In 1917 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. There he was one of the first pupils in Adrian Boult's conducting class, and was described by Hubert Parry as "the kind of phenomenon that appears once in a generation".
In 1917, he obtained a scholarship for music education. At the Royal College of Music, he was one of the earliest in Adrian Boult's conducting class, and Hubert Parry deemed him "a remarkable individual who appears once in many generations."