LEARMONTH-LERMONTOV. A HYISTORY OF THE NAME AND FAMILIES

Learmont’s mother could trace her lineage back to the
great Scottish poet and seer of the thirteenth century, Sir
Thomas Learmont of Ercildoune, better known as Thomas the
Rhymer. Learmont. Drysdale’s maternal grandfather, George
Learmont, was reared near Traquair House, where the Quair
and Tweed Rivers join, and was Factor to the last Earls of
Traquair for over forty years. This area spawned many
legends, ballads and songs, which the young Learmont learned
from his mother.
On leaving school, he studied architecture for some
time, but his interest in music led him to enrol at the Royal
Academy of Music in London. After his student days,
Drysdale taught for a short time at the Athenaeum in Glasgow,
but the remainder of his fairly short life was devoted to
composition. He produced a large number of songs and song
arrangements, a few orchestral works, some instrumental
chamber music, several operas and dramatic cantatas.
He spent most of his working years in London,
returning to Scotland only towards the end of his life. His
extant compositions include theatrical and orchestral works,
choral music, chamber pieces, numerous songs and folksong
arrangements, though few of these were published.
When the clergyman, novelist and folklorist Sabine
Baring-Gould published his colorful novel of 18th-century
country life, Red Spider, in 1887, it was so well received that
he was persuaded to write an operatic version. During this
period he was collaborating with fellow clergyman and
musician Henry Fleetwood-Sheppard on their monumental
collections of West Country folksong Songs and Ballads of the
West (1891) and A Garland of Country Song (1895).
Fleetwood-Sheppard agreed to provide the music for Red
Spider which, in reflection of its Devonshire setting, was to be
based on local traditional melodies. However, following a
period of collaboration, Fleetwood-Sheppard withdrew from
the project and Baring-Gould chose Learmont Drysdale as his
new partner. Red Spider was Drysdale’s greatest public
success. The work was extravagantly mounted and a first-rate
company engaged with Lucy Carr-Shaw (1853-1920), singer,
actress and sister of George Bernard Shaw, in the leading role.
During the autumn of 1898, Red Spider toured Britain
with a lengthy run that lasted for more than 100 performances,
but, sadly, it has not been staged since (Moira A Harris:
Learmont Drysdale’s Red Spider, Music in 19th-Century
Britain Conference: Abstracts).
As the result of the friendship which developed in the
1940s between Henry Farmer and Drysdale’s sister Janey,
who through the years had tried to promote her brothers works
whenever possible, she was persuaded by Farmer to donate to
Glasgow University Library many of Drysdale’s manuscript
compositions, as well as a number of published pieces and a
quantity of archival material. The Farmer Collection is an
additional source of material on Drysdale as it includes many
letters from Janey Drysdale to Henry Farmer concerning her
brother’s music as well as other topics (The Special
Collections Department. Henry George Farmers 1882-1965;
Collection, University of Glasgow; Kenny M. Sheppard
Selected choral works of Learmont Drysdale, Scotland’s
forgotten composer, Texas Tech University, USA, 1987).
Janey Drysdale was probably the first Learmonth who tried to
establish the connection between her Learmonth family and
the Russian poet Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov. Mr. Crocket,
her close friend, made a request to Russia in 1913 to find the
origin of Mikhail Lermontov’s family. The only fact that they
found was Lermontov’s Scottish origin.
One of the unusual and touching memories for all the
Learmonth-Lermontov families was George Learmont’s work
‘Thomas the Rhymer’ that was restored and orchestrated by
the famous Russian composer Edward Artemiev in 2007, for
the 950th Anniversary of the Learmonth surname.
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