mp3, below, consists of me singing the verses (not terribly well, but it's an awkward bugger of a tune) and Sharon doing the twiddly piano accompaniment. However, the fact that he did the burning-gaze-to-camera thing when posing as a wizard suggests that he was well aware of the final stanza.īefore I obtained the sheet music, Sharon Court taught me the tune as best she could remember it, but I had to guess at the last four lines because when she learned it, it ended at the second "mountain place": having now got the music I can read it well enough to see that I was at least roughly correct. I don't know which version, if either, is the one John himself sang, nor whether he included or omitted the last four lines.
A lady named Sharon Court, who was one of the people who were searching for the lyrics, remembers what seems to be the same version as the one in Verse for Ages, except without the last four lines, which tends to support the idea that there were always two versions of the ending. The sheet music is copyright Novello & Company, Limited 1955 and has a slightly different finale from the one given in Verse for Ages, but Bernie Morris (with whom I am now in touch) learned it in 1955 when the song was brand new, so it's not clear whether she has misremembered a few lines or whether there really were two (or more) slightly different version of the lyrics from the outset. I located and bought the sheet music and from this I was able to identify the composer as Peter Jenkyns (1921-1996).
Some months later I had a brainwave and did an image-search for sheet music for songs called The Wizard, then squinted at the little photographs until I found one with the right words. Jim Dixon at the Mudcat Café traditional music page tracked the lyrics down in Verse for Ages by Colleen Thatcher & Bernie Morris (Bronwyn Editions, 2009), page 189.
I knew that the song had been knocking around for a while: at least two people reported having learned The Wizard during the 1960s, one at Waltham Holy Cross School and the other at Sir John Cass College in Aldgate. Sadly he was dead before I thought to look for the complete lyrics and the tune, and all I found at first was a handful of other people who were also looking for it. He quoted a few lines to me ("With pointed hat and nails like claws//And a terrible smile on his face"), which was just enough to be able to pick it out from among the many other songs of the same name, but I had no idea how obscure it was, otherwise I would have asked him to teach it to me. Long before JK Rowling borrowed his appearance and most of his character and turned him into Severus Snape, my friend John Nettleship used to dress up in his black academic gown and perform a song called The Wizard as an end-of-term sketch to amuse his students.
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