1. A voice is a person

Blackburn in the northern county of Lancashire is a town built in a trough in the moors, with streets which pour down from all sides into its centre. Some noble reminders of its golden century still remain: the town hall, the concert hall, the library, the railway station, the cathedral, the museum, all of them except the cathedral Victorian or Edwardian and now stranded among the slap-dash new primitivism of shopping malls and car parks thrown up in Blackburn, and many other northern manufacturing towns, during the 1960s and 1970s. The good end of town—the best end, the West End, the Mayfair of Blackburn—lies on the north-western slope, along and above Preston New Road, probably because (a common theory about the layout of Victorian towns and cities) richer people took care to live up-wind of the mill smoke, and the prevailing wind in Britain is from the south-west. Lynwood Road is one of these streets which run steeply down the hill from the moorland. At the top of the street is the Dog Inn and, beyond that, the crest of the hill and fine views stretching north across the green valley of the Ribble to the Bowland Fells. Lynwood Road itself faces south; not a poor street—the terraced houses have bay windows; but not a rich one either—two rooms upstairs and two down, the kind of place that a mill foreman or a shopkeeper or a schoolmaster might have paid rent on a hundred years ago. Migrant families from the Indian subcontinent, mainly Muslims from Pakistan, their children and grandchildren, live here now. On this September evening, they come and go from each other’s houses, women in loose folds of white, small boys in prayer caps carrying green velvet cases which contain the Koran. ‘Salaam alaikum’, one bearded man says to another, as they pass on the slope.

Number 57 is on the steepest stretch, an end-of-terrace with a satellite dish fixed to its gable wall. The curtains are drawn in the bay. A pennant for the town’s football team, Blackburn Rovers, hangs in one window. Beside the door there is a plaque which says that from 1913 to 1933 this was ‘the home of Kathleen Ferrier, contralto singer’; a small plaque, modestly phrased—a Mr Mujib-Ur-Rehman has a larger and shinier nameplate just across the street, and he is not yet among the dead and great. Standing on the pavement, I looked at the view Kathleen Ferrier would have had, from age one to age twenty-one, as she was jiggled on her father’s shoulder, or ran to school, or set off every morning to work as a switchboard girl at the Blackburn telephone exchange. A view of a street, then a town in a valley, both under drizzle and dark now, and on the horizon, standing out sharp and patched with wet sunlight, the southern moors.

This would have been her view, and yet not quite her view: she would have been lucky to see the hills. Blackburn in the years she lived there was a different place, more sharply defined in character and more blurred atmospherically. A cotton-weaving town—J. B. Priestley wrote that it once wove ‘every dhoti in India’—with many mill chimneys between Lynwood Road and the southern horizon, and an atmosphere that cleared of smoke only one week in the year when the mills closed for the summer holiday—‘wakes week’—and their workers went to the seaside.

Standing there, I remembered that I had first come to Blackburn when it was such a place. We took the train a few miles from Bolton, where our home then was, came through the cuttings in the hills that can be seen from Lynwood Road and at Blackburn changed to a different train that took us up into the Yorkshire Dales. Blackburn’s station, I remember, was filled with crowds hurrying up and down the subways between platforms, rather like the opening scene in Mr Hulot’s Holiday, and on our platform there was a model of a two-funnelled steamer inside a glass case, placed there by the shipping company that took holidaymakers from Fleetwood and Liverpool to the Isle of Man. That was the summer of 1951.1 was six. Kathleen Ferrier had her first operation for cancer that spring, though very few people knew that then. She was a voice on the radio, singing British folk songs (‘Blow the Wind Southerly’) or the aria in English translation from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (‘What Is Life to Me Without Thee?’). Four years later, my elder brother brought home our first gramophone—or rather that new thing, a record player, portable, with three speeds—and two 78rpm records which had to be slipped carefully from their paper sleeves. They had these two Ferrier songs on their A-sides. My brother, who had charge of this delicate machinery, would wait for the deck to stop spinning, turn the discs over with his fingertips, and we would hear ‘Weel May the Keel Row’ and Handel’s ‘Art Thou Troubled?’ on their reverse. Now, to hear Ferrier, the family need no longer wait on the caprice of the BBC Light Programme’s record selection.

‘She has such a lovely voice,’ my mother said in the present tense, though by then Kathleen Ferrier was two years dead. We agreed—it was deep, it was thrilling, it was singular. But there were also two things which then I would have found hard to put into words (and it may be no easier now). First, I think we felt that Ferrier’s was the opposite of a disembodied ‘voice’; a personality housed in flesh and blood was singing, and directly, it seemed, to us. Second, the voice made us respectful and contemplative—even to a ten-year-old it could do this. I suppose we were in the presence of beauty—often a grave beauty; even the jauntiest folksong, ‘The Keel Row’, had something sad inside it. Well, it made you want to cry. But was that the composer’s notes, and the way they were sung, or the words in the lyrics and the way they were sung, or something you knew or sensed about the history of the person who sang them?

The answer to the last question, should it have been asked in our house in 1955, would have become almost immediately complicated. That same year, a few months after the record player arrived, my brother gave our mother as a Christmas present a newly published biography of Ferrier by her sister, Winifred. It had (still has—though often read, it has been carefully preserved) a pink dust-jacket with a Cecil Beaton portrait on the front showing Ferrier apparently in mid-song: erect, strong-necked, hair glinting in the photographer’s lights, teeth shining, eyes resolute, her wide mouth open (a mouth, as the critic Neville Cardus wrote, that ‘you could dive into’). This was the singer at her zenith in 1951, a lovely and celebrated woman who had sung at Glyndebourne and the Edinburgh Festival and at the Carnegie Hall in New York; in Salzburg, Chicago, Paris, Amsterdam, Montreal. But inside the book was a different kind of picture; snapshots of a girl who, in her clothes, her hair, her smile, her locations on municipal park benches and cold northern beaches, was as ordinary (and by extension as interesting) as ourselves. For us, and many people like us, it may have been the first moment of appeal in the Ferrier story—that such a voice could come from such a place: 57 Lynwood Road, Blackburn, Lancashire. What this provenance implied—an implication the biography reinforced—was that Kathleen was a ‘Lancashire lass’ and therefore ungrand and unsnobbish, a ‘good sort’ and true to her origins, with ‘never a trace of swank’. People knew her by affectionate nicknames: to the conductor Sir John Barbirolli she was ‘Katie’; to Gerald Moore, her frequent accompanist on the piano, she was ‘Kath’; and to herself she was ‘Klever Kaff’ or ‘Klever Question Mark Kaff’ or ‘Not-so-Klever Kaff’, and sometimes, at the end of her letters, simply ‘KK’.

The biography by her sister told the story of this last name. In her pre-war obscurity as a young housewife—Mrs Kathleen Wilson, wife to Mr Bert Wilson, bank manager—she had once sewn a button on to a coat as a favour to a friend. The friend was Wyn Hetherington. The coat belonged to her husband, Jack Hetherington, who needed it in a hurry; the Wilsons and the Hetheringtons were about to set out for a picnic, which Mrs Hetherington was preparing in the kitchen. So, watched by the Hetheringtons’ three-year-old son, Kathleen sewed quickly and with a nice final flourish, at which point the boy remarked (‘with respect and surprise in his voice’ writes Winifred Ferrier): ‘Clever Kaff!’ Perhaps because this is a childish story, it appealed to me as a child when I first skipped through the book. What the book did not disclose, however, was the fate of Mr Hetherington or Mrs Hetherington or Kathleen’s husband, Mr Wilson. Jack Hetherington died a few years later. Kathleen divorced Bert Wilson, who eventually married Wyn Hetherington. His first marriage produced no children. His second one did.

