Richard Stilgoe has spent the last year as High Sheriff of Surrey. This ancient office involves wearing black velvet and lace while trying to keep the crime rate down.

He was brought up in Liverpool, where he appeared at the Cavern Club on Saturdays and as a member of St Agnes’ Church Choir on Sundays. A Choral Exhibition took him to Cambridge where all thoughts of a serious musical career were erased. The sixties found him singing his songs in pubs and nightclubs, and on Radio 4’s Today programme. He spent the seventies in people’s living rooms via Nationwide, That’s Life and several series of his own. In the eighties he wrote musicals. For Andrew Lloyd Webber he wrote the words for a snippet of Cats, almost all of Starlight Express and a third of The Phantom of the Opera. For the National Youth Music Theatre, he wrote the words and music of Bodywork and Brilliant the Dinosaur.

In 1982, he and Peter Skellern both appeared in the Royal Variety Performance. While standing star-struck in the wings watching Ethel Merman, each of them said “We really ought to do something together sometime”. This year sees the first of several farewell tours.

Alongside all this has grown an increasing determination to make music available to more young people. To this end he founded the Orpheus Trust, which gives disabled people opportunities to make music, and this year opened the Orpheus Centre, a permanent home for this work. He is a member of the Government’s Music Trust, and has presented the Schools Proms at the Royal Albert Hall for the last eleven years. This year the Stilgoe Saturday Concerts for children start at the Festival Hall, and his new musical about foxes, entitled The Day the Earth Moved, has its first performance.

He has won three Monte Carlo Radio prizes, the Prix Italia and an OBE. His hobbies are architecture, cricket, sailing, his five children and twin grandsons, and he looks forward to spending the next century with them.

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