His brothers were Victor Augustine (1885-1960; a composer), and Tristan Noël Marchand (1894-1982; a soldier, barrister and collector of Australiana).
He had further studies at the Breslau Conservatory, then with César Thomson in Brussels and August Wilhelmj in London.
In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, he was imprisoned in Strangeways Prison as an enemy alien in the belief that he was a German, since he spoke German fluently, had developed a German-sounding English accent from his years of study on the European continent, and had also adopted the umlaut when writing his surname.
He enlisted the aid of a friend on the outside, Sir Gerald Woods Wollaston (a future Garter Principal King of Arms 1930-1944) in researching his ancestry, to prove that he was of purely English stock.
[1] Despite being cleared of any German sympathies or family connections, he was not required anymore at the Hallé due to the prevailing anti-German sentiment.
He led the premiere performance of Béla Bartók's Cantata Profana, in a radio broadcast from London on 25 May 1934.
His students included the composers Buxton Orr[8] and Imogen Holst,[9] the conductors George Weldon,[10] Robert Jenner,[11] and Thomas Loten,[12] and the tenor Ian Partridge.
The recording has been released on CD, paired with Eugene Goossens conducting Leoncavallo's Pagliacci.