All of this took place in Silloth, a small and declining port town on the Cumberland coast, and all of it is interesting, and some of it may even be pertinent to the question of Ferrier’s voice and career. But when she was alive, her audience knew very little about her life, even when she was losing it (‘arthritis’ was the public explanation for her absences from the opera stage and concert platform). During the years she sang, the fully-fledged notion of ‘celebrity’ had still to be invented. She gave very few newspaper interviews. She never appeared on television or in cinema newsreels. There is, so far as I can tell, no film footage of her outside a few silent and fleeting seconds, which are now in the hands of a devout enthusiast. As for her speaking voice, it can be heard only briefly and only twice, on a tape made at a post-concert New York party, and in a short speech she made for the BBC at an Edinburgh Festival (and a wonderfully modulated and enunciated voice it is too, without a trace of Lancashire; as a young woman in Blackburn, she had elocution lessons). In any case, who among the crowd that filled the Carnegie Hall in 1948 to hear her sing Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, Bruno Walter conducting, could have cared about her original place in the echelons of British social class and geography? They had come to hear her sing. Already in Britain she had achieved a remarkable and—a safe prediction—unrepeatable thing. For a few months in 1946-47, her recording of the aria ‘What Is Life?’ (Christoph Willibald Gluck, 1714-87) outsold any other record in any musical category. Well, it made you want to cry, or at least think a bit. As an anonymous listener is quoted as saying in another biography, by Charles Rigby, her singing ‘made you wish you had led a better life’.

Whether or not Ferrier was the finest singer of serious music to come out of Britain in the twentieth century is a futile discussion; some would question if she was even the best contralto. Her vocal range and interpretation were limited, and not every critic cared for her (‘this goitrous singer with the contralto hoot’—New Statesman). Neville Cardus, the Manchester Guardian’s music writer, a fellow Lancastrian and a great supporter, conceded, for example, that it was no accident that her only two attempts at opera, the title roles in Orfeo and Benjamin Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, were parts that required statuesque nobility and no flirtatious movement: ‘There was no surface glamour in her art and little exhibition of sex.’ Then again, how wide a repertoire does a singer need to have? Ferrier knew what suited, and what didn’t suit, her self-conscious body and voice. Verdi was out, even the Requiem—her voice wasn’t hard enough. Wagner was a temptation resisted, even when the invitation came ultimately from Herbert von Karajan and Bayreuth, though by then she was also too ill to accept. She sang mainly Handel, Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Elgar and Mahler—God, love, and death—plus a selection of plainly arranged British folk songs which brought her a popular audience. On the one hand, ‘Ye Banks and Braes’; on the other, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, his ‘Songs for Dead Children’. She and her greatest mentor, Bruno Walter, established Mahler’s vocal music in the British repertoire with a performance of Das Lied at the first Edinburgh Festival in 1947. Walter had been Mahler’s pupil and friend, had in fact conducted the first performance of Das Lied in 1911 in Vienna in the year of the composer’s death (he didn’t live to hear it). After Ferrier died, Walter said that the two greatest musical experiences of his life had been knowing Ferrier and Mahler, ‘in that order’.

He loved her, and, according to the suggestion of Ferrier’s third and most recent biographer, Maurice Leonard, for more than her voice. Most of her mentors did. Sir John Barbirolli, conductor of the Hallé in Manchester, and previously, like Walter, of the New York Philharmonic; Sir Malcolm Sargent, of the London Symphony; Walter Legge, the artistic director of Columbia Gramophone Company and the soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s husband: all loved her in one way or another. For Barbirolli, it was a matter of deep and familial friendship, playing and singing for fun, cooking and eating together, his wife and his mother usually present as well. But Legge tried it on in a taxi—Ferrier moved to the Decca company soon after—and Sargent is said to have gone further. Both were rebuffed.

Gerald Moore, her accompanist, wrote that one of her friends had told him: ‘Any man who does not acknowledge that Kathleen Ferrier is the most wonderful woman in the world has something wrong with him.’ Moore added that it was ‘not a case of a hundred men and a girl, for though we men loved her, our wives loved her themselves’. And they did. Women who were not always wives began to follow her from concert to concert during her second North American tour in 1949. From Chicago, she wrote to her sister Winifred: ‘I’ve made some wonderful friends here—all women o’course. I’ve had women following me from one concert to the next 200 miles apart—and they are the nicest pets…I could ever wish to meet.’ Three years on, there were groupies in the modern and less engaging sense. On October 28, 1952, the Daily Mail reported that, on the same evening that Ferrier was to perform Handel’s Messiah in the Albert Hall, eight chauffeur-driven cars had arrived outside her Hampstead flat. They had not been ordered. There had also been anonymous telephone calls and other japes; Gerald Moore later wrote that he had arrived home with her after a concert one night to find her door barricaded with dustbins. Ferrier told the Daily Mail: ‘A number of young girls have been following me around concerts in London and the provinces—they have even been present when I sang in Edinburgh, Newcastle, and Dublin. They sit up all night in the queue and then get rather noisy, screaming at the ends of performances. I can only assume that the people who perpetrate the hoaxes belong to the same group.’ Then a typical Ferrier touch: ‘I do not mind so much for myself, but I am sorry for the firms who suffer the expense and inconvenience.’ Though her fans were not to know this, she was gravely ill.

So the finest British singer of the century? Who can say. But best-loved is beyond doubt. Who else could make a girl scream at the end of Handel? By the time she died in Coronation year, 1953, she was probably the most celebrated woman in Britain after the Queen. To most of her audience, who heard her on the radio and on records and who never set foot in a concert hall, she was also an invisible one. But then, though the voice is an instrument, it is not a thing of brass or wood like a trumpet or a violin. As the tenor Peter Pears once said, referring to Ferrier, with whom he had often sung: ‘A voice is a person.’ What kind of person did we at home detect? Somebody sympathetic and simple and direct—all three words occur often in her friends’ descriptions—but also someone who had grieved, or who knew what grieving was, our time here being short and not always a bowl of cherries. Bruno Walter wrote: ‘She was very simple and natural; one could seem to read her mind like an open book, but only her singing revealed the abundant wealth of her inner life.. .to hear her meant to feel her innermost affectionate, rich and lofty self. She was not enigmatic, not problematic, but a rare combination of profundity and clarity, of abundance and simplicity.’

Reading her letters in the Kathleen Ferrier archive at Blackburn’s museum, I began to fall in love with her myself.

2. Accidents

It is a cold-blooded observation, but Ferrier’s life was made to be filmed. The arc and incident of it are dramatically perfect. Since 1953, several people have had the idea, including Lewis Gilbert, who directed Reach For the Sky, the story of the Second World War pilot, Douglas Bader, and his tin-legged triumph over adversity. But their projects always fell on the stony ground of Winifred Ferrier, who refused to cooperate because she feared that her sister’s life would be turned into a weepie. Triumph was fine; adversity, and particularly the final adversity, not. By the account of everyone who knew her, Winifred was, right up until her death in 1995, a formidable woman and a most jealous keeper of the Ferrier flame, and her fingerprints are all over most of what has so far been published about Kathleen’s private history. In life, Winifred and Kathleen were close.

