Thoughts from our founder – 80 years on
Covid-19 and the associated restrictions may have led to increased separation, but sometimes hands can reach out across the decades to make surprising connections. Last week I needed to scan an old copy of Gramophone, from July 1942. The war years are always a poignant presence among our bound volumes – the significantly thinner spines reflecting paper shortages and wider deprivations of the day, but there all the same, offering proud continuity and occasionally carrying correspondence from serving soldiers, grateful for links to art in unimaginable circumstances. I’m not, for one moment, equating the horrors of that global conflict with the challenges of our own time – the world is today united in fighting a common enemy – but turning to our founder Compton MacKenzie’s opening editorial, I was still…