- Father of Margaret Binge (born 1947) and Christopher Binge (born 1956).
- He had a musical colleague in the 1930s known as "Barry Gray" (real name Claude Eric Pountain, born in Derby in 1909). Not to be confused with the more famous "Barry Gray" (real name John Livesey Eccles, born in Blackburn in 1908) who scored Gerry Anderson television series such as Thunderbirds.
- Binge was born in a working-class neighbourhood in Derby, Derbyshire, in the English Midlands.
- In early 2013, Derby City Council and Derby Civic Society announced they would put a blue plaque on one of his two early homes in Derby (83 Darby Street, Normanton, or 29 Wiltshire Road, Chaddesden).
- Binge was educated at the Derby School of Music, where he studied the organ.
- He was a British composer and arranger of light music.
- A reggae version of Binges composition was the tune, "Elizabethan Reggae", was performed by Boris Gardiner in 1970.
- He arranged many of Mantovani's most famous pieces before composing his own music, which included Elizabethan Serenade and Sailing By.
- After the war, Mantovani offered Binge the job of arranging and composing for his new orchestra. With Mantovani, Binge also orchestrated Noël Coward's musicals Pacific 1860 (1946) and Ace of Clubs (1950). In 1951, his arrangement of "Charmaine" gave him and Mantovani worldwide success and recognition.
- His first big compositional success was the orchestral overture Spitfire, composed in Blackpool while he was still on RAF service, which predated William Walton's orchestral tribute by a year.
- During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Air Force, during which time he was much in demand organising in-camp entertainment.
- Binge's skill as a cinema organist was put to good use, and he played the organ in Mantovani's first band, the Tipica Orchestra.
- In 1952 Binge devised and conducted his own BBC radio programme called String Song, playing many of his own compositions. He regularly composed for production and library music publishers, and a number of his works were used for radio and television signature tunes.
- Binge's catalogue includes hundreds of works, most of them light orchestral.
- Best known today is probably his Elizabethan Serenade (1951), which was used by the British Broadcasting Corporation as the theme for the popular 1950s series, "Music Tapestry," and as the play-out for the British Forces Network radio station, and for which in 1957 he won an Ivor Novello Award.
- Early in his career he was a cinema organist, and later worked in summer orchestras in British seaside resorts (including Blackpool and Great Yarmouth), for which he learned to play the piano accordion.
- Binge was interested in the technicalities of composition and was most famous as the inventor of the "cascading strings" effect that is the signature sound of the Mantovani orchestra, much used in their arrangements of popular music. It was originally created to capture the essence of the echo properties of a building such as a cathedral, although it later became particularly associated with easy-listening music.
- In his childhood he was a chorister at Saint Andrews Church (Church of England), London Road, Derby - 'the railwaymen's church' (demolished 1970).
- In 1914 his dad joined the British Army and did not return till 1919. He died on Christmas Day, 1920, so his mother was left to bring up Ronnie and his brother and sister on her own.
- He loved to travel and conduct his own music with orchestras that were performing or recording his music.
- As a recreation he used his creative talents in painting and woodwork.
- In the 1970's Ronnie relished the opportunity to arrange and direct a series of LP albums for Rediffusion. Two of them, featuring arrangements of his own work and that of other composers, were reissued by Vocalion in 2001. Three more were reissued by Vocalion in 2003.
- He wrote pieces for choirs, and had a longstanding connection with the Wimbledon Girls' Choir under their conductor Malcolm Parker.
- Less well known is a 1948 piano piece known as "Vice Versa", a musical palindrome which was not only a front-to-back palindrome, but also exploited the two staves used for writing for piano. The music reads the same whichever way it is turned. He later extended this theme, composing a piece known as "Upside/Downside" for his son, who was learning to play the recorder at Downside School. This musical palindrome was for piano, recorder and cello and again was universally reversible - two players could play from the same sheet of music reading from opposite ends.
- Other well-known pieces of Binge include Miss Melanie, Like Old Times, The Watermill (1958) for oboe and strings, and his Concerto for Alto Saxophone in E-flat major (1956).
- His largest, longest, and most ambitious work is the four-movement Symphony in C ("Saturday Symphony"), which was written during his retirement between 1966 and 1968, and performed in Britain and Germany.
- He even wrote a piece for a primary school orchestra on one occasion.
- He was always deeply interested in working with the musicians who played his music. He often wrote for amateur or local groups - his Cornet Carillon is still played regularly by brass band ensembles everywhere.
- Binge is also known for Sailing By (1963), which introduces the late-night Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio 4.
- He gave much, not only to the professional world of light music, but always had time to spare for amateur musicians, especially brass bands, and never needed much persuasion to write for them.
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