Ron Goodwin

Ronald Alfred Goodwin entered the world on 17 February 1925 in Plymouth, Devon, England, and departed it on 8 January 2003 at Brimpton Common in Berkshire. Music captivated him from childhood, yet his initial employment lay far from the industry. A position copying scores for the publishers Campbell Connelly eventually drew him inside the profession. At London’s Guildhall School of Music he pursued studies in trumpet and arranging, later performing on trumpet with Harry Gold while supplying charts to the orchestras led by Ted Heath and Geraldo.

Polygon Records, soon followed by Parlophone, gave him the chance to issue discs under the billing Ron Goodwin And His Concert Orchestra; he simultaneously prepared and directed accompaniments for vocalists such as Petula Clark and Jimmy Young. In addition he produced concert works in the classical mould—the Drake 400 Concert Suite and the New Zealand Suite among them—and created memorable advertising melodies, among them the Ricicles jingle (“I like Ricicles: they’re twicicle as nicicles”) and the Mr Sheen theme (“Mr Sheen shines umpteen things clean”).

Although these accomplishments were considerable, Goodwin left his deepest mark through film composition. After early documentary assignments he served, from the 1960s into the 1980s, as composer and frequently as musical director for dozens of feature pictures, among them Whirlpool, The Witness, I’m All Right Jack, In The Nick, Village Of The Damned, The Trials Of Oscar Wilde, The Man With The Green Carnation, The Man At The Carleton Tower, The Clue Of The New Pin, Partners In Crime, Invasion Quartet, the four Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films (Murder, She Said, Murder At The Gallop, Murder Most Foul and Murder Ahoy), The Day Of The Triffids, Follow The Boys, Of Human Bondage, Children Of The Damned, 633 Squadron, A Home Of Your Own, Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines, Operation Crossbow, The Alphabet Murders, That Riviera Touch, The Trap (later adopted as the London Marathon theme), Mrs Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter, Where Eagles Dare, Battle Of Britain, The Executioner, Frenzy, One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing, Escape From The Dark, Ride A Wild Pony, Candleshoe, Force 10 From Navarone, The Spaceman And King Arthur, Clash Of Loyalties and Valhalla. Throughout the 1970s he acted as in-house composer for Walt Disney’s British productions and simultaneously released a popular sequence of easy-listening albums. Several Ivor Novello Awards came his way, including the Entertainment Music Award in 1972 and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994. During that same decade he toured Britain with an orchestra presenting his own film music, maintained a steady presence on radio, and undertook extensive work in Canada.