- He was a British orchestra leader, popular from the 1940s to the 1970s.
- Ternent was discovered by Jack Hylton while playing with the Selma Four in a Newcastle restaurant. Hylton took him to London where Ternent played in Al Starita's dance band at the Kit Kat Restaurant before joining Hylton's showband.
- He made his first recordings with his Sweet Rhythm Orchestra in 1938, and among the top musicians and singers who were associated with his stylish and tasteful dance band were Harry Roche, Don Lusher, Tommy Whittle, Duncan Campbell, Stan Roderick, Duncan Lamont, Rick Kennedy, Tony Mercer, Shirley Norman, Margaret Rose, and Eva Beynon.
- His life-long signature tune was Vivian Ellis' 'She's My Lovely.
- On leaving Hylton, he led various BBC orchestras for four years before forming his own band in 1944 and touring throughout the UK.
- He began his professional music career in 1927, joining Jack Hylton's showband, becoming its principal arranger and multi-instrumentalist. He remained with the band until the outbreak of World War II, and proceeded to lead orchestras for the BBC throughout the early 1940s.
- Billy Ternent was a highly respected figure in the British popular music scene.
- He formed his own band in 1944, and began conducting pit bands for various West End theatre shows.
- Ternant is best known for backing Frank Sinatra and his work at the London Palladium. Sinatra described him as "the little giant".
- From 1962 to 1967 he was the musical director for the London Palladium.
- He is reported to have been playing the violin by the age of seven.
- Thanks to his numerous broadcasts, Billy Ternent became a household name. For a while he was musical director of Tommy Handley's "ITMA" show, but the hectic schedule of wartime eventually took its toll, and Billy resigned from the BBC in March 1944 due to ill health. Stanley Black took over his baton at the BBC Dance Orchestra.
- His first broadcast was with a sextet from a tea-room in his native Newcastle.
- When only twelve his first job was playing in a trio accompanying the silent films at a North Shields cinema, and four years later he was conducting a cinema orchestra on a circuit owned by the theatrical impresario George Black.
- Billy continued to broadcast tasteful programmes of mainly dance music well into the 1970s, although his later years were troubled by recurring bouts of illness. Alan Dell persuaded him to conduct a selection of his arrangements, to rapturous applause, during a "Dance Band Days" concert at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on 12 June 1976, as part of the BBC's Festival of Light Music. This was to be his last major engagement, although stoically he continued to work until a few weeks before his death in March the following year.
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