Ron Grainer
| Ron Grainer | |
|---|---|
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Ronald Erle Grainer |
| Born |
11 August 1922 Atherton, Queensland, Australia |
| Died | 21 February 1981 (aged 58) Cuckfield, Sussex, England |
| Occupation(s) | Composer |
Ronald Erle "Ron" Grainer (11 August 1922 – 21 February 1981) was an Australian composer who worked for most of his professional career in the United Kingdom. He is mostly remembered for his film and television music, especially the theme music for Doctor Who.
Ron Grainer was born on 11 August 1922 in Atherton, Queensland, Australia, the first child of Margaret Clark, an amateur pianist, and Ronald Albert Grainer, a storekeeper and postmaster.
For the first eight years of Ron's life the Grainer family lived in Mt Mulligan, a small town built around the extraction of coal from three seams which lay beneath a 400-metre-high sandstone monolith, located 100 km west of Cairns. Apart from the industrial noise and dust, the family sometimes had to contend with the after effects of a high consumption of alcohol by the shift miners. On one such occasion a stray bullet flew through the roof of their home and almost hit the 11-week-old Ron as he lay on his bed.
Because of Mt Mulligan's physical isolation, encouraging a sense of community was vital. This was achieved by regularly holding dance and social functions. These public entertainments became very important for bolstering local morale, especially after a massive explosion on 19 September 1921 killed 75 resident mine workers – one third of Mt Mulligan's adult population.
Concerts in the years following the disaster included performances by a very young Ron Erle Grainer, taught piano-playing from the age of four by his mother and encouraged to learn the violin by an elderly Welsh miner. As Grainer's music skills developed, he started demonstrating an ability to reconstruct tunes he had heard at school or on gramophone records. Mary Wardle, a classical music singer, historian, and former resident of Mt Mulligan, remembers Grainer performing on keyboard instruments “when he could barely reach the pedals.”
The Grainer family left Mt Mulligan in 1930. By April 1932 they were living in Aloomba, a sugar-growing rural community on the Far North Queensland coast. Aloomba is situated on the eastern side of another rock monolith, the 922-metre-high Walsh's Pyramid. At the age of 9, as part of the Aloomba school team, Grainer won second prize for solo violin at the inaugural Cairns and District School Eisteddfod. This is the first newspaper mention of him giving a music performance in public. In early 1933, Grainer's family moved to Cairns where, apart from school work at Edge Hill State (1933–1934) and Cairns High (1935–1936), he commenced a serious study of music theory and interpretation. His family relocated south to Brisbane in 1937 where Grainer completed his secondary school education at St Joseph's College, Nudgee, matriculating in 1938. He enrolled at the University of Queensland in 1939 to study civil engineering and music, a course which included harmony, counterpoint, and composition as taught by classical musician Percy Brier, a traditionalist educator who encouraged his more talented students to think for themselves. Grainer gained his Associate of Trinity College London Diploma (ATCL) on piano.
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