I’ve a bit of a reputation for making impulse buys. Not your typical kind of impulse buys either. By that I mean I don’t walk into Lidl for a loaf of bread and a pint of milk and emerge with a pair of skis, a plasma cutter, 15kg of de-icer salt and a rowing boat.
Well. Not all the time. I’ve self-imposed a restraining order on my visiting the middle aisle.
I tend to go for the more obscure stuff. Odd one-offs that appear in bungled Web and auction searches. Rarities that appear on super dodgy looking but actually legit shopping websites that you know will never be that price again if the site admin cops on to it (and the chances are low as it looks like the webmaster has yet to upgrade from FrontPage).
I’ve got previous. A penchant for vinyl. And I don’t mean a silly little Beatles 12″ with 14 wrinkles on the left corner and a follicle from Ringo’s ear hair embedded within them. I mean super bizarre, possibly naff yet super wonderful stuff that 99.9% of the global populace wouldn’t give even one nanosecond of thought about snapping up.
I tend to pick up items such as official cameras from the 1980 Olympics. Or an extremely rare Canon Super 8 timer add-on (found on a village classifieds forum in a remote outpost in the French countryside no less). Yes, I am weird. Yes, I like weird things. And yes I will write about them all some day.
Yet on March 11, 2017 I made an impulse purchase that proved to have a bit more than a ‘gotta have it’ effect on me.
Allow me to explain…
Fijnaarts Jeugdorkest
It all started with a tireless search for demonstration and sound effects vinyl records from the 1950s and 60s. You know the kind. The fella that demonstrates in his best Queen’s English “a journey into stereophonic sound” followed by some cute left/right stereo pans featuring racing cars, crowds cheering and a variety of foley effects and so on.
Tucked away within the confines of one of my search results was a plethora of what can only be described as some of the most utterly wild and fantastic vinyl I’ve ever come across.
Judging from the listings, which consisted entirely of demonstration and religion-themed music, this person was either a serious collector, selling these on behalf of someone or ended up with them via a house clearance from some old girl from Deptford.
I picked up not one, not two, but three records from the seller.
Yes, I got the stereo demonstration record from 1965 that I was looking for. I am very happy to have it in my collection, I might add. However I also picked up a bizarre double LP from Holland entitled Fijnaarts Jeugdorkest and a less enthusiastic release entitled Christ Liveth In Me by the Toftwood Male Voice Choir.
I’ve no reasoning behind why I bought those two records. They just appeared quaint. A bit silly. Loveable. Offbeat. Look, I don’t know, I just bought them. You can forget Fijnaarts Jeugdorkest though. We’re going on a journey to Toftwood…
Toftwood Male Voice Choir – Christ Liveth In Me (Sleeve Notes) (Source: 45worlds.com)
Christ Liveth in Toftwood.
A handful of days passed. My little trio of vinyl wonders arrived posthaste. I dutifully unwrapped them. Coveted them. Never played them. Stored them. Thought little more of them.
Fast forward a week or so and for reasons unbeknownst to myself I dug out the Toftwood Male Voice Choir album from storage. I guess more than anything to pop it on a turntable and have a chuckle to a few choice hymns belted out by some earnest chaps whilst I flipped through the sleeve notes.
I never got to put the record on my turntable.
I’d become engrossed in the sleeve notes and the wholesome cover photo. A quick scan of the notes printed on the reverse revealed the names of the choir members, little details about where it was recorded, but curiously not when it was recorded.
Then there is that cover photo. Handsome chaps in their Sunday best accompanied by a cheerful pianist in a period floral robe. That curious looking green glass cross and matching pea green curtain combination. The floor tiles reminiscent of any school assembly hall in the 1970’s and 80’s.
At the same time that I was studying the album sleeve, I happened upon an old story from the local paper of my home town. Someone had discovered a similar album recorded by a choir in 1985 and had hoped to reunite one of the members with the album. It was at that exact moment that I decided that I wanted to do the very same thing. I wanted to reunite Christ Liveth In Me with the Toftwood Male Voice Choir.
It was not going to be easy.
Toftwood Methodist Church, Dereham, Norfolk, UK. (Source: Google Maps)
The Green Green Glass…
There were a couple of immediate stumbling blocks in my newly found quest. The biggest was that the chaps who recorded their magnum opus were of a certain age at the time.
The difficulty was that the choir members were already of a certain age when the record was made, meaning that many might no longer be alive. This was made more difficult by the fact that only the first initial and surname are listed for each of the choir members. Curiously the only name printed in full was the pianist, Miss Christine Cooper.
With a full name to work with, I pinned my hopes on identifying Miss Cooper and, perhaps, reuniting her with a copy of the record.
Sleeve notes aside, I had precious little else to go on.
Oddly it was the green stained glass cross in the cover photo that became my first clue. Thus the first stop on my quest was Google Maps.
With thanks to Alphabet’s wonderful mapping technology I immediately discovered the church was still standing today. What is more amazing is that the stained glass window that features so prominently on the album cover is still there!
