There's another reason for celebrating today – 4 July – apart from its being American Independence Day and that's because 152 years ago an Oxford mathematic don, the Reverend C L Dodgson, took the three daughters of the Dean of Christ Church on a boating trip on the river Isis and wove a story to entertain his young passengers that featured the middle daughter, Alice Liddell, and was eventually written up as Alice's Adventures Underground...
...and was later refined into that classic of nonsense we now know as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865 by Dodgson under the pen-name, Lewis Carroll...
To mark this occasion, it seemed to me that a song might be called for – well, two songs actually – so here's an extract from my second-ever radio programme for the BBC, The Tune's My Own Invention about the music written by various composers down the years as settings for the songs in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-glass and What Alice Found There...
The programme, first broadcast over thirty-five years ago in 1978, was written with my good friend the late Antony Miall and, between us, we provided all the character voices –– with the exception of Alice who was played by Miss Eva Haddon!
In this sequence Tony, as well playing the piano, speaks, sings and weeps for the doleful Mock Turtle while I growl away as the Gryphon.
Won't you come and join the dance...?
Won't you come and join the dance...?
