ABSTRACT
When he was discharged from his Guards regiment at the end of the Second World War, Humphrey Lyttelton enrolled as a student at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. On Monday nights he’d go to the Red Barn at Barnehurst, Kent, ‘a drear, dull, thirties-built suburb’, for an evening of New Orleans jazz - first a lecture and record recital, then live music from George Webb’s Dixielanders. In his autobiography Lyttelton remembers how determined these ‘real’ jazzers were to distinguish themselves from Britain’s pre-war dance band musicians. They were contemptuous of band uniforms, stage comperes, novelty numbers; they cultivated a deliberate image of no image, dressing down, basking in their lack of ‘professionalism’. They modelled their playing on black rather than white American performers, and their very amateurism (George Webb and several of his band members were full-time workers at the nearby Vickers-
Armstrong plant) was taken to guarantee both their resistance to commercial pressures and their proletarian sympathies - their initial central London concerts were promoted by the Young Communist League’s Challenge Jazz Club. But this was a meritocratic set-up and old Etonian Lyttelton soon became a Dixielander too, before leav ing, in November 1947, to form his own band (taking Wally Fawkes, ex-Sidcup Art School, with him). Jim Godbolt, the Dixielanders’ then manager, comments: ‘It’s certain that there would have been a [trad jazz] “revival” in Britain without Webb-Lyttelton but this strange flowering of an alien culture in a drear-dull London sub urb, with an upper-crust gent and a band of factory workers, spear headed a movement that spread throughout the country with quite sensational results.’2
