Vernon Handley, who died yesterday aged 77, was one of the best-loved of conductors and a great champion of British orchestral music; a protégé of Sir Adrian Boult, he was renowned for holding fast to two principles - an undemonstrative technique and an unfashionable repertoire.
While he was by no means alone in promoting the underdogs of British music, no one did more than 'Tod' Handley to bring them to the attention of the mainstream. His aim was to include at least one British work in all his concerts. Nevertheless, he would acknowledge that "One man can't put it right," adding: "But I've done as much as I could, and I'm going to keep trying."

At the same time he would insist forcibly that he could - "and would" - conduct the whole repertoire. Like George Szell, his speciality was to specialise in nothing. Many of his concerts and recordings included such mainstream fare as violin concertos by Beethoven and Bruch, overtures by Dvo?ák and symphonies by Schubert.

Handley was principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra (1985-89) and principal guest conductor, later conductor emeritus, of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (1989-95) - he will be remembered particularly for his recordings of the complete symphonies of Vaughan Williams and of Herbert Howells's Hymnus Paradisi, both with the RLPO. Although he had been associate conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra since 1994, he never held the top position with a London orchestra.

Despite this - or perhaps because of it - he was a firm favourite among orchestral musicians, who valued his surefootedness, commitment and humanity. His good humour and self-effacing nature endeared him to his players as much as it did to his audience. When acknowledging the applause at the end of a concert he would often point to the score, as if to pass credit to the composer.
He was renowned for exchanging wisecracks and jokes with his players, urging them to "enjoy the music". With student orchestras, notably at the Royal Academy of Music, he was patience personified, yet not without pithy observations: "Do you know the most expressive way to play a triplet?" he asked his students. "In time!"

Handley unashamedly aligned himself with composers who had fallen from favour and, indeed, with some who had never been in favour. They included Arnold Bax, Granville Bantock, Edmund Rubbra, Robert Simpson (who dedicated his 10th symphony to Handley) and EJ Moeran. He even championed Sir Malcolm Arnold at a time when the composer couldn't keep his own life in tune, let alone his music, and persuaded audiences to sit through works by Holst other than The Planets - such as the composer's Choral Symphony, which he revived in Liverpool in 1994.

His relationship with the music of Sir Arthur Bliss, the Master of the Queen's Music, was one of his most endearing. The two were close friends in Bliss's later years, and in 1973 Handley conducted the première of the older man's Metamorphic Variations. What Bliss demands from a conductor, said Handley, is "absolute clarity of vision". It was a vision that Handley was willing and able to provide.

He was also the best Elgar conductor of his time, arguably the best since the composer himself. His recording of the Violin Concerto with Nigel Kennedy, then an emerging star, won Record of the Year at the Gramophone Awards in 1985 (one of three he would win). It helped to establish Kennedy's career and brought comparisons with Elgar's own recording, made with the precocious Yehudi Menuhin in 1932. More recently (in 2007) Handley recorded the Cello Concerto with Natalie Clein and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

Few, if any, understood Elgar better than Handley. As one reviewer suggested, when comparing his recording of The Dream of Gerontius (with Anthony Rolfe Johnson) with Barbirolli's reading of Elgar's affirmation of the Christian faith, if Barbirolli was an Old Testament prophet, then Handley was the high priest, noble and exalted.

George Vernon Handley was born at Enfield, Middlesex, on November 11 1930 into what he once described as "a very, very working-class family". He was a Celt, and proud of it. His Irish mother had taught piano "rather badly" and bred Newfoundland dogs; his Welsh father, who had had once been a tenor at Llandaff Cathedral, worked in a paper-making factory.

By the age of 18 months the young Vernon could sing perfectly in tune. The name "Tod" came because he was born with his feet turned in. "I'm pigeon-toed," he told The Daily Telegraph in 2007. "So is my elder brother [Graham, a commentator on 19th-century novelists], and my father said, 'They toddle'."

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