Addinsell was born in January 1904 and will best be remembered for the piece of music he wrote for the 1941 film, Dangerous Moonlight, known to millions as The Warsaw Concerto.   He wrote a vast amount of other film and radio and stage music and was otherwise well known at the time for his collaboration with the comedienne and singer, Joyce Grenfell.  Richard Addinsell died in 1977.

Although few people may recognise Alford's name, almost everyone will be familiar with his most famous march, Colonel Bogey.  Born Frederick Ricketts in London in 1881, he adopted the pseudonym of Alford to cover his compositions when he started to write for military bands whilst holding the post of bandmaster of the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders following service in India.   Besides writing some memorable marches, he also produced many classical arrangements and transcriptions.

William Alwyn was born in Northampton in November 1905.  He will be best remembered as the composer of a host of striking British film scores.  It is reckoned he wrote over 200 of them.  These include Desert Victory, The Way Ahead, The True Glory, Odd Man Out, The History of Mr. Polly, Fallen Idol, The Crimson Pirate, The Million Pound Note, The Winslow Boy, The Card and A Night to Remember.

Leroy Anderson (June 29, 1908 – May 18, 1975) was best known as an American composer of short, light concert pieces, many of which were introduced by the Boston Pops Orchestra under the direction of Arthur Fiedler. John Williams described him as "one of the great American masters of light orchestral music."

Ronald Binge was born on 15^th July 1910 in Normanton, Derby.  He will best be remembered for the work he undertook with his friend Mantovani and his orchestra.  He developed the popular “cascading strings” effect caused by dividing the violins into parts and then allocated each part a different note in sequence.  His most famous piece is  Charmaine, arranged by Binge for Mantovani as well as the still popular Elizabethan Serenade composed for in 1952.  Binge died in 1979.

Eric Coates (August 27, 1886 – December 21, 1957) was an English composer of light music and a viola player.   Coates is perhaps most famously known for his contribution to the film score for The Dam Busters (1954); he composed the famous main title march.

Coleridge-Taylor was born in August 1875.  After showing early promise as a violinist he gained a scholarship to the Royal College of Music under Sir Charles Villiers Stanford as a student of violin, piano and composition.  He is remembered for his large scale cantata, The Song of Hiawatha made up of three parts: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha’s Departure.  Although immensely popular at the time (between 1898 and 1900), the cantata is awaiting rediscovery in the 21^st century.  He also wrote a violin concerto, several other cantatas, incidental music to a number of plays, songs and instrumental pieces.  His life was as eventful as his music until his early death at the age of 37 from overwork. 

Ernest Frederic Curzon was born on 4^th September 1899 in London.  His musical talent was soon manifest as he showed an early interest in the violin, cello, piano and organ. When he was only 12 his childhood choral settings were given a performance by a local choir. At the age of 16 he began work as a pianist in a London theatre orchestra and by the time he was 20 he had his own orchestra and he was also writing music to accompany silent films.

Trevor Duncan (real name Leonard Charles Trebilco) was born in London on 27th February 1924. By the age of twelve he could play by ear and taught himself to read music at his local library.  For a year he attended the Trinity College of Music for violin, harmony and counterpoint tuition and when he reached eighteen he joined the BBC making sound effects. He was conscripted into the RAF in 1943 where he became a wireless operator. He saw active service in Stirling aircraft but in his spare time he played in various RAF station dance-bands.  His war service included eighteen months in India before he was discharged from the RAF in 1947.  He returned to BBC Radio as a sound and balance engineer working with a variety of light orchestras, allowing him to experiment with microphone placings, trying to ensure that the music was heard to the best advantage.  So he learned at first hand what certain combinations of instruments could or could not successfully achieve.

Robert Joseph Farnon (July 24, 1917 – April 22, 2005) was a Canadian-born composer, conductor, musical arranger and trumpet player.   He is probably best known for two famous pieces of light music, Jumping Bean and Portrait of a Flirt, both which were originally released as A and B sides on the same 78. Also famous are his Westminster Waltz and A Star is Born.

Percy Fletcher was born in Derby in December 1879 and took lessons on the violin, piano and organ.  He in time became the musical director of a number of London theatres including the Savoy, Drury Lane and the Prince of Wales.  Between 1915 and his death in 1932 he was the musical director of His Majesty’s Theatre.  He was responsible for orchestrating the score of Frederick Norton’s hit musical Chu Chin Chow and is distinguished for completing the unfinished ballet scores left by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor after the composer died in 1912: The Hiawatha Suite and The Minnehaha Suite.

