Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft in 1913. He started composing when he was very young, though in his early pieces he seemed more concerned about the nice patterns the notes made on the paper than the music.

As a teenager he was allowed out of school to have lengthy nine hour lessons with the composer Frank Bridge and eventually he came up to London to study at the Royal College of Music.

Later he was lucky enough to get work with the Post Office Film Unit (of all unlikely combinations) where he learnt to set verses to music and work to a deadline.

In 1939 Britten went over to America. He made the trip with his friend Peter Pears and the two of them hoped to make a musical career for themselves in the States. Pears was a singer (tenor) and Britten used to accompany him in his recitals. They got a certain amount of work and made some good friends, but neither really wished to stay. However as the Second World War had broken out in Europe, and as Britten and Pears were both pacifists, they were not very anxious to go home either. The crunch came in June 1941. Britten was staying with friends in California and, looking round at the dry Western scenery, he got more and more homesick. Then suddenly he came across an English magazine article by E M Forster on the poetry of George Crabbe.

Crabbe was a very minor 18th century poet and it seems odd, at first, that his verses should have excited Britten as much as they did. However, like Britten, Crabbe had been born in Suffolk and Forster began his article by describing the scenery of Crabbe’s birthplace, Aldeburgh (just a few miles down the coast from Britten’s Lowestoft): "It is a bleak little place; not beautiful... and near the quay the scenery becomes melancholy and flat; with expanses of mud, saltish commons, and the marsh-birds crying.” (You may have to come from Suffolk to like this sort of thing!) As Britten read the article a wave of longing for England overwhelmed him. He knew he had to go home.

Britten and Pears booked a passage back as soon as they could, and the next year they got a place in a Swedish cargo vessel. They spent a month crawling up the North American coast and then across the Atlantic to Liverpool. It was a slow, boring, voyage and extremely dangerous (the German U Boat packs were out in force) but the only thing that really bothered them was the noise. The boat was small and overcrowded and the crew stamped about all day, whistling, while Britten sweated in his tiny cabin, trying to compose. He wrote the 'Ceremony of Carols' and (with Pears' help) the plot of a new opera, 'Peter Grimes'. They had found the story in Crabbe’s poem 'The Borough'.

'Peter Grimes' is an odd choice for an operatic hero. In Crabbe’s poem Grimes is a brutal fisherman who murders his apprentices and eventually goes insane. But Britten extended the character. His Grimes is not a thug, but an outcast - somebody made savage by prejudice and distrust. Britten and Pears probably identified with Grimes; they felt like outcasts themselves. Being a pacifist (and a homosexual) in war time, living in England was no joke, and the prejudice they encountered nearly wrecked the opera. 'Peter Grimes' was due to be put on by the Sadler's Wells Company and many of the singers resented working for a couple of gay 'conchees' (Conscientious Objectors).

The rehearsal period was a nightmare; the chorus rebelled, one singer resigned and everybody approached the First Night (June 7th 1945) in a state of panic. When the curtain came down at the end of the show, there was nothing, not a sound. The audience was silent for 30 seconds and the cast started panicking. What was happening? Was there going to be a riot? The stage crew fingered the ropes that were to pull down the Safety Curtain, and then the storm broke. Roars of approval burst from all over the theatre, the cast took 14 curtain calls, and Benjamin Britten came on stage to make the deepest bow he ever made in his life, "He just folded in the middle" said the little boy playing the apprentice, "I've never seen anybody bow like that!"

Britten died in 1976 and his reputation as one of the 20th century’s great composers still remains. His operas, including 'Peter Grimes' are still regularly performed not only in Britain but across the world.