Music was then one of the main recreations of northern England. People sang for pleasure, in front parlours, at concert parties, and in churches, with the Messiah every Christmas at the town hall. The Ferriers were no exception to this tradition, though Kathleen’s particular skill was at the piano. At school, as at the keyboard, she was an able student and her teachers expected her to stay on for the examinations that would get her into university; her sister was already at college and training to be a teacher. Then the Ferrier family hit a money crisis. Her father was about to retire, George continued to be a worry, her sister had still to earn. At fourteen, Kathleen left school and went to work on the switchboard at the Blackburn telephone exchange for eight shillings and threepence (41p) a week. For the next nine years she answered callers and put them through. In 1933, she entered a contest to find the recorded voice which would automatically announce the time to anyone who dialled the letters T.I.M.—a new device called the ‘speaking clock’. Along with hundreds of other young women entrants, she had to say ‘At the third stroke it will be ten forty-five and thirty seconds’, but she failed to get past the local heats. Her voice remained untrained—her first serious singing lessons began only in 1939, when she was twenty-seven. Musically, she confined herself to the piano. She won competitions and accompanied prominent local and visiting singers. When she got married in 1935, the Blackburn Times felt able to announce miss k. ferrier married: brilliant blackburn musician.

Her husband, Albert Wilson, came from over the hill in Chorley and worked at a bank on the outskirts of Blackpool. His family was well-to-do and—in Chorley—prominent; his father, a businessman, chaired the local council and sat on the magistrate’s bench. The wedding, therefore, took place at a Methodist church in the bridegroom’s parish rather than the bride’s and, by the standards of the time, was quite grand. The Blackburn Times recorded the details under a photograph four columns wide. The presents included an oak standard lamp from Kathleen’s fellow telephonists and a walnut clock from the bridegroom’s colleagues at the bank. After the reception, Mr and Mrs Wilson left ‘for a touring honeymoon in the South’.

Kathleen had to give up her job; in 1935, married women could not be employed in telephone exchanges or any other department of the Post Office. The Wilsons first set up house in Wharton, just east of Preston at the beginnings of the Lancashire holiday coast, and then, when Bert was promoted to the rank of manager the following year, moved a hundred miles north to Silloth in Cumberland. There Kathleen lived the life of a bank-manager’s wife in a small town. She learned to play golf well and tennis well enough, she swam, she gallantly got up on stage in amateur theatricals, she gave piano lessons, she shopped, she cooked. It began to be noticed that the Wilsons produced no children, though Kathleen was by now in her mid-twenties and in ruddy health. It was also noticed, by her friends the Hetheringtons among others, that she could sing. There were musical evenings at the flat over the bank. In 1937, her husband bet her a shilling that she wouldn’t dare compete at the annual music festival in Carlisle, the nearest large town, as a singer as well as a pianist. Kathleen took on the bet and won the silver rose bowl for the festival’s best singer, a judge recording that ‘Mrs Wilson, of Silloth, had a very, very beautiful voice indeed’. For the next two years, she sang at local concerts, sometimes for nothing and sometimes for trivial fees, and often with crowd-pleasers such as ‘The End of a Perfect Day’ and ‘Curly Headed Babby’. In 1938, she appeared with acrobats and comics at the Workington Opera House in a variety show called Artists You Might Never Have Heard. The next year she sang a couple of songs (‘The End of a Perfect Day’ again) on a regional radio show from Newcastle. She was becoming known—‘Mrs Kathleen Wilson, the Silloth contralto’—but it would be hard to detect from her engagement book any sign of onwards-and-upwards progress, any suggestion that her future lay anywhere other than in being a woman with a ‘natural’ but untrained voice, who, because she was a childless wife-at-home supported by her husband, could afford the time to sing. Professional classical singers need seven or eight years’ coaching—breathing, vocal technique, lyric interpretation, musicianship, foreign languages—which, ideally, they should start in their teens.

And then the war happened and everything changed. Her husband was called up to the army, her father, now a widower, came to live with her (as it turned out permanently, until his death in 1951). She turned her back on her marriage, hired one of the best teachers in northern England (Dr J. E. Hutchinson, of Newcastle), and relaunched herself as Miss Kathleen Ferrier. The war unleashed a new supply of work in the form of uplifting entertainment—this at a time when ‘uplifting’ and ‘entertainment’ were less divisible—which was brought direct to the factory floor in lunchtime concerts, or in the evenings to country barns and working men’s clubs. Kathleen got a contract from a government body called the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, CEMA, and took Handel and Bach and Purcell to men and women who had just finished a morning shift making rubber dinghies for the Royal Air Force or a day digging coal. By the end of 1942, she had a comprehensive knowledge of the geography of industrial England, its railway junctions, cold lodging-houses, sparse food, tinny upright pianos, and blacked-out streets. She sang for CEMA in places that are difficult to find on a medium-scale map—between November 25 and December 12, 1942, for example, in Stanley, Holmes Chapel, Winsfold, Great Sanghall, Runswick Bay, Crook, and Hackness, as well as in Cockermouth, Crewe, Chester, Newcastle, Durham and Sunderland. But by then she knew her destination was London. Earlier that year, Malcolm Sargent had met her in Manchester and encouraged her to move south, and there had been an enthusiastic notice of one of her lunchtime performances in the Manchester Guardian, her first review in a national newspaper, which began with the words ‘Miss Kathleen Ferrier, a new singer of remarkable talent…’

She was now earning eighteen guineas a week. She was determined to rise to a new level as performer. On Christmas Eve 1942 she and Winifred and their father moved into a rented, £l50-a-year flat in Hampstead, 2 Frognal Mansions. She acquired an influential agent, John Tillett, of the Ibbs and Tillett concert agency, and a new teacher, Professor Roy Henderson, who taught at the Royal Academy of Music. Kathleen was thirty; Henderson thought she had come to him ten years too late, but what lay inside her mouth amazed him—a ‘wonderful cavity at the back of her throat’. Later he wrote: ‘In the course of my teaching I have looked into hundreds of throats, but with the exception of a coloured bass with a rich voice, I have seen nothing to equal it…one could have shot a fair-sized apple right to the back of her throat without meeting obstruction. This space gave her that depth and roundness of tone which were distinctive. The voice rolled out because there was nothing to stop it.’

Henderson worked with her for the rest of her career. This wasn’t easy. Ferrier grew to be in such demand—seventeen Messiahs in seventeen different towns, for example, in the month of December 1945—that the time for private coaching had always to be fitted around her public performances. Musicianship was not a problem; Ferrier was an excellent pianist and understood scores. But she and Henderson had to work hard on her unreliable top notes, her interpretation, her memory, her awkward platform stance, and her breathing. He would make her lean with her back against a wall and kick hard with her diaphragm against the force of his fist (Enrico Caruso could kick his diaphragm against a grand piano and move it several inches). In the end, Henderson wrote, ‘she played her voice as she willed’.

