Fred Tomlinson (singer)

Education and career

Fred Tomlinson came into the world on 18 December 1927 in Rawtenstall, Lancashire. His father, also named Fred (who passed away in September 1995), started the Rossendale Male Voice Choir in 1924 and led it for more than half a century. Tomlinson’s older brother, Ernest, made a name for himself composing orchestral light music. A scholarship took young Fred to Manchester Cathedral choir school, where he stayed until the school shut down in 1940 because of the war.

At age eleven, he joined the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, and attended King’s College School there. Later, he studied at Bacup and Rawtenstall Grammar School, then pursued music, mathematics, statistics, and Italian at Leeds University. After training as a teacher and serving in the Royal Air Force in Singapore, he moved into music professionally. He sang with the George Mitchell Singers, a group central to a long-running TV variety franchise that began in 1958 and lasted over twenty years.

He also created his own quartet, the Northerners, and later formed the Fred Tomlinson Singers in the late 1960s. Under the pen name Frederick Culpan (his mother’s maiden name), he wrote original pieces like The Chaucer Suite for chorus and orchestra, and he arranged music for his father’s choir. He was an active member of Equity’s Concert & Session Singers Committee.

Monty Python and other television work

The Fred Tomlinson Singers sang the music featured on Monty Python's Flying Circus. Tomlinson co-wrote 'The Lumberjack Song' with Terry Jones and Michael Palin, and performed it on the show in December 1969, as well as the song 'Spam' in 1970 while dressed as Vikings. He also helped David Croft on Dad's Army and Are You Being Served?, and provided choral music for The Ken Dodd Show, The Goodies, The Two Ronnies, and Only Fools and Horses. He contributed musically to documentaries such as Himalaya with Michael Palin, Timeshift, and The Amazing Race Australia.

Peter Warlock

Fred Tomlinson devoted much of his life to the music of Peter Warlock and Bernard van Dieren. For a quarter of a century, he chaired the Peter Warlock Society, during which he prepared new editions of Warlock's scores and authored books such as A Peter Warlock Handbook and Warlock and van Dieren, with a van Dieren Catalogue. In 1971, he assembled a recording of Warlock drinking songs, drawn from a 1929 anthology Warlock had published under the pseudonym Rab Noolas. That album first appeared on the Unicorn label and was reissued in 2024 by Convivium.

Did You Know?

• He married Pamela Mellor during the mid-1950s, having met her in Leeds; she sang as an alto with the Fred Tomlinson Singers.
• His Centenary 'Curlew' Companion was arranged as a continuous suite of Warlock songs using the same instrumentation as The Curlew.