DOUGLAS, Roy

Born in Tunbridge Wells, Dec 12, 1907
Died March 23, 2013

• Roy Douglas was a composer and arranger who worked in film and television.
• Douglas had a long collaboration with Ralph Vaughan Williams and William Walton, helping them prepare scores for performance and publication.
• Douglas made a popular orchestration of the Chopin works used in the ballet Les sylphides.

Douglas “knew Vaughan Williams’s mind and, perhaps a rarer accomplishment, could read his handwriting”

From Roy Douglas’s obituary ¹

“Mr. Douglas, who writes my music for me.“

This is how Vaughan Williams liked introducing Douglas to people. Douglas found this very embarrassing.²

³

1. “Roy Douglas, Composer – Obituary,” The Telegraph, March 25, 2015, accessed September 4, 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11494520/Roy-Douglas-composer-obituary.html.
2. Ibid.
3. Christopher Palmer and Stephen Lloyd, “Douglas, Roy,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed September 4, 2019, https://oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000008091.