The green glass cross that appears on the album cover is still intact in 2026. (Source: Google Maps)
What I can’t quite get over is how grandiose the scene appears in photo, yet it looks so minuscule in real life.
Sticking with the church as my font (sigh… -ed) for clues, I dug up more information from their official web site. At this point, I decided to get the ball rolling and make contact.
I fired off an email in the hopes of receiving some sort of response but alas to this day I have yet to hear from them. At the same time I happened upon a lovely photo album of the church and its grounds.
One of the photos featured a collection of commemorative and remembrance plates. I scanned the names looking for anything that might match a member of the Toftwood gang.
Still nothing.
Shop Local
My attention turned to two further names that appeared on the sleeve notes. Cyril Jolly, a local author who had provided a short blurb/critique piece.
This led me to discover an interesting book on Amazon, oh and another dead end.
The second name was that of the photographer, Ron Newell. I managed to uncover an article about Mr. Newell but then immediately ran into yet another dead end as Mr. Newell’s business is no longer around.
The only other interesting tidbit I discovered was a wedding photo Mr. Newell took in 1969. Notice the framing similarities between the Toftwood photo and the wedding photo? Alright, maybe it’s just me then.
I was now fast running out of possible leads with the limited resources available to me. I don’t care how far-reaching and privacy-unfriendly you say the Internet is, when you have as little information to go on as I did with this the Internet becomes a troublesome and difficult place to extract plentiful and relative information.
I dug around the national archives to see if I could unearth anything about the choir or the Whitehouse Recording Studio. Information wasn’t immediately pouring from such a vast treasure trove of historical data. Though I did manage to uncover a local radio recording from Toftwood in November 1983 that features an interview with Colin Aldiss, a man who was planning on screening Raiders Of The Lost Ark in his 30 seat home cinema.
Impressive!
The possible location for Whitehouse Recording Studio, Dereham, Norfolk. (Source: Google Maps)
Nightmare on Wax
Alphabet came up trumps again for locating the possible site where the magic happened. Whitehouse Recording Studio. Today, what was home to some of the finest recording kit on the planet, is now a garage and workshop. Interestingly the building is still white, which is a nice coincidence.
Further digging revealed that the label the choir were signed to, SRT, was also home to early releases from the likes of Def Leppard, and unfortunately Skrewdriver. I also discovered that the album was likely to have been recorded in 1979 or early 1980 thanks to a very helpful thread about the SRT numbering system and history over at Discogs.
Ron Newell Wedding Photography 1969 (Source: Hoe & Worthing Archive)
All Good Things…
So that was it. All possible leads I had were now exhausted. I should mention that with a very quick search entry in Google I did find an entry about one choir member, Mr. Kenny Austin. However I felt it inappropriate to approach a chap in his twilight years with the news I’d come into possession of a recording he made nearly 40 years ago.
As for Mr. Austin I decided to leave it there, though should you be reading this, please get in touch!
What of Miss. Christine Cooper? Well, the answer had more or less been staring me in the face from the outset. It appeared I’d completely overlooked that her name (I assume) had been mentioned as a member of the choir in the 1985 album I had already read about.
Go ahead, have a look at it again. Now look at the album photo and see if you can find her (or someone who looks very similar I should add).
See?
It was at this point that I focused my search around Cromer and Dereham. It wasn’t long before I came across someone I believed might be Miss Cooper, apparently alive and well (at the time I wrote this blog in 2017). I contacted Miss Cooper through a form on a choir website. The person managing the email account replied to say that my message had been passed on. I never received any further update, but that’s absolutely fine.
I don’t want this to be some sort of bizarre stalking exercise, or for someone unpleasant to read this and feel it a good idea to hurl abuse and so forth. I did read that Miss Cooper still loves to play music and sing (when I wrote my article in 2017), which is great to know.
What started as a bit of a giggle over an impulse buy has led me down a path of discovery, uncovering more information than I would have ever thought possible from a bunch of loose sleeve notes on an obscure record. I just hope that one day I can provide you all with a bit of closure on this case.
I still haven’t played the record. I don’t think I want to either. A part of me feels a little spooked out by what I might hear, which is really silly but just how I feel about it.
I’d really love to know more about the recording, including how many copies were pressed or sold. So far, I’ve seen just two copies offered for sale on eBay, including the one I bought.
I’m still left with a hollow feeling about this record. Perhaps the backstory is not as complete as my investigation has thus far uncovered? Maybe there is more to discover?
I did make contact again with the eBay seller who told me the record collection belonged to his father who was from Dereham. Alas his father passed away so if there was any story to be had with him, he has taken it with him to his grave.
For now, it would appear that the Toftwood story is set to be a mystery that will unfortunately remain unsolved.
72.
NOTE: This blog article was first published on my old blog in 2017. I lost all of that old blog data and only recently found fragments of what I wrote near-on a decade ago (as of 2026). I hope you enjoy my rediscovered articles. I wanted to publish them so hopefully they don't get lost again!