Ian Handford: David Fanshawe – from Paignton to Polynesia

David Arthur Fanshawe was born in Paignton on April 19th 1942 and eventually attended St Georges Choir School Windsor and then Stowe Buckinghamshire. 

His father meanwhile was an artillery Officer in the Army in India before serving in numerous countries mirroring many generations of Fanshawe's who had supported the British interest abroad. 

It is likely that it was his fathers wide travels and involvement in the planning of the D-Day landings that sparked David's earliest dreams about "adventure and travel". Even at age six he would repeatedly say "when he grew up he wanted to be a traveller and explorer" like dad.

David was born and initially schooled in Torbay before attending the Choir school at Windsor, yet it was after moving to Stowe school Bucks that he now discovered he suffered from dyslexia. Undeterred he still used his spare time learning  how to play the piano. It seems that being unable to read musical scores debarred him from being a chorister and now he was even more determined to find a way to create a career which encompassed "adventure and travel" of the world.  

Dyslexia was never going to deter his future, though his mother still introduced him to Baroness Guirne Crieth a famous composer, formal pianist and fortunately a tutor. She taught him until 1959 the time he was about to leave Stowe school.  However it was not long before he found his perfect first job by becoming a trainee film editor and sound recordist with The Film Producers Guild at Merton. 

The studio specialised in documentary film making work and the skill of sound recording on tape. These were indeed the absolutel skills required by David and with his vision and dreams  for "adventure and travel" he must have thought he was in heaven.  He now learned the art of "sound recording and production of film" and by 1965 very much to his astonishment he won a Full Scholarship to the Royal College of Music, knowing this would further his study of music under the professional eye of the already famous composer John Lambert.

It was during one of the college holidays that David set out on his first adventure and early ambition to travelling both Europe and the Middle East before finally getting to Afghanistan. It was while hiking in Afghan and Iran that for the first time David actually discovered Islamic music and knew it needed to be encaptured for posterity. During his later travels he would formally record all ethnic and traditional music found in Iraq and Bahrain before returning to London and complete his studying. 

Now qualified to undertake his second major adventure or perhaps more succinctly - start his dreamed of  "travels and exploring" by 1972 David actually knew precisely where his next trip would take him. He was away from the UK for more than two years while crossing Europe and the Mediterranean before travelling on to Lake Victoria Africa - constantly encapturing every type of indigenous music on tape he came across. In fact when he finally returned three years later, he had travelled the Mediterranean, the Nile, Egypt and the Sudan before entering Uganda and Kenya to reach his final goal the area of Lake Victoria. 

It was a stupendous trip where he encaptured music from a dozen or more countries having once persuaded local musicians to play for especially him. In reality it fulfilled his wildest dreams completely. With his huge workload complete he returned to London with hundreds of hours of musical recordings which now somehow proved why the unexpected scholarship given by the Royal College of Music was given and perhaps more importantly access to that famous tutor the composer John Lambert.

For this work alone fifty years later, David would be get another personal award - an Honorary Degree as  "Doctor of Music" given by the "University of the West of England" - appropriately the region where he was born when his family lived at Paignton.