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 secured a scholarship at the Royal College of Music. In Boult's conducting program, he was among the first students, and according to Hubert Parry, "an extraordinary talent that comes along only rarely."