civil engineer born in Bombay, India. Like many of his near ancestors, he was an industrialist and businessman. Sorabji's mother, Madeline Matilda Worthy (1866–1959), was English and born in Camberwell, Surrey (now South London). She is said to have been a singer, pianist and organist, but there is little evidence of this. They married on 18 February 1892 and Sorabji was their only child. Little is known of Sorabji's early life and musical beginnings. He reportedly started to learn the piano from his mother when he was eight, and he later received help from Emily Edroff-Smith, a musician and piano teacher who was a friend of his mother's. Sorabji attended a school of about twenty boys where, in addition to general education, he took music lessons in piano, organ and harmony, as well as language classes for German and Italian. He was also educated by his mother, who took him to concerts. Entering the music world (1913–1936) The first major insight into Sorabji's life comes from his correspondence with the composer and critic Peter Warlock, which began in 1913. Warlock inspired Sorabji to become a music critic and focus on composition. Sorabji had obtained a matriculation but decided to study music privately, as Warlock's claims about universities made him abandon his plan of going to one. Thus, from the early 1910s until 1916, Sorabji studied music with the pianist and composer Charles A. Trew. Around this time, he came to be close to and exchanged ideas with the composers Bernard van Dieren and Cecil Gray, who were friends with Warlock. For unknown reasons, Sorabji was not conscripted during World War I, and though he later praised conscientious objectors for their courage, there is no proof he tried to register as one. Sorabji's letters from this time document his nascent feelings of otherness, the sense of alienation that he as a homosexual of mixed ancestry experienced and his development of a non-English identity. Sorabji joined the Parsi community in 1913 or 1914 by attending a Navjote ceremony (probably performed in his home by a priest) and changed his name. He had apparently been mistreated by other boys in the school he attended and his tutor, who sought to make an English gentleman out of him, would make derogatory comments about India and hit him on the head with a large book, which gave him recurring headaches. Sorabji said that in 1914,