Her career at this national and international level—finally, a diva—lasted barely ten years. She first entered the musical consciousness of London—as opposed to Silloth or Workington—in May 1943, when she sang the Messiah at Westminster Abbey. After that, the milestones came regularly: 1944, Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius in Leeds, and her first recordings; 1946, the first Lucretia in Benjamin Britten’s new opera at Glyndebourne, and her first overseas performances, in Holland; 1947, the first of her six Edinburgh Festivals and her first Mahler; 1948, the first of her three North American tours, and at the Edinburgh Festival of that year a programme which gave her equal prominence with Yehudi Menuhin, Jean-Louis Barrault, Artur Schnabel, Margot Fonteyn, Andres Segovia and John Gielgud; 1949, New York again, Havana, Holland for the premier of Britten’s ‘Spring’ Symphony, Salzburg, Copenhagen, Oslo; 1950, New York for the last time, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, New Mexico, California, Montreal, and Bach’s B Minor Mass with von Karjan and Schwarzkopf at La Scala, Milan; 1952, in Vienna to record Das Lied with Walter, in England a private recital for the new Queen; 1953, February 6, at Covent Garden as Orpheus, in a new English translation of Gluck, her last public appearance.

Accidents. What if her marriage had been happy? If her marriage, unhappy or happy, had led to children? If there had been no war? Wonderful throat cavity or not, it seems unlikely that those ten years would have unfolded for her in the way they did. Cardus, her admirer, wrote that he doubted that she would have turned away from a more loving and rewarding domesticity ‘to embark on the wandering life of a concert singer’; that ‘disappointment in marriage probably canalized her emotional impulses…and [her] aim and purpose were consciously or sub-consciously crystallized’.

Still, there was a price. In November 1952, Cardus heard her sing Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben cycle—‘A woman’s life and love’—at the Royal Festival Hall. He thought she had made too many gestures, that she’d overstressed the lyrics with too much theatrical ‘business’ with her face and hands. After the concert, he walked up and down the Embankment ‘battling with his conscience’ over the duties of friendship and honest criticism, and then, criticism winning, committed his thoughts to the pages of the Manchester Guardian. He wrote to Ferrier explaining his reasons, and Ferrier replied graciously. The fact was, she wrote, that she hadn’t been consciously ‘acting’—she couldn’t help singing these songs about love, marriage and children this way: ‘If someone I adored had just proposed to me, I should be breathless with excitement and unable to keep still; and if I had a child, I should hug it till it yelled…’

3. Tears

She liked to laugh. All her friends attest to that. She liked to laugh, and cook, and paint, and garden. Also, she liked to smoke. Passing Cloud was her favourite brand; expensive, oval cigarettes with a King Charles cavalier on the packet lying back and smoking with his boots on. Untipped, of course. During her tours, she would ration herself to one after each concert, but when she was ill and at home in bed she could smoke to her heart’s content: a silver lining—she never neglected those. Neither was she averse to a drink. The phrase ‘a dirty big pint’ appears in one of her letters, and when Barbirolli brought good vintage wine and port to her flat for celebrations, the bottles were emptied. Above all, perhaps, she liked to eat. After seven years of British rationing, she found a cornucopia in North America, and on the way there. Her letters delight in the details of ship’s menus, and never mind the swell. Rarely can the food of Cunard liners have slipped down a more appreciative throat, or one so wide and free of obstruction.

A woman of hearty appetites, then, a good woman for men to be with. She liked their company. Sex? We may never know. Romantic love? We’ll come to that.

There are apparent paradoxes, but only to those of us who expect other people to be all of a piece, and chained to their upbringing. For a woman who left school at fourteen, she showed fine instincts for eighteenth-century furniture and glass. For a woman of great and almost Victorian personal probity—incontestable on the evidence—she took enormous pleasure, again incontestably, from what was then known as filth. She loved double entendres, limericks, swearing, all kinds of bawdiness and ribaldry. Barbirolli, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears called her ‘Rabelaisian’. Cardus said that she could ‘lend to a sequence of swear-words the rhythm of hexameters’. One of her more harmless favourites is quoted in Maurice Leonard’s biography. She liked to recite:

I wish I were a fascinating bitch
I’d never be poor, I’d always be rich.
I’d live in a house with a little red light,
And sleep all day, and work all night.

Probity and ribaldry may be the complementary sides of the same old northern English coin. The paradox which is harder to reconcile is her determination to make zestful light of everything—even her music, even (and especially) her illness—with her musical ability to move an audience to the point of tears. In her letters, almost to the end, Ferrier is a writer marked by the multiple exclamation mark: whoopee!!! Life is a great adventure for ‘lucky, lucky Kaff’ this ‘lucky old twerp’ who is ‘tickled pink’ and sometimes ‘pickled tink’: nothing is sacred, and nothing numinous. Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody becomes his Alto Raspberry. Saint-Saëns has composed ‘Softly Awakes My Tart’. Purcell didn’t write ‘Mad Bess of Bedlam’ but Bad Mess of the same.

Her mastectomy means removing ‘a bump on mi busto’.

You have to smile. Listen to Brahms’s Raspberry on a CD, however, to the point where the previously-silent chorus joins Ferrier in the final stanza, the one that asks God to save Goethe’s bereft young wanderer: and is that or is it not a pricking behind the eyes? No cause for shame. Hardened conductors and orchestral players have also cried. According to Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Herbert von Karajan burst into tears when Ferrier began to sing the ‘Agnus Dei’ in Bach’s B Minor Mass at La Scala, though he had heard it often enough before and he was conducting her (and Schwarzkopf) at the time. The following year, 1952, she did Das Lied with Josef Krips conducting the London Symphony at the Festival Hall, and at the end, according to Krips, ‘we all, the orchestra and myself, were in tears’.

Only when she was singing did Ferrier herself cry in front of other people. It often gave her difficulty. As Peter Pears told a BBC programme in 1978: ‘If anything, Kath felt things almost too strongly. She often had to fight to control her tears.’ In 1944 Winifred watched her practising Brahms’s Four Serious Songs, which are set to verses from the Biblical books of Ecclesiastes and Corinthians, and noticed how one of them, ‘Oh Death, How Bitter Art Thou’, regularly made her cry. But Mahler, after she was introduced to his music by Bruno Walter, gave her the fiercest struggle. There had been a lot of death in Gustav Mahler’s life—his siblings, his four-year-old daughter—and when he sat down to compose Das Lied von der Erde, ‘The Song of the Earth’, a heart ailment was already giving him intimations of his own. The music has parts for a tenor and a contralto, who sing alternately, with lyrics which are translated from a collection of Chinese poetry. The last song, the ‘Abschied’, or ‘Farewell’, is given to the contralto and lasts, with orchestral punctuation, for twenty-eight minutes. The message is: our lives are brief, but the beauties of the world go on.

Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die Fernen!
Ewig… ewig… ewig… ewig

Everywhere and forever, the blue distance shines!
Forever…(and) ever…(and) ever…(and) ever

Rehearsing these final lines with Walter before her first performance of Das Lied in Edinburgh in September, 1947, Ferrier sometimes choked and could not finish. At the performance itself, she could barely get the final two ‘ewigs‘ out. Her face was running with tears. Nobody complained. In Britain, nobody had heard Mahler so brilliantly sung before. The critic in Punch wrote: ‘Days afterwards I still seem to hear that haunting heartbreaking farewell and Kathleen Ferrier’s glorious voice singing “Ewig…ewig…ewig” across time and space.’ Cardus wrote: ‘Such experiences cannot be written of in terms of musical criticism.’ Afterwards, he went round to the artists’ room to congratulate her—they had never met before. She greeted him ‘as though she had known me for a lifetime’ and said: ‘What a fool I’ve made of myself. And what will Dr Walter think of me?’ Cardus told her that she shouldn’t worry, for he was sure that Walter would take both her hands in his and reply: ‘My dear child, if we had all been artists as great as you we should all have wept—myself, orchestra, audience, everybody.’

What was it in her that responded so fully, so rawly, to music which, as Walter later said, ‘men wrote in moments of solemnity and devotion’? A few people, though not her intimates, saw her jollity as a disguise. Ronald Duncan, who wrote the libretto for Britten’s Lucretia, met her several times during production meetings in 1946 and said that he thought tears were never far from her eyes, caused ‘not only by her unfortunate marriage but a need for love which life itself could not fulfil.’ But there was also a more general morbidity. According to Winifred, both in her book and in conversations with Maurice Leonard, Kathleen had feared cancer ever since childhood, when she witnessed the slow death of a woman neighbour in Blackburn. An underlying reason for the move to London in 1942 had been access to better doctors and hospitals. Though her cancer wasn’t diagnosed until 1951, she had gone through the 1940s worrying intermittently about pains in her breast. According to Winifred, the soreness had started soon after she was married in 1935, when someone had ‘accidently caught her a blow with his elbow’. According to Winifred, the someone was Kathleen’s husband, Bert Wilson.

4. Winifred

A modern question, which nobody would have asked in 1953: was Ferrier a lesbian? A few women, too young to have known her or that time, like to think so. A lesbian colleague of a friend of mine, hearing that I was interested in the singer, said: ‘She spent only one night with a man, and that put her off it for life.’ But we know that, or think we know it, because of Winifred’s opinion, as it is indirectly quoted in Leonard’s biography: ‘Years later Kathleen confessed to Winifred that she had dreaded every night of her honeymoon.’ In Winifred’s own biography, there is a passage which, considering the period and the fact that Bert Wilson was still alive (he died in 1966), is remarkable for its intimacy and implication. During the rehearsals for Lucretia, Ferrier found that she could not reach the climactic top A which she had to ring out while stabbing herself. Britten rescored the piece to replace the A with an F sharp. Then, at one of the last Glyndebourne performances, Britten was startled to hear her hit the original higher note—‘the first she had ever sung in public, I think I remember her saying’. Winifred Ferrier makes a great deal of the event. She reproduces Ronald Duncan’s libretto and Britten’s music—the only place that musical notation occurs in her narrative.

Last night Tarquinius ravished me
And took his peace from me…
Even love’s too frail to bear the weight of shadows,
Now [she stabs herself] I’ll be forever chaste,
With only death to ravish me.

Winifred’s commentary runs underneath: ‘In this opera to sing these words demands a high order of emotional control, but when their meaning has personal significance, the strain can be almost intolerable. Perhaps the real explanation of that “Top A” lies in its symbolic revelation of how she dealt with the deep problems of her life.’

It is hard to be completely certain where Winifred is pointing her readers with these words: rape seems the likeliest destination, on the other hand it could be the line about a life of chastity, with or without rape to set it off. But if rape was in Winifred’s mind, then the consequence of her vindictiveness towards another Ferrier biography which was published in the same year suggests otherwise. While Winifred was writing her book for the publisher Hamish Hamilton (who was a friend of Kathleen’s), a journalist called Charles Rigby was finishing a rival biography for the publisher Robert Hale. Rigby’s book appeared first, though the author died before its publication. Winifred read it and insisted—she was indeed a formidable woman—that it was republished to include a page that would correct, in the publisher’s words, ‘errors of fact and expressions of opinion which are clearly wrong’. There were nine of them, none of them serious apart from the marriage question. Rigby had dealt with it as a private matter. Kathleen and her husband had ‘just gone their separate ways’; the divorce had not been reported in the press, and Kathleen never talked of it. Winifred, however, wanted things more public and more plain. The note published at her request reads: ‘The author has clearly formed a misleading impression of one important aspect of Kathleen Ferrier’s marriage. This was dissolved by reason of her husband’s incapacity to consummate it.’

Not rape then, but the opposite of rape, or rape successfully thwarted, or—the common thing—some want of desire in the chemistry between two people. But Winifred always remained keen on the idea of non-consummation as the husband’s fault. Among Kathleen’s papers in the archive at Blackburn’s museum, there is one of Winifred’s own: a typewritten sheet which reads like a memo to herself, reminding her of the facts she would disclose to any future biographer or inquiring journalist:

kathleen ferrier’s marriage
While she was married to Albert Wilson, Kathleen never talked about it. I did not question her although I was surprised that they had no children.
After the Annulment she told me that, even before the wedding she realized that it was a mistake but she had got so involved with his family and with the people in the village that she could not face the prospect of upsetting them all by breaking it off. She said that her future father-in-law would have had a stroke if she had!
She tried to be a good wife to Albert and said to him once, ‘I do wish that you would make a bit of a fuss of me’ and he replied, ‘You don’t run after a bus when you have caught it.’
In the War it was Albert’s call-up and Kathleen’s growing reputation as a singer which set her free. Eventually she applied for an Annulment of the marriage and this is an extract from the Divorce Registry in the High Court of Justice. [March 31, 1947]
Kathleen Mary Wilson Ferrier, Petitioner
Albert Wilson, Respondent.
The marriage at Brinscoll Methodist Chapel, Chorley, to be pronounced and declared to be absolutely null and void to all intents and purposes in the law by reason of the incapacity of the Respondent to consummate the marriage.

According to Maurice Leonard, Winifred was simply so peeved at the idea of anyone other than her writing a book about her sister that she would have done anything to spoil its chance of success, even to the extent of breaching Bert Wilson’s privacy in her need to correct its ‘mistakes’. But there may be more to it—resentment towards the man who had taken Kathleen from her. Winifred was, even for a big sister, unusually devoted to Kathleen. The ‘touring honeymoon in the South’ reported in the Blackburn Times was in fact spent with Winifred at her flat in Edgware, north London, where she had a job as a teacher. When Bert was called up in 1940, Winifred took another teaching job in Carlisle, so that she could live again with her sister and her father. And in London the same ménage à trois continued for several years. She never married. She was her sister’s biggest supporter. She became headmistress of a school in Chiswick, west London, and then, thanks to a connection made through Kathleen, went to work as a fashion buyer for Marks & Spencer. For the forty-two years she lived after 1953, her emotional life was gathered around her sister’s memory, and the medical charities and musical scholarships which served it.

The obvious explanation for the speculation about Kathleen’s sexuality is that she seemed to fit a certain lesbian stereotype. She was a tall, beautiful woman with a deep voice and no apparent ties to men. Very few people knew she had been married. Several of the songs she sang were originally written for the male voice. Her most famous dramatic role, as Orfeo, required her to act as a man (the part was written by Gluck for a castrato). The private truth, however, is that she loved men and was involved with them. One of the boxes in the museum at Blackburn contains her pocket diaries, which start early in the war, after Bert had left for the army. They are touching in the brevity and simplicity of their entries, and by what they show of her ability to pick herself up and get on with life. A man called John appears in 1942.

