[2] The mill-owner's daughter spotted his musical talent initially on the harmonium[2] and persuaded the mill owner, Teddy Higham,[2] to pay for piano lessons.
He lost his boyhood stammer and broad Lancashire accent in early adulthood but fought personal demons of doubt and worry all his life.
[1] In 1946 he returned to the Royal College, and studied piano with Arthur Benjamin and Frank Merrick, composition with Herbert Howells, and orchestration with Gordon Jacob.
His familiarity with the keyboard has the naturalness of breathing; and he moves in it with confidence, dexterity and graceFrom 1954 to 1973 he composed many of Grenfell's songs and spoof operettas such as Freda and Eric.
To warm up before a show they would improvise fake Debussy and mock Schubert; he learned to play over hailstorms in Melbourne, cowboy films in Sydney, bagpipes in Auckland and the police radio on Grenfell's mike.
The next time we toured together I always checked in advance.At Grenfell's last performance, at the Waterloo Dinner in Windsor Castle in June 1973, she insisted she would only dine with the Queen if the Blezards were also invited.
The Queen chose the programme, including Blezard's favourite "The Battle March of Delhi", a melodramatic Victorian song involving colonels, marauders and bugles.
Grenfell supported the Blezard family in many ways: she bought them a dishwasher one Christmas; wrote birthday songs for their children, and contributed (unwittingly) to his son's first motorbike.
For the royal opening of Snape Maltings concert hall in 1967, Blezard and Grenfell composed a surprise song for Benjamin Britten who was so overwhelmed that he burst into tears.
[2] The same year he was musical director in London and New York for John Osborne's The Entertainer, starring Laurence Olivier as the failed music-hall artist Archie Rice.
His own favourite composition, written in 1951, was the dark, quasi-mahlerian Duetto (for string ensemble), which his wife Joan Kemp-Potter also considered his most accomplished work.
His orchestral music, in which the influence of his hero Maurice Ravel is easily detectable, particularly in its harmonic patterns, has enjoyed a significant revival since the late 1990s after a long period of neglect.