Hubert Bath was born in Devon and studied at the RAM. He was in at the start of the ‘talkies’ and in fact contributed to the score of the first British one, Hitchcock’s Blackmail in 1929. Many others followed, culminating in Love Story which contained the mini-piano concerto, Cornish Rhapsody, so often recorded alongside Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto which predates it by a few years. Bath never lived to see the full success of his piece, dying days before the end of the War in 1945 at work on the Margaret Lockwood vehicle, The Wicked Lady. His march, Out of the Blue (1931), subtitled ‘Marine Four-step or Eva Three-step’, has become synonymous in Britain with football results, being the signature-tune of BBC radio’s Sports Report.
© 2006 Philip Lane
