Billy Ternent was born in 50 Grey Street on the 10th October 1899 in North Shields near the mouth of the River Tyne, one of the most famous Ports for ships (Fishing/Coal/Repairs to ships etc etc) The family moved to nearby Rosella Place, which was just as well as the house in which he was born was destroyed during the War. In his early teenage years, he was known as, and signed, as his photo indicates Willie.
After Sunday Service he would go to Howard Street Hall and play in the Temperance Brass Band. His first instrument was the violin which he loved. He told me that his elder brother (also a musician), disliked the sound of the violin and persuaded him to take up the trumpet around 1914 when he was 16 years old, then piano and saxophone.
He was a master of the sub-tone clarinet and he introduced to the UK the idea of playing clarinets through megaphones.
Whilst working as a clerk-typist in a local shipyard office he was playing regularly at concerts, dances and silent films. Soon he was leading his own trio. He was father to a son and a daughter with his first wife whom he married in 1922 . I knew both of his siblings. His son became a drummer and was secretly very proud of his father, but family bitterness often kept the subject silent, for the marriage was not a happy one. In his 20’s he landed a prestigious job at Fenwick’s Store in Newcastle where he was heard by a London Group the Selmer Four and was asked to replace a member. His wife, believed that going off to London was the road to moral ruin. She was wrong. It was the road to great musical success. His marriage broke up, but his wife exercised her legal right, to refuse a divorce and held out for decades.
In 1975 Billy became ill with what he thought was anaemia—but it was leukaemia. In December 1976, a change in the British Law meant he was free to marry Eileen his sweetheart of 29 years. She was voted the World Champion Ballroom Dancer. They had fallen in love in 1947—20 years after he left North Shields. She did not know that 3 months later she would be a widow.
Too ill to conduct what was to be his Orchestra’s last broadcast, Harry Roche, one of his trombonists, stood in for him. On March 23rd aged 77, he died, and his body was cremated at Golders’ Green Crematorium on March 28th, 1977.
