They described their new music as " cowboy jive", and they acquired a manager, the sports commentator " Lord Jim" Ferguson, who became the fourth partner. Grande said: "We would take a standard like "Ida (Sweet as Apple Cider)" and play it every way we could think of - fast, slow, soft, hillbilly, waltz and Dixie." Playing the double-bass, Haley developed the backbeat that became rock'n'roll. He admired Grande's musical knowledge and the fact that he could read music and write arrangements They rehearsed together, trying out different combinatons. Haley was impressed by Grande and his friend the steel guitarist and fiddle player Billy Williamson, and discussed forming a new band with them. I knew I wanted to do this full-time as I hated driving coal wagons.

I used to fill in for his accordion player, Al Constantine, from time to time. Bill Haley was a very good entertainer and a very good yodeller but when he started rock'n'roll, he stopped yodelling. One of those bands was Bill Haley and the Four Aces of Western Swing Grande told me, I met him on and off before I joined him. On leaving school, he had a clerical job for a detective agency and also delivered coal, but he loved the accordion and would sit in with country and polka bands including Tex Ritter's at the Sleepy Hollow Ranch in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. The record spearheaded a musical revolution, but it was anything but an overnight success story as the band had spent many years in the business. Born into an Italian family in South Philadelphia, Johnny Grande (pronounced "Gran-dee") learnt the piano as a child and developed a good knowledge of the classics. Johnny Grande was a founder member of Bill Haley and His Comets and he played piano on what is arguably the most famous of all records, "Rock Around the Clock" (1954).

John A. Grande, keyboard player: born Philadelphia 14 January 1930; married; died Clarkesville, Tennessee 2 June 2006. Neither he nor his visitors anticipated that, by the next morning, he would have followed a lifetime's habit and quietly slipped away.Pieter van der Merwe. His last two conversations in hospital were, appropriately, about advice to a postgraduate student on naval aspects of the Crimean War, and a specialist discussion with an old railway friend.

Never openly astonished, he smilingly observed that a bomb dropped on the room would wipe out maritime historical scholarship at a stroke.Happily, he was to remain engaged in it for another 20 years. As part of the London Docklands History Group, he helped preserve important buildings there before the area began to resemble Manhattan, while current climate research based on historical sources can be traced back to his advocacy of the use of weather data found in 18th-century ships' logs.Pearsall's retirement in 1985 was marked by his investiture with the reconditely suitable but now discontinued Imperial Service Order, and (as he was told) a small private dinner at which he arrived to find 50 people waiting to honour him. His final historian's role was in part a response to his unpredictable health and, among other things, informed major redevelopment of the museum's historical galleries through the following decade.His own output included specialist articles and reviews, a substantial museum pamphlet on the Second Dutch War, contributions to Society for Nautical Research and Navy Records Society publications and, most recently, revisions to obscure naval lives in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Here, with other "buffs" who became known as the "Euston Troupe", he and his brother also extended a family passion for railways, which in 1962 resulted in his still-useful study, North Irish Channel Services.The doctorate never materialised but Graham remained a friend and encouraged Alan Pearsall to apply for a general assistant's job at Greenwich, where he arrived in September 1955 and in the 1960s was for some years the museum's diligent and expert Curator of Manuscripts. It took him another year to recover before he went to read History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and then began a PhD at London University under Professor Gerald Graham.