Arnold Safroni was the pseudonym of the novelist, dramatist and composer, A.S. Middleton. Born in Kent, he studied violin, becoming leader of the orchestra at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney, Australia, and later with the Carl Rosa Opera company. He wrote salon pieces and military marches, of which Imperial Echoes (1913) is his best known. It lay virtually ignored for the first thirty years of its life before BBC radio chose it to herald their nightly Radio Newsreel programme for the next thirty years or so. When CBC in Canada started up a television service in 1953 it was adopted there too for its nightly news bulletins.
© 2006 Philip Lane