May 16 Sunderland. Up at 5am!! John met me in Newcastle. Went to Station Hotel to pass the time till lunch and train for Sunderland. Concert went off very well. Tea in Station Hotel all together. Home at 8.20 after salmon mayonnaise in Eldon Grill! Walked home. Two heart-to-heart talks today. What a strain.
June 8 Letter from John.
June 10 Bert coming home.
July 7 London. Met John. Went to [unclear] and punted.
July 11 John rang up from Bedford.
July 23 Telegram from John.
August 4 Letters from John and Bert.
August 13 Gateshead Miners’ Welfare Hall Whickham. Sgtay at Mrs Cookes [in ink – then in pencil:] Letter from John. Rang him up. Final break. Concert not bad.
August 14 Came home. Depressed. Went to flix [the cinema] with Mrs Simpson. Shopped.

So much for John. Rick arrived in 1944.

May 4 L’pool. Dinner dance with Rick Davies. Gorgeous time.
February 15 [1945] Rick rang from Liverpool!!

Rick Davies, who was a Liverpool antique dealer, appears regularly in her diaries until December 1951. He wanted to marry her, but by that stage Ferrier had decided she was ‘a lone she-wolf’ whose dedication to singing was absolute. In June 1950, Davies had flown to Zurich to spend some time with her. Kathleen wrote to Winifred: ‘I don’t mind him for a buddy for two days, then I’ve had enough and want to retire behind an iron curtain and not have to listen and make conversation. Fickle, that’s me.’

5. A lucky ole twerp

How else did Ferrier see herself? If private correspondence is any key to a person’s character, then as blessed and stoic and lucky, oh so very lucky. In 1978, Tennessee Williams heard a recording of Ferrier for the first time and was so moved by her voice that he immediately wrote a mournful and not very good poem about her (‘the string of the violins/Are a thousand knives in her breast’). But there is no self-mourning in Ferrier, or none that she wants to let on about. Alan Bennett might have invented her, or indeed she, and other north country women like her, might have invented him. The letters at the Blackburn archive almost dance out of their cardboard boxes with good humour.

America was her great discovery. On her way there for the first time, on the Mauretania, she wrote to her sister.

Dearest Win,
Hello love! Here I am, propped up in bed, having had a gorgeous breakfast & feeling the complete diva!
Heavens! I never expected to enjoy this trip so much. We’ve had sunshine, gales—heavy swells and I’ve never turned a hair—even when I’ve seen other folk in distress! Bless Dr Morton for his littul pills.
I don’t know where to start, but our main conversation is the food! I have never ever seen such dishes, and we are being very spoiled by the chief steward who thinks up meals for us, so that we start with tomato juice, caviar with all the trimmings, soup, fish, lobster or salmon, beef, steaks, joints of all descriptions, and the most amazing sweets ever. Baked ice-cream—that is ice cream with cherries in brandy & the brandy lit with a match till there are blue flames all over it. Mr Tillett [her agent] has a liver, but if he will have two eggs for breakfast—! True he only asked for one, but they always double the order!
I have a cabin to myself with my own shower & lav, and everything is sheer luxury. We have deck chairs on the Promenade deck, and as soon as we arrive in the morning our feet are tucked up in warm rugs & we get chicken soup & a dry biscuit!
We share a dining table with James Mason’s mother-in-law, and an Australian lady,—Mrs Stilwell, whom I always have to arrive at her name by steps—such as ‘Quite good’ ‘Getting better’ and ‘Very well’!! Also on ship are Zoltan Korda (film man who made Sanders of the River) Viscountess Rothermere and Ernest Ansermet [her conductor at Glyndebourne in 1946] and wife! But otherwise nobody startling. We have been invited to cocktails with the Chief Steward & the Captain, and altogether have had a wonderful time & a grand rest. I won 10/- on the horseracing & lost it all the next night!!
There are people on board who haven’t had more than a couple of meals the whole trip they have been so ill, so I’m feeling elated at my seaworthiness! Mr Tillett’s a good sailor—it’s just his liver wot gets him down! He’s grand and good company and very anxious as to my welfare, and we’re getting on fine.
Have seen about four films & the time has just flown! My earrings are lovely & I’m taking great care of them—will write again after we arrive tomorrow.
Loads of love to you both and I hope all’s well with you.
Klever Kaff!

In New York, she wrote to her father and her personal assistant and secretary, Paddy Jewett. In conversation, she always used ‘me’ for ‘my’—‘me face, me breakfast’—which in her letters becomes ‘mi’.

Dearest Pop & Paddy,
…I now have six concerts off mi chest, and they have all gone very well. Pittsburg was a huge success, thank goodness!
Sandor [Arpad Sandor, her accompanist] continues to annoy me almost more than I can bear—he played so softly in the Ash Grove the other night I could hardly hear him, & I had to say ‘LOUDER’ out of the corner of my mouth in between verses, but of course he didn’t hear me! He’s the only thing that makes me nervous for my recital here—I never know what he’ll do next. At Pittsburg we did Heidenröslein as an encore, unrehearsed, and he put in trills where there weren’t any—I stood with my mouth open—the audience would think it was peculiar interpretation!! Twice, he’s put in a major chord where there’s only an octave in the Erl King & when I asked him to play it & Röslein again at a rehearsal the other day, he played them both just as written! I think he’ll go ga-ga one day very soon!
I think mi pitcher’s good in the Evening News—it flatters me. I can hardly wear that hat now cos Ann chopped mi hair off the other day & now I’m like this—s’rather fetching!!
Yesterday I bought myself a girdle for mi spare tyre—it’s a beauty & comes right above mi waist line. Instead of oozing at mi waistline I just ooze top & bottom—it’s beautiful! I also got a brassière-top petticoat—no bra needed—in nylon & 3 prs of pants—all needing no ironing!! And it works too, cos I’ve washed a pair of pants to make sure! I think even John would be proud of my waist now.
Bruno Walter is going to play for me in a New York recital next year as well as Edinburgh & London (Sep 28th) Isn’t that marvellous? He’s given me 8 new songs to learn, but I do it gladly for him!…Loads of love to you all… Kaff

She went alone on her second tour of North America. Her agent, John Tillett, had died. For sixteen weeks she criss-crossed the USA and Canada by train. She wrote to her father that at Granville, Ohio, ‘the concert was about a quarter filled, and some of them knitting!! I could have spat at them’. From Saint John, New Brunswick, she wrote to Tillett’s widow, Emmie, who now ran the agency.

My dear Emmie,
I am enclosing a few criticisms I have collected on my travels, Los Angeles San Francisco, New York and Montreal, and I would like—if you agree—to have an insertion in the Times and Telegraph with a few quotations just to let people know I’ve been working hard—and not disappeared for three months! Aren’t they lovely ones? I’m being very spoiled and just lapping it up!
…All goes well here—it’s been a lovely tour—and I still haven’t signed owt! Klever Kaff!
…Tell Miss Lereculey [in Paris] my French grows apace—I’m learning some Chausson—and she’ll have to look for competition! I can say ‘Darling, je vous aime beaucoup—passepartout—cul-de-sac—Vouley vous coucher avec—oh no! that’s the rude one!
Heigh ho quelle vie! Ain’t I a lucky ole budder!
Much love to you all
KATHLEEN

Later the same month, after a concert in New York, she wrote to her sister from the Hotel Weylin.

