I read with some sadness this week The Times’s obituary on Edmund Hockridge, a Canadian-born one-time star of the English musical stage, who has died at the age of 89. It is more than four decades since his days of greatest fame as Skye Masterson in Guys and Dolls, Judge Forestier in Can Can and Sid Sorokin in The Pajama Game – all at the London Coliseum. Most will have probably forgotten him.

His was a name familiar to me from childhood as one of two celebrities in my home city of Peterborough. We did better, I think than Banbury (Gary Glitter and Larry Grayson) since the other was Ernie Wise. I got to know both in later years when I worked on the local newspaper. Hockridge was famously a gentleman, a feature of his personality not omitted from The Times’s obit.

In his earlier career in his native country he had been a star of opera, where his roles included Peter Grimes in Benjamin Britten’s opera of that name. By coincidence, l found myself at the scene of Hockridge’s British triumphs, the Coliseum, last week, standing next to the musician who first conducted the opera in Britain, Sir Reginald Goodall. (Peter Pears said he did it even better than Britten.) Not the man himself (he died aged 88 in 1990) but a portrait bust of him sculpted three years earlier by the Oxford artist Michael Black. Close by in the theatre bar is a portrait of the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras, who is still making music at the age of 83.

I salute all three men today and especially Hockridge who said recently: “I keep going and I am flattered when anyone remembers me.”