Roy Douglas

Richard Roy Douglas (12 December 1907 – 23 March 2015) was an English composer, pianist and arranger. He worked as musical assistant to William Walton and Ralph Vaughan Williams, made well-known orchestrations of works such as Les Sylphides (based on piano pieces by Chopin) and Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, and wrote a quantity of original music. Life and career Early years Roy Douglas was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, on 12 December 1907, the youngest of the three children of Edith Ella Douglas, Charlton, and her husband, Richard Moses Douglas, a buyer and manager in a furnishing company. His involvement with music began early: as a five-year-old he would listen to his sister playing in her piano lessons and then seat himself at the piano and play by ear. His mother decided that he too should have piano lessons. An attack of rheumatic fever left him with a damaged heart, and the doctors said he was unlikely to live to adulthood. His fragile health meant that he received little formal education, but when well enough, he spent many hours playing the piano, “reading at sight everything I could find from Beethoven to ragtime” He was harmonium player, deputy pianist, celesta pl