Ernest Shand (born Ernest William Watson, 31 January 1868 – 29 November 1924) was an English guitarist-composer, music hall singer, and actor, born in Hull into a musical family. After starting on violin, he took up guitar and became a pupil of Madame Sidney Pratten, who published his early compositions; by his late twenties he had written over 150 guitar pieces along with the first known guitar concerto from the British Isles. The guitar’s small niche in England meant Shand earned much of his living as a music-hall actor, touring as far as Australia, before he stopped composing around 1910 and moved to Birmingham, where he died in 1924.

Shand’s playing was said to remain unsurpassed in Britain until Julian Bream’s emergence in the late 1940s, and his large catalogue of salon pieces, dances, and fantasias — including the Légende, Op. 201 — helped sustain guitar composition in England against the dominance of orchestral music, later drawing renewed attention through modern editions and recordings.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Shand