Ivan March was born on 5 April 1928 in Portsmouth, but was raised in Eltham, South London.
[1] His father, John, was a policeman; his mother Mabel (née Adams) had been a milliner before her marriage.
[2] While doing his national service in the late 1940s March joined the Central Band of the RAF as a horn player, and enrolled at the Royal Northern College of Music, after which he was a member of the orchestras of the D'Oyly Carte and Carl Rosa Opera Companies, before joining the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
[1] His Gramophone colleague Martin Cullingford recalled: During the 1960s many local authorities in Britain set up lending libraries of LPs, and March was called in to advise many of them.
[3] In 1953 March married Kathleen Forsyth, an opera singer ten years his senior.