The Wizard

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Long before JK Rowling borrowed his appearance and most of his character and turned him into Severus Snape, my friend John Nettleship used to dress up in his black academic gown and perform a song called The Wizard as an end-of-term sketch to amuse his students. He quoted a few lines to me ("With pointed hat and nails like claws//And a terrible smile on his face"), which was just enough to be able to pick it out from among the many other songs of the same name, but I had no idea how obscure it was, otherwise I would have asked him to teach it to me. Sadly he was dead before I thought to look for the complete lyrics and the tune, and all I found at first was a handful of other people who were also looking for it.

I knew that the song had been knocking around for a while: at least two people reported having learned The Wizard during the 1960s, one at Waltham Holy Cross School and the other at Sir John Cass College in Aldgate. Jim Dixon at the Mudcat Café traditional music page tracked the lyrics down in Verse for Ages by Colleen Thatcher & Bernie Morris (Bronwyn Editions, 2009), page 189. Some months later I had a brainwave and did an image-search for sheet music for songs called The Wizard, then squinted at the little photographs until I found one with the right words.

I located and bought the sheet music and from this I was able to identify the composer as Peter Jenkyns (1921-1996). The sheet music is copyright Novello & Company, Limited 1955 and has a slightly different finale from the one given in Verse for Ages, but Bernie Morris (with whom I am now in touch) learned it in 1955 when the song was brand new, so it's not clear whether she has misremembered a few lines or whether there really were two (or more) slightly different version of the lyrics from the outset. A lady named Sharon Court, who was one of the people who were searching for the lyrics, remembers what seems to be the same version as the one in Verse for Ages, except without the last four lines, which tends to support the idea that there were always two versions of the ending.

THE WIZARD

1^st half, universally agreed on:

With pointed hat and nails like claws
And a terrible smile on his face,
The wizard sits behind locked doors
In his cell in a mountain place;
Around the walls of his magic den,
Laid out in endless line
Are books of spells for him to cast
And bottles of magic wine.

With horny hands he waves his wand
And scatters upon the fire
A powder which burns with ghostly light
As the flames rise even higher;
His lips recite a magic spell,
The flames dance on the walls,
And shadows deepen on his face
As on his knees he falls.

John at his most wizardly - taken for an interview in 2007, from Free Press

2^nd half, Verse for Ages version:

As I turn the pages of the picture book,
The scenes change endlessly –
Kings and queens and palaces
And galleons on the sea;
But whenever I look at the picture book,
I linger at the place
Where the wizard sits behind locked doors
In his cell in a mountain place,

With books of spells for him to cast
And bottles of magic wine;
And all the time his wicked eyes
Are gazing into mine.

2^nd half, Novello & Co. Ltd. version:

As I turn the page of the picture book,
The scenes change endlessly –
Kings and queens and palaces
And galleons on the sea;
But whenever I look at the picture book,
I linger at the place
Where the wizard sits in his mountain cell
With a terrible smile on his face,

And books of magic spells to cast
And bottles of magic wine;
And all the time his wicked eyes
Are gazing into mine.

I don't know which version, if either, is the one John himself sang, nor whether he included or omitted the last four lines. However, the fact that he did the burning-gaze-to-camera thing when posing as a wizard suggests that he was well aware of the final stanza.

Before I obtained the sheet music, Sharon Court taught me the tune as best she could remember it, but I had to guess at the last four lines because when she learned it, it ended at the second "mountain place": having now got the music I can read it well enough to see that I was at least roughly correct. The .mp3, below, consists of me singing the verses (not terribly well, but it's an awkward bugger of a tune) and Sharon doing the twiddly piano accompaniment. Bernie Morris has promised to try to come up with a more professional and less approximate version.

Meanwhile, the .m4a is Lee Healy whistling the tune, almost but not exactly identical, which he remembers from when he won first prize with this song in the under-12s section at a local Feis (music and dance festival) in 1966.

I will post the actual written music if I am allowed to do so without infringing copyright, but I need to check that.

About Peter Jenkyns himself I can find little, except his dates, that he was Canadian, that he wrote what are said to be wonderful classical pieces for the harmonica as well as numerous children's songs, and was friends with the harmonica player Douglas William Richard Tate. Despite his prolific output and the apparently continuing popularity of many of his songs, almost nothing seems to be recorded of the man himself, although he died only fifteen years ago [twenty-five years ago, now, as I update this ten years and one day after John's death]. No better demonstration could have been devised of the reason why I chose to write about John, who believed so strongly in the importance of memory.