David Jacks - Peter Asher: A Life in Music

This is my first attempt at writing a book, and I would not have succeeded were it not for the help of a huge number of people. I would like to acknowledge a few to which I owe a great deal of thanks...

Author Sheila Weller gave me an early push to keep going, as did author Harvey Kubernik. My old friend, writer Matt Hurwitz, always offered encouragement, as did Don Wrege and George (not the) Martintwo friends from my college days who were always ready to read chapters and offer, not only invaluable critiques, but their love and support.

My eternal thanks to everyone who spoke with me in person, or on the phone, or sent an email recounting their adventures with Peter. Of course, you dont get in touch with over two hundred entertainers and show business folk without various managers and publicists clearing the way, and Im indebted to you all (too numerous to list here, unfortunately). A handful of interviews ended up being drastically reduced or edited out entirely, but they were always important in helping to broaden my understanding of Peters life and career.

A big thanks to Keith Avo Avison, who managed to hang on to hundreds of negatives from his days with Peter and Gordon and simply mailed them all to me (theyre in Peters hands now).

That youre reading this is due in no small part to my literary agent, Barbara Hogensonfor this project to ever see the light of day, she was essential. And thanks to the folks at Backbeat Books for their faith in what I was attempting to do.

And to my biggest fan, Kathleen Forrestbecause of you, I wont ever have to stay in a world without love.

Finally: Fond thanks to Peter Ashercool and thoughtful throughout.

David Jacks

April 2022

On April 3, 1912, just a week before the Titanic set sail on her only voyage, the fourth of Louise and the Reverend Felix Ashers five children was born in Nottingham. Richard Alan John Asher certainly inherited his mothers love of music, and though he did not follow his father into the clergy, Richard always loved the hymns of the church; his mind easily grasped the workings of harmony and thrilled to voices raised in songa love he passed on to his future children. My father used to make us all sing in a little harmony group at home, Peter Asher remembered. He would sing bass. We sang a lot as kids, my sisters and I.

After attending Lancing College, Richard enrolled at the London Hospital, where he got his qualifications in 1935. In 1942, Dr. Asher was appointed physician at Central Middlesex Hospitalnot a particularly prestigious hospital at the time. Though a new World War was raging, Richard was deemed unfit for the armed forces. He had some problem with his toes, some disease where they were all kind of bunched up, Peter recalled. But I think doctors got pretty much of a pass anyway because they needed them. He was a pacifist by the end of the war, Peter confided, smiling, so that would have been an issue! Dr. Asher excelled as a general physician, where his eccentricity began to show itselfmastering how to sign his name upside down (to save time, he said) and bicycling through the hospital corridors as he went from ward to ward, seeing scores of patients on his rounds.

On July 27, 1943, Richard married red-haired twenty-nine-year-old Margaret Augusta Eliotlike his mother, a talented musician and teacher. Margaret could trace her ancestry back past William the Conqueror and other members of the British peerage, eventually arriving at distant relative Arnulf of Metz, a seventh-century Frankish bishop and saint. The newlyweds soon moved into a flat at 2 Seaford Court on Great Portland Street, where Margaret gave private music lessons, supplementing her income as a teacher at the prestigious Royal Academy of Music. She also began to play concerts around England, which helped boost morale during wartime: One day playing in a canteen, where the noise of the till drowned the music, she later recalled, and another day playing trios at the bottom of a coal mine. A woman in an orchestra was then quite rare, but with many of the men off fighting Hitler, they were welcomedsomewhat: I remember my mother telling me, said Peter, they were instructed that when they walked onto the stage to walk behind the men to make themselves invisible.

Not long after he arrived at Central Middlesex, Dr. Asher was given the task of overseeing the Mental Observation Ward. He was not formally trained in psychiatry but had amazing powers of observation, noting how mental disease often had a physical cause. He also began to write, with many articles appearing in The Lancetone of the oldest and most-respected medical journals in the world. He was known for his succinct way of writing, rather than the medical tradition of verbosity and confusion, Peter noted.

One early piece, published in 1947 in the British Medical Journal, was The Dangers of Going to Bed. With skill and wit, and quite ahead of his time, he made the case for getting patients up and moving much quicker than was then customary. But of all his writings, many gathered in two volumes after his death (Talking Sense and A Sense of Asher), he is best known for Munchausen syndrome.

Now an accepted mental condition known even by the general public, Munchausen syndrome involves a person who fabricates or elaborates an illness to get attention. After observing several patients who were admitted numerous times with different illnesses and wildly varying stories to explain their need for treatment, Dr. Asher wrote his paper (published in The Lancet, February 1951), naming the condition after the wild and fictitious exploits of Baron von Munchausen. Whereas most Doctors would name a disease after themselves, Peter observed, it was my fathers nature that he would name it after Baron Munchausen, of whose adventures he was an avid reader. Today, a related condition named Munchausen syndrome by proxy is well-documented, in which a parent, for example, concocts a story regarding their childs supposed illness and revels in the attention.

On June 22, 1944, the Ashers welcomed their first childthe thirty-ninth great-grandson of mighty Saint Arnulf. No long fancy namesimply Peter Asher. My father believed in simplicity, Peter recalled, especially when many forms and ration books required the use of full names. He decided, correctly, that it would be a convenience in life (both to him and later to us) to give minimalist names. Margaret, encouraged by Dr. Asher, was determined to feed Peter herself, so it was a choice between staying at home or taking the baby with me to work, she later recalled. Accordingly, baby Peter began to accompany Margaret to her concerts. I often think, she stated, that he did more for morale of the troops than the classical concerts they heard. When I came off the platform, I invariably found some soldier had picked him up. One experience, though, proved quite alarming: I played in a Town Hall and was advised to leave my baby and the carrycot in the Mayors parlour. When I went to collect him, no baby and no carrycot. An earnest social worker had taken him as she thought he was abandoned, Margaret remembered. But of course, all was well in the end.

Sister Jane joined the family two years later, with another sister, Clare, arriving two years after thatall sporting their mothers flaming red hair. While juggling the raising of her growing brood, Margaret continued tutoring music students, including a young man who, while serving in the Fleet Air Arm during the war, had befriended a professor of piano at the Guildhall School of Music.

When I came out of the services, he asked me to come and see him, Sir George Martin recalled. He said, You know, you really should take up music. And I said, I cant! Ive never had a music lesson in my life! And he said, Yes you can! If you apply yourself, you