Stanley Hawley

Harry Stanley Hawley (17 May 1867 – 13 June 1916) was an English pianist and a composer who specialised in recitation melodramas for speaker and piano. Education Hawley was born at 61 South Street, Ilkeston, Derbyshire, the son of a butcher, who died before his son’s first birthday. Stanley won a scholarship to attend Derby Grammar School. At the age of 15 he was appointed organist at the Independent Chapel in Pimlico, Ilkeston. In 1883 he began studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London, supported by a further scholarship. His teachers there included Arthur O’Leary and Ebenezer Prout. Performer and composer Hawley rapidly established himself as an accompanist and soloist, making his debut at the St James’s Hall in 1887. According to Eric Coates Grieg, during one of his visits to London in the late 1880s, heard the student Hawley play his Piano Concerto and praised his performance, though the facts and exact date of this often repeated anecdote have since been disputed. In 1890 he was the first to receive the medal of the Worshipful Company of Musicians and in the same year he performed for Queen Victoria at Osborne House (her summer residence) on the Isle of Wight. He perfor