Dearest Win,
Well, that’s over, thank goodness! It was a complete sell-out with about 100 people sitting on the platform!!
I’ve never known such applause—I couldn’t start for about 5 mins! Must have been mi red frock. Bruno Walter and Eliz Schumann were in the audience and the clapping became almost a nuisance. I was a bit dry about my throat, and so wet about my torso, I had to keep my frock from sticking to my legs by holding it out in the front of me when I walked. People shouted and stamped, but the critics this morning are only luke-warm. I can’t get away with the budders here, but it’s the audience that are the final judges, and they couldn’t have been more marvellous. Whattastrain.
…Well, poppet mine, look after yourself—love to Pop and Paddy… Loads of love.
Klever Question Mark Kaff

In 1950, she was in the USA for what turned out to be her last tour there. Bruno Walter gave her the use of his house in Beverly Hills—the Walters were away—and from there she used his typewriter to write to Emmie Tillett.

My dear Emmie,
Thank you so much for your letters love…I am so glad your back is better again, and your Momma well—much love to her, and I am looking forward to seeing her when I get back. I heard Dame Myra [Hess] is ill and has cancelled her tour here—I do hope it isn’t serious??
Oooooooooo, boy…Orpheus with Dr Bruno?????? YES PLEASE—would forgo all my holiday for that.
The Halle and Orpheus? I think as it was my suggestion that they do it, I must do the Sheffield date, tho I feel rather sadly about the Passion if Dr Jacques has asked for me—but I couldn’t travel overnight to do it, as you say.
Gee whiz//// all this work// aren’t I a lucky ole twerp/ (I have no exclam. marks on this machine—it does limit me)
Yes, I can do the Apostles for Hanley—it is the Music Makers that gets me doon. Lovely to do Gerontius for the Royal Choral on May 24th—whoopee…
All is going so well here. The concerts have been a great success—we’ve been to some lovely places—and now I am installed here, and have the house to myself with man and wife [servants] to look after me…The sun is shining—this place is just amazing—the palms and the houses and the glamour pussies, and the luxury of it all. I am being ruined here—I have the use of two superb cars at any time—my bathroom plumbing is an hourly—well nearly—delight, and, oh, it’s so warm…1 have so many dates with new found friends that it is almost embarrassing, but today I have started on my real holiday—ten days before going to North Calif,. so I am as happy as a lark, and feel very grateful for this wonderful opportunity to see so much…
…Much love to you and thank you for all your endeavours on my behalf—I am a lucky twerp.
Look after yourself,
love Kathleen

During her first American tour, Kathleen had sung at La Crosse, Wisconsin, and made friends with one of the concert’s organisers, Benita (aka Bonnie) Cress, and her husband Bill. When she went back to La Crosse in 1950, she stayed with them. The Cresses became two of her closest friends. Ferrier wrote to them regularly until she was too ill to write.

Dearest Bill and Benita,
Well, loves, home at last, and the Spring is here to welcome me with blossom, bulbs and sticky horsechestnut buds. It all looks green and lovely.
…The flat looked lovely—Paddy’s mother had colour-washed the walls of all the rooms & I had new curtains & carpet in my room—very swish! And everybody was well & happy, so it was a good home-coming after the most wonderful time & tour ever. Lucky Kaff!
Eggs are off the ration too & somebody brought us a pound of real farm butter this morning so we’re in clover.
I’m seeing Mr Mertens [André Mertens, her US agent] next week & if I ask him to send you a cheque for $100 could you send us a few things occasionally? Our greatest miss at the moment is sugar—not cubes—and soap—toilet and flakes—& if it were possible to pack some white flour for baking cakes I should be top of the class with my manager here! The grocery stores—I think—will do it all for you, rather than you having the bother of finding boxes, paper & string. I hope this isn’t asking too much of you love. Don’t trouble for one minute if it is.
Mr Anderson in Chicago sends us Peacock Sliced Dried Beef (Cudahy? Wisconsin) & Paddy & her mother have thought of every way of cooking, steaming, baking & grilling it—with no success. Do you know anything about it—it comes from your part of the world. They’ve even tried soaking it overnight, but it still baffles.
…Much love to you both & thank you again for all you wonderful & many kindnesses.
God bless you & keep you,
Yours till hell freezes
Love, Kathleen

Three weeks later, on May 1, 1950, she wrote again with ‘a naughty limerick’.

There was a young lady of Nantes
Tres chic, jolie et elegante,
Her hole was so small
She was no good at all
Except for la plume de ma tante!

In July, Ferrier went to see a doctor about pains in her breast. Her teacher, Roy Henderson, went with her and waited outside the surgery. ‘Look, Prof!’ she said when she came out, ‘he’s given me a clean bill of health!’

The Cresses, meanwhile, sent two food parcels. Kathleen replied on August 10.

Dearest Bill and Benita,
A wondrous parcel arrived yesterday, full of just all the right things!! Bless you for a 1000 times—we haven’t seen such salmon for 10 years so we’re going to have a feast one of these days. Thankyou so very much for all your trouble. It couldn’t be lovelier. Yes love the 2nd June box arrived safely and in wonderful order—food seems to get here without difficulty—fingers Xd!—we are getting a good store now—but as you say it’s a jolly good idea with the world situation looking menacing! Isn’t it a bluidy shame for young boys and their parents to be suffering five years after the last holocaust! Whattaworld!
…Going back to your letter. Coffee has always been easy here, because we are tea drinking nation—so there is no difficulty there. Paddy still gloating over the cake mixtures—they really are a blessing in a hurry particularly! We can get Fab here now too and soon soap should be off the ration altogether so we shan’t need any more—it will be gorgeous to go in a shop and buy soap without coughing up a niggly bit of printed paper!
Schwarzkopf is a fine musician and she does a terrific amount of work—some things absolutely superb and others, I think, Unsuitable—but all the Viennese singers work themselves to a standstill—I just daudle in comparison! Klever me—I’ve been home nearly two months—having sometimes two lessons a day and a real rest from concert giving—and I think it has done me a world of good. I’ve been going a bit gay too, and going to theatres and dinners. Tonight I am going to the Promenade concert—a Beethoven night—and dining afterwards with Malcom Sargent and a friend—M.S. is conducting. I’ve been spending a lot of money too—bought a fur coat—dyed Russian ermine (very unpatriotic!) but very beautiful—ordered three cupboards to fit in my room for all my odds and sods—and ordered a Beau Decca—longplaying, shortplaying and radio—so now I’m broke, but tickled pink, so what the heck!!!!
My first concert is Aug 28th at Edinburgh with the Brahms Alto Rhap, with Fritz Busch—and it will be lovely when that is over, because I shall be able to relax and enjoy the rest of the festival.
Now I must get ready to go to a lesson before my night out, so thankyou again for everything and God bless.
Much love to you both,
Kaff

She was working hard, she was tired.

