[1] He became known as an arranger of music and, after service in the RAF during World War II, he ran a ballroom orchestra at the Grand Spa Hotel in Bristol.
[2] In 1961, the first stereophonic single ever released in the UK, was billed as 'The Sound of Ed White', playing "Coral Reef" and "Tropical Blue".
[2][3] In the United States it was used for an even longer period of time (1955–1974) as the theme music to Captain Kangaroo on the CBS TV network.
In 1957, permission was granted for Mary Rodgers to write lyrics to the tune and the vocal version was given the title "Captain Kangaroo".
[4] "Puffin' Billy" has often been used to signify 1950s Middle England, for example in The Comic Strip's parodies of The Famous Five,[1] in some of the last cigar adverts on British TV in the early 1990s, and in a trailer for a 2004 Channel 4 documentary about anti-asylum-seeker demonstrators in Lee-on-the-Solent.