Thomas Round
[3] Round began singing as a child in the St Paul's Mission church choir, where he met his future wife, Alice York.
[4] On leaving Barrow Technical College at the age of 15, he started working at the mill as an apprentice joiner and competed at some music festivals.
[6][4] He found his duties generally dull, although he was posted to guard the house where Dr Buck Ruxton had notoriously killed his wife and housemaid the previous year.
[3] In 1938 he married Alice at St Paul's Church, Barrow, and the couple had one son, Ellis, born in 1942, who became an aeronautical engineer.
"[6] He also performed on the radio[3] and was offered the chance to appear as a guest in a college production in Dallas, playing Canio in Pagliacci.
[18] He played roles in Gianni Schicchi, Lilac Time, Eugene Onegin,[8] and less-frequently staged works including Rimsky Korsakov's The Snow Maiden (Tsar Berendei),[19] Wolf-Ferrari's School for Fathers (Count Riccardo),[20] and John Gardner's adaptation of The Moon and Sixpence.
He created the tenor lead, Nils, in the world premiere of Delius's Irmelin under Sir Thomas Beecham in Oxford in 1953.
[8] The following year, he rejoined D'Oyly Carte as a guest artist for a short period, playing Prince Hilarion in a new production of Princess Ida at the Savoy Theatre.
[25] Round returned to D'Oyly Carte, on tour in 1958 in Dublin, playing his old roles of Frederic, Nanki-Poo, adding Ralph, and, for the first time, Marco in The Gondoliers, the following season.
[26] During the company's summer break in 1958, Round earned more good notices as Count Danilo opposite June Bronhill with Sadler's Wells in The Merry Widow at the London Coliseum.
[1][30] In 1961, his other new roles were Richard Dauntless in Ruddigore and Cyril in Princess Ida, and he participated in 1962–63 in the company's extensive North American tour.
[26] By 1963, Philip Potter had taken over the parts of Frederic and Nanki-Poo, but Round added the role of the Defendant in Trial by Jury and resumed singing Tolloller in Iolanthe.
[8] In 1969, when Adams left D'Oyly Carte, the partners began to tour extensively with this new company in the British Isles, the Far East, Australasia, and North America, including three Hollywood Bowl concerts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
[8][32] To enable the company to appear in small venues, Sullivan's orchestrations were adapted and arranged for smaller forces than D'Oyly Carte employed.
Pinafore, Frederic in Pirates, Tolloller in Iolanthe, Nanki-Poo in The Mikado, Richard Dauntless in Ruddigore, Colonel Fairfax in Yeomen, and Marco in The Gondoliers, as well as acting as a director for the company.
In November 1995, he celebrated fifty years as a professional singer with a three-day opera event in the Lake District at which Adams also appeared.
[8] The Gilbert and Sullivan for All team also recorded a miscellaneous LP, including Valerie Masterson and Gillian Knight as Princesses Nekaya and Kalyba in an excerpt from Utopia, Limited, and Round as Antonio in The Gondoliers.
