Benjamin Dale

Benjamin James Dale (17 July 1885 – 30 July 1943) was an English composer and academic who had a long association with the Royal Academy of Music. Dale showed compositional talent from an early age and went on to write a small but notable corpus of works. His best-known composition is probably the large-scale Piano Sonata in D minor he started while still a student at the Royal Academy of Music, which communicates in a potent late romantic style. Christopher Foreman has proposed a comprehensive reassessment of Benjamin Dale's music.

Benjamin Dale was born in Upper Holloway, Islington, London, to Charles James Dale, a pottery manufacturer from Staffordshire, and his wife, Frances Anne Hallett, daughter of a furniture manufacturer from Clerkenwell. His father, who had migrated first to Derbyshire and then to London, was a director of the Denby Pottery Company and London manager of James Bourne & Son. He was also a self-taught but enthusiastic amateur musician, church organist and Methodist hymn tune writer who nurtured the Finsbury Choral Association (attracting composers such as Sullivan and Stanford to come and conduct their choral works) and founded a Metropolitan College of Music in Holloway that would later become the London College of Music.

Benjamin was the youngest of seven children. One of his brothers was Henry Hallett Dale, a future Nobel Prize-winning physiologist and President of the Royal Society (as well as isolating and describing histamine and acetylcholine, he helped uncover important mechanisms of the immune and nervous systems that would transform contemporary understanding of anaphylaxis, allergy, and immunity). Although ten years Benjamin's elder, Henry always remained close to his younger brother and, like their father, both men had a reputation for being affable and approachable, irrespective of position and fame.

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