Francis J. M. Collinson
Francis James Montgomery Collinson
(1898-1984)
A musical director and musicologist, Francis James Montgomery Collinson was born at Coates House, Manor Place, Edinburgh, the third of five children of Thomas Henry Collinson organist at St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh. His father was Northumbrian, his mother Scottish. He attended Daniel Stewart's College, Edinburgh, leaving in 1914 to serve an apprenticeship under his father at St Mary's, where Francis had been a chorister. During the First World War he served for three years in motor transport in the Army Service Corps, having first been a Red Cross volunteer. In 1919 he matriculated in music studies at the University of Edinburgh. He threw himself into university musical life, playing in and conducting the Reid Orchestra and conducting the student Yahoo Orchestra which he developed into a large-scale theatre orchestra. He also composed the annual musical show run by the student representative council. After gaining a MusBac in 1923 he met with some success in London and conducted for both Cole Porter and Richard Tauber.
In 1941 Collinson took charge of the BBC's Country Magazine programmes. These programmes, many of them outside broadcasts, involved Collinson in the study, collection and arrangement of folk-songs throughout Britain. Bob and James Copper from Sussex and Harry Cox from Norfolk were three of his 'finds'. He published these arrangements in a series with Francis Dillon from 1946 onwards and also issued three unique 78 r.p.m. recordings of folk songs in the Gramophone Company's Plum Label series.
In 1951, Collinson was invited back to Edinburgh as the first musical research fellow at the School of Scottish Studies, concentrating on the collection, study, and transcription of traditional song in Scottish and Gaelic. In 1966 he made his name in the field of traditional music with his comprehensive and scholarly book The Traditional and National Music of Scotland. Thereafter, under the editorship of the great Gaelic folklorist John Lorne Campbell he brought out three volumes of Hebridean Folksongs (1969, 1977, and 1981), presenting to the world genuine Gaelic traditional song. During this period he also produced The Bagpipe: The History of a Musical Instrument (1975).
Collinson died on 21 December 1984 in Galashiels, and buried at Mortlach Church, Dufftown, Banffshire. His manuscripts of music collected from English sources reside with the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (VWML), London.
Browse Francis Collinson's collection in The Full English digital archive.
