Philip Bate - Legacy

Legacy

Beginning from the time he was at school, Bate had been interested by musical instruments, which he began to collect and study. He would visit junk shops and markets to seek out items: one clarinet from a market stall cost him a week's pocket money — his first flute, by William Henry Potter, was given to him by friends, and the next he inherited from his flautist grandfather. Whilst in London he would frequent the Caledonian Road, Portobello, and Bermondsey markets, making friendships with those who shared his interests, such as Canon Francis Galpin, who encouraged Bate to turn his scientific education to the study of musical instruments. Bate used his carpentry skills to make and restore instruments in his collection and after learning metalworking techniques, made reproductions of draw-trumpets used by David Munrow's Early Music Consort of London.

In 1946 Bate and a group of friends founded the Galpin Society, the first group to specialize in the history and study of musical instruments. He was its first chairman and from 1977 was its president. As well as writing articles for the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Bate wrote the books The Oboe (1956), The Trumpet and Trombone (1966), and The Flute: a Study of its History, Development and Construction (1969).

By the time he was 60, his collection of musical instruments covered the history of woodwind from 1680 onwards and included brass instruments and a collection of printed instrument tutors. Convinced that the collection was of value to those concerned with the interpretation of music, and that the instruments should be used and properly maintained, he gave the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments to the University of Oxford in 1968, on the condition that it was used for teaching and was provided with a specialist curator to care for and lecture on it. Bate continued to add to the collection, and it grew through the acquisition of collections made by many of his friends and colleagues in the Galpin Society.

Bate was made an honorary Master of Arts by Oxford University in 1973. Philip Bate died on November 3, 1999, in the Whittington Hospital, Islington and was cremated. His ashes were interred in the music faculty garden next to the Bate Collection in Oxford.