German was born German Edward Jones in February 1862 in Shropshire, the second of five children.  At the age of 18, following private study German entered the Royal Academy of Music where he eventually changed his name to Edward German to avoid confusion with another student. He studied violin and organ and composition under Ebenezer Prout.  In 1884, the Academy appointed German a sub-professor of the violin.  During his time as an instructor, he won several medals and prizes such as the Tubbs Bow and the Charles Lucas Medal for his Te Deum for soloists, choir and organ, leading him to change his focus from violin to composition. He wrote a light opera, The Two Poets in 1886 and he following year his first symphony was performed at the Academy.  In 1890 he conducted a revised version of this symphony at the Crystal Palace and The Two Poets toured successfully throughout England.

Cecil Armstrong Gibbs was born in Great Baddow in 1889 the son of the wealthy soap and chemical manufacturer, David Gibbs.  He was educated at a preparatory school in Brighton and then moved on to Winchester College.  He then won an exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge reading history and after completing the course stayed on to take his Mus. B. Qualification.  He studied harmony and composition under E. J. Dent amongst others and organ under Cyril Rootham.

Peter Hope (b. 1930) is a prolific arranger and composer in his own right.  In recent years he has been commissioned to arrange music for artists such as Jose Carreras, Jessye Norman, Dennis O’Neill, Stuart Burrows and Kiri Te Kanawa.  His film work included orchestrations for John Williams’s score of Raiders of the Lost Ark and for the score of James Horners’ Willow.  Hope has also served on the committee of the Composers’s Guild of Great Britain (which has since merged with the Songwriters Guild into The British Academy of Composers and Songwriters) and between 1970-72 he was appointed as chairman and later as co-chairman.

Albert Ketèlbey was born on 9th August 1875 at Aston Manor, Birmingham.   He is perhaps one of the best known composers in the field of British light music with such fantasy romantic travelogue pieces as In a Monastery Garden and In a Persian Market familiar to millions to his name.  Ketèlbey started piano lessons when very young and at the age of eleven played his own composition entitled Sonata to an audience including Edward Elgar.  By the age of thirteen he had won a scholarship to Trinity College of Music, London, an institution with which he was associated for many years, first as a pupil, later as an examiner.  Although he also played other instruments, including the organ, flute, oboe, clarinet and cello, his first instrument remained the piano with composition taking an ever-increasing role.  

Gordon Langford (b.1930 Gordon Colman) is an English composer, arranger and performer. Although well known in the brass band community as a composer and arranger, he is less well known as a composer of orchestral music, despite winning an Ivor Novello award for his March from the Colour Suite in 1971. 

Billy Joseph Mayerl (May 31, 1902- March 25, 1959), was an English pianist and composer who built a career in music hall and musical theatre and became an acknowledged master of light music. He is perhaps  best known for his syncopated novelty piano solos.  He wrote over 300 piano pieces, many of which were named after flowers, including his best known composition, Marigold (1927).  He also composed works for piano and orchestra, often in suites with evocative names such as the Aquarium Suite (1937), comprising Willow Moss, Moorish Iodl, Fantail and  Whirligig.

Montague Phillips was born in London in November 1885 and is probably most well known for the opera The Rebel Maid staged in 1921 and the very popular song from the opera, The Fishermen of England.  At an early age he was noted as a promising boy soprano in the choir of St. Botolph’s Church, Bishopgate.  He went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music along with such contemporaries as York Bowen, Benjamin Dale and Arnold Bax where he eventually became a Professor of Harmony and Composition.

Gavin Sutherland (born 1972) is a conductor, composer/arranger and pianist.   He has made dozens of recordings all over the world, predominantly with the Royal Ballet Sinfonia and the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra for labels such as ASV, Sony, Warner Classics, Naxos Marco Polo, Dutton-Vocalion, Campion and Olympian. Gavin  has played an important and very influential part in the current revival of British Light Music chiefly through several popular series of discs, although he has recorded works as wide-ranging as Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius and the chart-topping Carry On Album and the single release of the Radio 4 UK Theme.

Ernest Tomlinson (born September 19, 1924) is not only a distinguished arranger and composer of light music but he is also well known for his contribution over the course of the past few years to the conservation and archiving of the light music legacy of this country.  He has won several prestigious awards for his work:  the Composers' Guild Award in 1965 and two Ivor Novello Awards - one for his full-length ballet Aladdin in 1975 and the other for services to light music in 1970.  For several years he sat on the Executive Committee of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain and held the office of Chairman during 1964.  He has been a composer-director of the Performing Rights Society since 1965 and he is currently the President of the Light Music Society.