Edmund Hockridge

Edmund James Arthur Hockridge (9 August 1919 – 15 March 2009)

Career Edmund Hockridge grew up on a farm in the Vancouver area of British Columbia. His mother was a pianist and his father and three brothers - all older than he was - loved to sing. When Edmund was 17, a Vancouver music club organised an audition with New York Metropolitan Opera star John Charles Thomas, who encouraged him to look to music as a career. Going overseas during World War II with the Royal Canadian Air Force led to Hockridge being "loaned" to the BBC, in a unit supplying news and entertainment to the troops in Europe, working with the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the Canadian Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force led by Robert Farnon.

In 1986, aged 67, he partnered the rock singer Suzi Quatro in a London production of Annie Get Your Gun (his seventh musical) and also appeared with Isla St Clair in a provincial production of The Sound of Music (1984). Hockridge followed this record with "No Other Love," which was another hit. He had one final entry on the chart with "By the Fountains of Rome" in September 1957.

After this, he continued to record for Pye Nixa, though not charting again in the UK.

Personal life and death Hockridge died on 15 March 2009, at the age of 89, in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. He was survived by his widow Jackie, their sons Murray and Stephen, a foster son, Clifford, and Ian, his son from his first marriage to Eileen Elliott.

Filmography King's Rhapsody (1955)