To go by the Sunday Times's ‘Portrait Gallery’ piece, Rubbra cut no less striking a figure in the late 1950s than he had thirty years earlier, with his beard ‘now conferring on him, as on Kodály, the saintly look of an Apostle … A smile is rarely absent from his face, which radiates good nature and a complete lack of malice.’ Such the public persona. But Western music led a double life after the war, with those living the one seldom prepared to acknowledge the other's existence or even its right to exist. Rubbra began to be overshadowed as more attention was devoted to a new generation both Continental and British. There was, in particular, the ‘Manchester School’ of Richard Hall's former students at the Royal Manchester College of Music, with the composers Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, both eventually knighted, and Alexander Goehr, plus the pianist John Ogdon and trumpet-player and conductor Elgar Howarth. War had nipped in the bud the work of familiarising a fairly reluctant public with the newest music and methods from the Continent, and it needed doing all over again. Most of it had to wait until the BBC's post-1959 ‘Glock regime’, by which time the avant-garde had taken on so radical a face that ‘traditionalist’ composers such as Rubbra found themselves quite out of fashion.