Hubert Bath

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Hubert Charles Bath (6 November 1883 – 24 April 1945) was an English film composer, music director and conductor. Born in Barnstaple, Devon, he sang in a church choir and studied at the Royal Academy of Music from 1899, learning piano with Oscar Beringer and composition with Frederick Corder.

In 1913–14 he conducted Thomas Quinlan’s opera troupe on a world tour and acted as chorus master. He conducted Madame Butterfly at the London Opera House in July 1915, with Tamaki Miura, and then wrote light operas such as Young England (1915) and Bubbole (1920, in Milan), moving toward grand opera with Trilby.

Bath wrote many film scores, including part of Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929). He also composed marches for brass bands, orchestral suites, theatre music and choral works. His piece Out of the Blue has been the theme for the BBC’s Sports Report since the show began in 1948. His Cornish Rhapsody was written for the 1944 film Love Story and is central to its plot. He created humorous cantatas like The Wedding of Shon Maclean (1909), Look at the Clock (1910) and The Wake of O’Connor (1914), and piano pieces such as Shakespeare Pieces (1916), My Lady (1923), Italian Suite (1924), the Gaelic Suite (Irish sketches for piano, published 1927) and Sonnet Suite (1933).

Freedom, a 12-minute symphonic piece first used for the National Championships in 1922, is often called the first brass-band symphony, though it is really a suite. In 1924 Bath was named as a co-respondent in the divorce case between Colonel Alfred Rawlinson and actress Jean Aylwin. He died in Harefield, Middlesex, in 1945, aged 61. His son John Bath (1915–2004) also became a film composer.