My mother, Alexandrina Campbell, who has died aged 95, was a pianist, country-dance teacher and church organist. While raising her family, she took a variety of jobs, the most important of which, to her, was working with children with special needs when she was living in Buckinghamshire during the early 1970s.
First as a volunteer at Vinio House school, High Wycombe, and then in a full-time permanent post, Ina developed a form of music therapy. That passion was passed on to her youngest daughter, Julie, who now practises a more advanced form of musical performance for young people with special needs.
One of two daughters of James Beveridge and his wife, Jean (nee Forester), Ina was born and raised in Glasgow, where her father was the janitor at Shawlands Academy, which she herself attended in the 30s. She learned early how to play the piano, but her most remarkable gift was her ear for music. As a teenager, she used to listen to the latest pop songs on the radio in the evenings. “Then I would go through to the room with the piano and pick out the melody,” she told me. “Once you had the tune, it was easy enough to fit it together with the harmony.”
She married Harry Campbell as soon as the second world war ended. Their twin daughters, Jean and Phyllis, were born in 1947 and I followed four years later. Our family tea-time at home in Glasgow was apt to be interrupted by a phone call about a replacement accordionist in the band for a weekend dance, in which Ina herself was the pianist.
At the same time, there was her interest in Scottish country dancing. One of my strongest childhood memories is of being led by the hand to a church hall in the neighbourhood, to sit quietly with a comic annual, while Ina took the women of the locality through the paces of an eightsome reel.
When she and my father returned from High Wycombe to live in Braco, Perthshire, in 1975, Ina became the organist at Ardoch parish church. At the same time she was willing, as ever, to perform for local dances, allowing me to say: “Church of Scotland organist by day … dance-band pianist by night.”
Ina’s experiences as a dance pianist began during her wartime service in Portmahomack, Easter Ross, when she took up one request after another to play in Highland village halls – not so much “digging for victory” as tinkling the keys for victory.
A written record of this time came to light unexpectedly a few years ago, in the form of letters between Ina and Harry, written during the war, she in Portmahomack, he in the Royal Navy in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). There are frequent mentions of Ina being called on out of the blue to provide entertainment for service personnel on leave. A characteristic note is her appreciation of her fellow musicians. She was booked to play somewhere on Christmas night, 1944, she told my father. “I am playing at Fearn on Friday. Every time I go to these halls I think of the times when you were there.”
Harry died in 2002. Ina is survived by me, Jean, Phyllis and Julie, and by five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
