first time in eight years. Hearing him play an innocuous concerto by Viotti moved my father more than all the words he had ever read. Kreisler, with his bushy moustache and flashing eyes, ran off dazzling cadenzas as if they were child’s play while holding listeners, one by one, in the grip of a limpid glare. ‘I was seduced,’ my father would recall. ‘It was as if he played only for me. From the moment his eye caught mine, I knew that my life was destined for music.’

Unable to read a score or play a scale, my father hired a tutor to instruct him in the difference between crotchets and quavers and the significance of pitch relations in concert programming. He frequented student recitals at the Trinity College of Music, behind Selfridge’s department store, sniffing talent by instinct. One violinist he picked off the pavement, busking in Oxford Street. With a handful of hopefuls, he put on chamber recitals at the Aeolian Hall, a churchy room on Regent Street; and with the newly formed Birmingham Orchestra, bussed in for the night, he staged the first of his family entertainments at the marbled Royal Albert Hall, on the southern edge of Hyde Park.

No critic was ever invited to his concerts, but the halls were full and admission was universally affordable. An outraged music industry condemned Simmonds for ‘lowering the tone’. My father laughed, and halved his top-price tickets. He refused to join collegial committees to discuss unit costs, credit lines and entry controls on foreign performers. He could not countenance anything that imposed restraint on an interpreter of music, a bringer of light and joy. He revered artists, almost without reservation.