Honoraray Members

For almost thirty years, John Tucker regularly organised concerts for the Choir in his hometown of Walsall.

A director and producer of the Christmas edition of “This Is Tom Jones” with Ronnie Cass, Jon Schoffield earned widespread acclaim as a filmmaker and director throughout the 1970s and 80s.

Llanelli-born Ronnie Cass was the producer of “This is Tom Jones” during the 1960s and 70s, on which the Choir regularly appeared. He produced Sir Harry Secombe’s “Highway”, which also featured the Choir, and he arranged several items for their repertoire.
Composer Ronnie Cass was born in Llanelli in April 1923 and educated at Llanelli Grammar School. One of six boys, his father was a jeweller, but Ronnie had musical ambitions from the start. He was giving piano concerts in his teens but became a maths teacher to help with family finances. He studied economics at Aberystwyth University when the Second World War began, and he joined the RAF. When his squadron was posted to Burma, they took a piano with them so that he could carry on entertaining them.
After the war, he returned to Wales, but in 1949 he came to London searching for musical opportunities. He found them when Cecil Landeau hired him as musical director at Ciro’s nightclub. There he met Peter Myers, who was preparing a new revue. Their show 10:15 was staged at the tiny Irving Theatre off Leicester Square and was well-received. The Irving Revue soon followed in 1951, starring Betty Marsden, Michael Medwin, Eunice Gayson and Larry Hagman, later to play the evil J.R. Ewing in Dallas and 1952 brought forward at the same small premises Ronnie Stevens’s staging of David Climie’s late-night revue, Just Lately, with Joan Sims, Charles Ross and Kenneth Connor.
In 1952 Ronnie attended a show performed by students of the London School of Economics, one of whom, Ron Moody, was so funny, he was soon making his professional début in Intimacy at Eight (1952), a Cass-Myers revue presented at the New Lindsay Theatre in Notting Hill Gate. A revised version, Intimacy at 8:30 (1954), ran for 551 performances in the West End, of which he was recognised as its leading stage show composer. For Amusement Only (1956) was even more successful, with Moody hilarious in “The Vagabond Student”, a sketch about amateur operatic societies.
Ronnie Cass always said his favourite revue was High Spirits (1953), although it ran only five months at London’s cavernous Hippodrome. Its cast included the actress Valerie Carton, whom he married in 1955. One of the highlights of Cass’s next engagement, For Amusement Only (Apollo, 1956), which ran for two years, was Jimmy Thompson’s impersonation of Liberace, Ich Liberace Dich, with Cass’s sardonic music. A sequel, called For Adults Only (Strand, 1958), with a cast led by Hugh Paddick, Ron Moody and Miriam Karlin, ran for a year. Cass then devised, as musical director, the team’s last West End revue, The Lord Chamberlain Regrets (Saville, 1961) - an allusion to the stage censor who had another seven years in office - with Millicent Martin and Ronnie Stevens heading the cast. However, the show lacked the sparkle and bite of its predecessors.
Two years later, Cass devised and wrote with Myers a late-night West End show, Round Leicester Square (Prince Charles). Comprising a medley of mainly Edwardian songs, Vivienne Martin, Thompson, and Stevens led it. Realising that intimate revue was losing its popularity, Myers and Cass turned to the cinema, scoring great success with the Cliff Richard vehicles The Young Ones (1962) and Summer Holiday (1963). Although the title songs of both films were written by other hands, Cass and Myers provided the basic scores and the screenplays. Their third Cliff musical, Wonderful Life (1964), was less successful.
The unstoppable Ronnie was said to give Robinson Crusoe lessons in survival and went on to create Déjà Revue (1974), a “review of revues” while also writing TV plays. He composed a cantata performed at Norwich Cathedral and devised cabaret shows for cruise liners. He and his old friend Warren Mitchell teamed up to bring The Thoughts of Chairman Alf (1975) to the stage, which they took around the country for the next 20 years.
Having joined the theatre from the world of cabaret, Cass tried cabaret again in 1979, co-devising and writing Blondes and Bombshells. He wrote two novels, True Blue and Fringe Benefits, and a book of theatrical humour titled A Funny Thing Happened or an Anthology of Pro’s. Cass worked with his fellow Welshman Tom Jones on more than 70 television shows and Harry Secombe on the religious series Highway. It was in this capacity that he came into contact with the Treorchy Male Choir.

The international superstar catapulted to the top of the charts with “It’s Not Unusual” in 1964. For more than forty years, he remained at the pinnacle of his career and in 2006 received a knighthood. In 1969 the Choir first performed on the Christmas edition of his show, “This is Tom Jones”. They made two more appearances in subsequent years, along with a joint performance on the Burt Bacharach Show. Throughout the 1980s, they continued making shows with Tom, including “Born To Be Me”, and he wrote the Foreword for the Choir’s photographic history book, published in 2000.

The Choir’s elocutionist from 1957 to 1978, his career began with the Mid Rhondda Garrick Dramatic Society, and he went on to perform at the Old Vic in London. He became a Rhondda Borough Councillor in 1953 and was Mayor from 1968 to 1969. He won more than 200 competitions as an elocutionist, including three consecutive “firsts” at the Miners’ Eisteddfod.