William Blezard (10 March 1921 in Padiham, Lancashire – 2 March 2003 in Barnes, London) was a talented pianist and composer who was musical director to Noël Coward, Marlene Dietrich and Joyce Grenfell.
Personal life
Blezard's parents worked in one of Padiham's many cotton mills as weavers. Like many other local children, as a child he wore clogs, traditional for the area and not a sign of poverty. His tenor father sang semi-professionally. The mill-owner's daughter spotted his musical talent initially on the harmonium and persuaded the mill owner, Teddy Higham, to pay for piano lessons. In 1938 he left Clitheroe Royal Grammar School where he had played Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, having won a Lancashire county scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London where he was a pupil of Arthur Benjamin.
In 1954 he married musical conductor Joan Kemp-Potter, whom he met at the Royal College. She was the conductor of the Leatherhead Choral Society and the Sutton Symphony Orchestra (1974-1992) as well as a teacher at the Guildhall School of Music and the London College of Music and an artist. She died in 2001, aged 80. He had cared for her after she had had a severe stroke in 1994. They had a son and daughter, known as Paul and Pookie.
Blezard never stopped working to improve his piano technique. He lost his boyhood stammer and broad Lancashire accent in early adulthood but fought personal demons of doubt and worry all his life.
He and his family lived in a rambling house just off Barnes Common, the living room dominated by his grand piano. Whenever he wanted to emphasise a point, he would leap up to demonstrate on the keys. He never retired and the night before he died he was performing at a charity concert in Barnes.
War work
He joined the Royal Air Force at the outbreak of the Second World War and became a Morse code operator in Wick, Scotland.
Postwar career
In 1946 he returned to the Royal College, and studied piano with Arthur Benjamin and Frank Merrick, composition with Herbert Howells, and orchestration with Gordon Jacob. He won the Cobbett Prize for a composition for a Fantasy String Quartet. He then wrote music for Muir Mathieson's documentary films, at Denham Film Studios near the village of Denham, and many others including "The Cardboard Cavalier", 1949, starring Margaret Lockwood and the film version of Noël Coward's play "The Astonished Heart" in 1950 starring Celia Johnson. Another was Beau Brummell, 1954, starring Stewart Granger, Peter Ustinov, Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Morley.
In 1954 Blezard had arranged a performance for two pianos with Donald Swann and Sydney Carter. Swann introduced him to Joyce Grenfell, and she engaged him as her musical director. During rehearsals the same year for the show "Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure", Blezard married the conductor Joan Kemp Potter. The show lasted for over a year, ending its West End run at St Martin's Theatre. The piano was so bad that Blezard asked the management to buy an upright Bechstein at Harrods' sale.
After this production, Grenfell decided that Blezard's piano skills were such that she no longer needed an orchestra as he could play any tune by ear, arrange it in any key or style and transcribe it on to paper without a piano. She wrote in her first, 1976, autobiography, "In Pleasant Places": "He is compounded of compressed energy, employed at its best when he is playing the piano, then it is wholly controlled. His familiarity with the keyboard has the naturalness of breathing; and he moves in it with confidence, dexterity and grace
From 1954 to 1973 he composed many of Grenfell's songs and spoof operettas such as Freda and Eric. They performed on stage and television all over Britain, America and Australia. He could play her entire repertoire from memory, even though she often changed the running order at the last moment. To warm up before a show they would improvise fake Debussy and mock Schubert; he learned to play over hailstorms in Melbourne, cowboy films in Sydney, bagpipes in Auckland and the police radio on Grenfell's mike.
Grenfell insisted on Blezard's getting equal credit, and would complain to the organisers if he was left off a poster or not mentioned in a review. She also pushed for higher fees, and persuaded the BBC to increase his fee from 10 to 200 guineas for two Cabaret television shows. Diana Lyddon, stage manager for Grenfell's 1960 British tour, said:"The venues were often town halls. They were all under contract to provide a tuned Steinway grand. As I was trying to fix the lighting, Bill would stomp in and say: 'Bloody awful piano again'. The next time we toured together I always checked in advance.