I enjoyed A. A. Gill’s Sunday Times article on Morris dancing this week, which was written in his usual entertaining and erudite fashion. As I spotted it in the magazine, however, I felt pretty certain that I would not get far into it without finding Gill repeating the injunction that one should try everything once except incest and folk-dancing. I was confident, too, that the well-known remark would be misattributed, as it almost always is.

I was right on both counts. On the second page of the piece, the quotation was offered. Its source was given as the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. This at least made a change from Winston Churchill and Oscar Wilde, both of whom are often erroneously credited with the observation.

Look it up in most dictionaries of quotations and you will find it attributed to another musical figure, the composer Sir Arnold Bax. It can be found in his 1943 memoir, Farewell My Youth. But such an attribution is only partly correct. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations properly lists the contribution among the (surprisingly thin) selection supplied by Anonymous, because Bax states the advice came from “a sympathetic Scot”.

It is, of course, just the kind of witticism Beecham might have uttered. He, after all, gave us the wonderful description of the sound of a harpsichord – “Like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof.”

For malicious wit, though, it is hard to beat his description of Herbert von Karajan as “a kind of musical Malcolm Sargent”.