FARNHAM is mourning the loss of one of its most decorated sons after Sir Jeffrey Tate, a Cambridge graduate and qualified doctor who went on to guest conduct almost every major orchestra and opera house in the world despite severe disability, died aged 74 earlier this month.

Sir Jeffrey was born on April 28, 1943, in Salisbury and at the age of three was diagnosed with congenital spina bifida and kyphoscoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine that paralysed his left leg and greatly affected his ability to move freely.

However, he never let the condition - nor his lack of formal musical training - hold him back and after climbing to the pinnacle of the classical music world, was knighted by Prince William in April this year for his ‘services to British music overseas’.

Sir Jeffrey moved to Farnham with his family in 1950, and attended Wrecclesham Primary School. His younger sister Jill recalls their childhood as “very happy” and said her brother displayed considerable musical prowess from a young age.

“I remember Jeff organising a show in our front garden to raise funds for charity,” Jill told The Herald. “He chose the music and my task was to perform a dance, which unfortunately ended with me falling backwards over a bed of rose bushes!”

The family had a piano in the lounge of their home in Monkshanger, off Lynch Road, on which Jeffrey and Jill’s mother would play standards from the mid-20th century, including Ivor Novello, Rogers and Hart and Cole Porter. Suitably inspired, Jeffrey would frequently cycle to the library in West Street and take out sheet music to play, accompanied by his sister’s singing.

“My repertoire was quite vast for a young girl,” Jill continued. “I remember singing John Ireland, Schumann, Schubert and even music from the Arcadians!”

She added her brother was also very well read, and she would often plunder his bookshelves for European novels by the likes of Stendhal, de Maupassant and Dostoyevsky etc. “Jeff didn’t do frivolous reading!”, she said.

Away from home, Jeffrey’s musical inclinations led him to become a choir boy at St Thomas on the Bourne, and he developed his hobby further after joining Farnham Grammar School in 1954.

School mate Ian Sargeant, recalls Jeffrey rarely mentioned his disability when talking to other boys and “coped to the utmost of his physical ability”, cycling to school and joining all the activities he could.

Although largely self-taught on the piano, taking lessons only intermittently, Jeffrey passed his grade 4 exam and O-level in music a year earlier than normal and the whole school became quickly aware of his prodigious musical talent.

Alan Fluck, the grammar school’s music master, gave him great encouragement and many opportunities to perform as a pianist, a cellist and a singer, and he subsequently flourished in works by Benjamin Britten and Gian Carlo Menotti.

“Talking to Jeffrey was more like talking to a friendly school master than another schoolboy who was only 12 months older than I was,” said Ian. “He wasn’t condescending in attitude, but he was knowledgeable and interesting.”

Jeffrey also started a play reading group at the Castle Theatre on Sunday afternoons, attended by about a dozen amateur performers, and eventually left the grammar school in 1961, having been school captain in his last year.

Determined to repay the medical profession for treating his condition, Jeffrey won a scholarship to read natural sciences at Christ’s College Cambridge and completed his medical training at St Thomas’s Hospital, London, specialising in eye surgery.

However, his passion for music never waned and after a chance meeting with the tenor John Kentish, who was astonished by his musical ability while performing a party piece together, Jeffrey was urged to take up his hobby professionally.

Her went on to study music at the London Opera Centre and soon took up a post as a repetiteur and a coach at the Royal Opera House, helping prepare singers for conductors such as Georg Solti and Edward Downes.

From there he followed his new career to work in Bavaria, Paris and Cologne, before quietly making his conducting debut in Carmen at Gothenburg Opera. In 1980, he made his full debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, stepping in for the ill James Levine to conduct Lulu.

Five years later, in 1985, he was appointed the first principal conductor of the English Chamber Orchestra - traditionally a conductor-less ensemble - a position he held until 2000. He also served as the first ever principal conductor of the Royal Opera House between 1986 and 1991.

But by the mid-1990s Sir Jeffrey had firmly established himself in continental Europe and from then on was rarely seen in Britain as he took posts including principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Geneva Opera and the Orchestre National de France.

He later served as music director of the San Carlo Theatre of Naples from 2005 until 2010, and in 2009 was appointed chief conductor of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, a post he held until his death.

Reflecting on her brother’s career, Jill continued: “As his music career took off Jeff spent less time in England but I was lucky to see him conduct in Cologne, Florence, Naples and Venice. Last year I was proud to be in Venice when he received a very prestigious music award. It was strange to watch the great and the good of Venice making such a fuss over my big brother!

“Our lives took very different paths and we would often go six or nine months without seeing each other. He did not use a computer so emailing was not an option to keep in touch. But we always saw each other around Christmas time. His Christmas parties were legendary.

“He was uncle to my four children and my youngest son, Rhys, is lucky enough to live in Jeff’s house in Camden. He was delighted when my son Oliver was accepted to read languages at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where Jeff himself had been a student.

“It wasn’t all music with Jeff. He collected early Meissen porcelain, loved visiting old English churches and was a superb cook (I was his commis chef!).

“But most of all I remember a warm, funny, highly intelligent man who was very humble about his talents and lived his life doing the one thing that he loved and for that I am very grateful. I will miss him more than words can express.”

Sir Jeffrey was also president of the Farnham and Bourne Choral Society, Farnham Youth Choir, and of Shine Charity (formerly UK Spina Bifida charity) - the latter for some 23 years from 1989 to September 2012.

He died on Friday, June 2, of a heart attack while on holiday in Bergamo, Italy and is survived by his husband Klaus Kuhlemann, a German geomorphologist whom he met when conducting at Cologne from 1977.

A cremation has already taken place overseas, but Jill intends to hold a celebration of her brother’s life in Farnham, probably at St Thomas-on-the Bourne in the autumn. A notice will be placed in The Herald once a date has been organised.