With the pressing need for funds, Alwyn took what opportunities for employment came his way. In 1927 he was playing the flute in the pit at the Carlton Theatre in London, for the musical play Lady Luck. The show opened 27 April, closing in February 1928, and for however long he was playing for it, Alwyn found it monotonous. There was pleasure to be had from watching the cast, especially Leslie Henson, but the music was ‘dreary – the sort of smart dreariness without character’.

In the summer of 1927 Alwyn secured a fortnight’s engagement with the local band at Broadstairs, summoned as a replacement for a flautist who had been hired but left for a more lucrative assignment. The orchestra of ten performed in ‘a ricketty bandstand on the sea front doing our best to intone In a Monastery Garden in the teeth of what seemed a perpetual gale’. It was a wet, depressing August, with rehearsals conducted by a Captain Waterhouse (a veteran of the Great War) in a soggy marquee, rehearsals often for concerts that were cancelled because of the dismal weather. A keen Wagnerian, the Captain took the opportunity during rehearsal to put the orchestra through selections from The Valkyrie and Götterdämmerung, the results ‘a faint echo of the grandeur of Bayreuth’. 4 Beyond Broadstairs, Waterhouse’s annual moment of glory was at the Promenade Concerts, when (the only man in England who owned and could play an instrument called the heckelphone, an oboe of baritone pitch invented by the German instrument maker Heckel) the Captain was called into service for Delius’s Dance Rhapsody.

Coming down to breakfast one morning in the back-street boarding house where he lodged with some of his fellow bandsmen, Alwyn found two letters waiting for him. Opening the first, Alwyn was dismayed at what he read. Grieg’s publisher wished for an immediate explanation of why Alwyn had infringed the composer’s copyright by arranging Grieg’s Lyric Pieces for four flutes. Court action was mentioned as a possibility. These arrangements had been written for the London Flute Quartet, in complete innocence of any matters relating to copyright and its infringement, mechanical rights or performing rights, all things of which Alwyn was quite unaware.