Phillip Sear plays the fifth piece from a 1931 suite 'In the Heart of the Garden' by the British composer Leonard Butler (1869-1943).
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I know little about Butler except that he was born in Dorking (which is in the Surrey Hills), studied with Ebenezer Prout, later became a professor of piano at the Guildhall School in London, and died in St. Austell. He seems to gave specialized in liturgical and organ music, but also wrote some picturesque piano suites - rather in the manner of Frederic Mullen and Percy Elliott. He had a real gift for short lively light pieces. This suite was dedicated to Emma Bourrie Hamilton (1878-1952), who was living in Bexhill, and who wrote a memoir 'The Schoolmarm's Scrapbook', now in the East Sussex Record Office. To quote a RootsWeb correspondent: "She was headmistress of a girls' school (St John's, Bexhill-on-Sea, founded in the early 19C by her grandmother and great-aunts, who were succeeded by her mother and aunts) that closed down in 1940 when a jettisoned bomb landed very close to the safer place to which the school had already moved from the coast, and it was felt the pupils would be better moved right away from the bombers' flight path to London."

My thumbnail shows a colourized postcard of the frontage of St. John's school in Bexhill - not much inspiration in that garden, one would have thought!
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Played by Phillip Sear
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