Fascinating Boyd Neel Fact.

I'd never heard of Louis Boyd Neel before his name turned up in the Leonard Barras story 'A Sanctified Artefact' (see previous posting) so I did a perfunctory interweb search and found this interesting snippet:

For Neel, at this stage, music was still a hobby. He conducted amateur groups and was persuaded to form an orchestra of young professionals, whom he recruited in 1932 from the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music. The Boyd Neel London String Orchestra (later the Boyd Neel Orchestra) made its debut at the Aeolian Hall, London, on 22 June 1933. After the concert, Neel returned to his surgery and delivered a baby.