Edward Sackville-West, 5th Baron Sackville

Edward Charles Sackville-West, 5th Baron Sackville (13 November 1901 – 4 July 1965) was a British music critic, novelist and, in his last years, a member of the House of Lords. Musically gifted as a boy, he was attracted as a young man to a literary life and wrote a series of semi-autobiographical novels in the 1920s and 1930s. They made little impact, and his more lasting books are a biography of the essayist Thomas De Quincey and The Record Guide, Britain's first comprehensive guide to classical music on record, first published in 1951.

As a critic and a member of the board of the Royal Opera House, he strove to promote the works of young British composers, including Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett. Britten worked with him on a musical drama for radio and dedicated to him one of his best known works, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings.

Biography

Early years Sackville-West was born at Cadogan Gardens, London, the elder child and only son of Major-General Charles John Sackville-West, who later became the fourth Baron Sackville, and his first wife, Maud Cecilia, née Bell (1873–1920). He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. While at Eton he studied the piano with Irene Scharrer, his housemaster's wife, and became highly proficient, winning the Eton music prize in 1918. His partner Desmond Shawe-Taylor said of him, "not many boys can have played at a school concert the Second Concerto of Rachmaninov. He even contemplated a pianist's career, but was deterred by poor health." At Oxford he made many literary friends, including Maurice Bowra, Roy Harrod and L. P. Hartley, and literature began to rival music as his chief interest. He left Oxford without taking his degree and embarked on a career as a novelist, writing a series of autobiographical novels. Sackville-West's biographer, Michael de-la-Noy, wrote, "The Ruin, like all the gothic literary efforts over which Sackville-West took infinite but rather pointless pains, was heavily laced with the mannered style of the late nineteenth-century 'decadent' movement … with whose work Eddy had unfortunately become enamoured when he was seventeen." Simpson: A Life was the best received. Its study of a children's nurse was judged "impressive and in its way original, the more so because Simpson has such a cool, aloof quality and so little resembles the conventional Nanny of fact or fiction." In this period, away from fiction, Sackville-West wrote A Flame in Sunlight: the Life and Work of Thomas De Quincey (1936), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Musical work In 1935 Sackville-West became music critic of the magazine New Statesman, a post he held for twenty years, contributing weekly reviews of recordings. The Times wrote that his articles "were distinguished not only for their command of the jewelled phrase but for their zealous propagation of young British composers." In 1956 he also bought Cooleville House at Clogheen in County Tipperary, Ireland. On the death of his father on 8 May 1962 he inherited the title Baron Sackville. He took his seat in the House of Lords but never made a speech.