Eric Fogg

Charles William Eric Fogg (21 February 190319 December 1939) was an English composer, conductor and BBC broadcaster. His early works were influenced by Igor Stravinsky, where he came under the influence of Sydney Nicholson and Ernest Bullock. His contemporaries there included Leslie Heward and Eric Warr. Fogg went on to study with Granville Bantock in Birmingham On 16 June 1921, his “Chinese suite” The Golden Valley (1919) was premiered by Adrian Boult with the Queen’s Hall Orchestra at the Royal College of Music, in the same concert as the first and only performance of Ivor Gurney’s War Elegy. He joined the BBC in Manchester in 1924 as an accompanist, rising to assistant music director under T H Morrison. In the 1930s he was well known as “Uncle Eric” of the radio programme Children’s Favourites. He succeeded Archie Camden as the conductor of the Manchester Schoolchildren’s Orchestra. In 1934 he moved to London and became musical director of the BBC’s Empire Service (now the BBC World Service), where he founded the Empire Orchestra of 22 players in December 1934. After this time his composition work tailed off due to pressure of other work, which included conducting the Empire Orc