Dearest Bonnie,
I am ‘all behind’ mit my letters to you, but have been dashing madly round, now that the season is in full swing again.
The records should really be out now in the States—if they’re not soon, I really will get a hat pin to Decca—they said Sept…the bar stewards!
The boxes you sent sound just wonderful… The canned chicken was gorgeous and fell to bits with tenderness, the pore littul budder! The cookies were a treat too—but they are off for me now, cos I’m getting too fat—so I’m cutting all starches (when I’m strong enough) and trying to get my bulges a bit less rotund. I had some new photies taken the other day, and I look like the bull at the other end of the Toreador!!—fraightful!! …But, otherwise, all is well, and we’re all full of beans—and hope you are too.
Dashing off to the north tomorrow—Manchester, Bolton, Huddersfield and Grimsby. Thankyou for everything, bless you, and look after yourselves.
Much love from us all,
Kaff

Early in 1951, her assistant, Paddy Jewett, left to get married. Ferrier hired as her replacement a young New Zealand woman, Bernie Hammond, who also happened to be a trained nurse. In March, Ferrier asked her: ‘Have a look at this lump will you?’

Dearest Benita,
I have neglected you I fear—but things have been happening with such rapidity, I haven’t written any personal letters for ages.
First I have got a ‘jewel’ to look after me & to keep Paddy company until the latter marries. She’s a New Zealand girl called Bernie and a trained nurse—but wanting a job where she can be independent. She nursed my manager’s mother when she died—and I knew her well, but never thought she’d consider such a mundane job. But she seems in her element, has a wonderful sense of humour & is altogether a pearl. She hasn’t got out of her nursing as she thought, as I have to go into hospital any day now for a rather formidable op for a ‘bump on mi busto’. But having Bernie here has lightened the load enormously & I am in the finest radiologists & surgeons hands in the country. I have had to cancel a month’s tour in Scandinavia & everything until the middle of May—but I am glad of a rest—I feel better now that everything is getting done. I should have gone earlier but haven’t been home for months. The X-ray yesterday was better than they thought.
So don’t worry, love, & I’ll ask Paddy to send you a line. We are fine for everything in the food line and don’t want for anything—thanks to you. And I’m smoking with abandon being as ‘ow I’ve not to sing for 6 weeks!
I hope you & Bill are both flourishing & much, much love to you—
Yours till hell freezes,
Kaff

Dearest Bonnie,
Bless you for my lovely birthday present—they arrived yesterday—and are so lovely—thank you very, very much.
I am writing my first letters for a bit & feeling real cocky—just waiting for the doctor to come—and being glad it isn’t this time last week—when I threw up four times all down Bernie’s front—poor, sweet Bernie—she’s been an absolutely bluidy marvel—and I just don’t know what I should have done without her.
I don’t know about my itinerary yet love—it’s at home & I’m not even thinking about singing yet—but I’ll let you know in a bit. I shall be here another week or ten days yet—then have to have some rays [radium treatment] for a few weeks—then a holiday—so I’m really enjoying a rest—& gee! I was ready for it. I seem to have startled all the staff here with quick recovery, and I’m being spoiled to death and thoroughly enjoying myself!!
I hope your arm is much better love—you just be a good honey-chile now and have a good rest—and thankyou again for the gorgeous present and lovely card. I am not telling any of my buddies in N.Y. about my op. as such exaggerated rumours get round—you’se the only one wot knows! Much love to you both, Kaff

Dearest Benita,
Thank you so much for all your letters—I am so sorry we have neglected you lately… I’m feeling better each day & my anaemia which was rather low, is almost normal again. I have been going each morning to the hospital for rays, and should have only another two weeks to do—perhaps even less. The budder of it is, I haven’t to wash my neck and it’s about an inch deep in dust—but, I suppose, one of these days, I’ll be a clean girl again!
I haven’t had a bath for over six weeks!—I don’t ‘arf pong!
The doctors are enormously pleased with me—and I’m in wonderful hands—I couldn’t have been better cared for—and I’ve loved the rest, and don’t ever want to start again!! My dr. says I have to go easy for 2 yrs that is why I have had to cancel the first month of America—but I shall be doing Chicago so hope to see you there. Bernie is coming with me & is pickled tink!
Between you and me, I’m very lop-sided at the top but am camouflaging with great taste & delicacy!! And what the heck, as long as I feel well & can sing a bit, eh?
…We’re all right for parcels for the moment, love—and I’m not short of a single thing—I’m just spoiled to death!
Much love to you both—will write again, Kaff

She began to sing again. She toured Holland and appeared at the Edinburgh Festival in September. But she cancelled her American tour which was scheduled for later that year. Her disease and her frequent radium therapy were exhausting her.

Dearest Bonnie,
…I have been dashing about a bit since Holland, and have just been hibernating on my bed in between concerts to be ready for the next one. Bernie has been doing everything!! Keeping me in control, the housework, shopping (quite a long job here with queues!) endless letters and the cooking—and she’s still bright and cheerful. You’ll have to see her—she’s every jewel rolled in one. Lucky Kaff!
Here it comes love! I have to cancel my American trip—not because I’m any worse—I hasten to tell you—but because Holland took it our of me a bit, and the doctor feels that so heavy a tour would be asking for trouble so soon. If I needed treatment it can really only be given here, as it is such an intricate business that only a doctor who knows the case could cope. HELL! HELL! HELL! My tour started off with a recital every other day and travelling in between, and it just makes me tired to think of it, but I am grieved to the core to miss my buddies there, and especially LaCrosse, but I think it is wise, and it will be the first long rest I have had in ten years! I know you will understand and try not to be too disappointed, because by this time next year I hope to be bouncing with health.
…I do hope you are well and happy and forgive me for not writing sooner—the days go so quickly!
God bless and look after yourselves and much love from
Kaff

Dearest Bonnie,
…Edinburgh went well—Bruno was ‘pickled tink’ and said it was a privilege to work with me, which made music in my heart! The hall was full and sitting on the platform and it was broadcast all over the place so it was quite a strain—and I’ve felt better ever since!
Had another X-ray last week and the doctor is very pleased and I have finished my treatment at the hospital which is a lovely thought—pets though they are! I hope it’s for good. I’m putting on weight and getting so perky there’s no holding me—but it’s a lovely thought that I can have a complete rest until the New Year, even though it means not seeing my buddies in LaCrosse. I’m even catching up on letters as you can see—have tidied my drawers—the first time in ten years!!! and have even had a bit of decorating done to cheer up the place. We’re looking fraightfully posh now old girl!
…Much love to you and Bill and God bless, and thankyou for everything
Kathleen

Dearest Bonnie,
Just a word in your ear of real thanks for the heavenly soap which arrived this morning—bless you—it’s a very special treat and a real luxury. You are a poppet of the first rank!
…All’s well here—I’m having a complete rest from singing and going gay a bit—to Covent Garden & theatres—first time in 10 yrs!
I hear there are all sorts of rumours [about her illness] about me there—originated from Edinburgh—Mr Mertens says. Between you & me, love, I think some it comes from Ethel Bartlett—I may be wrong—but will you keep your pretty pink ears open—or perhaps just ask for news of me if given the chance—& tell me what she says? I’d like to be proved wrong, but have mi suspicions! There are malicious rumours going around—so don’t let on you know me. Okeydoke. And don’t believe any of the rumours—I’ll let you know the truth, first thing—and at this moment—I’m jes full o’ beans! God bless, darlings—
I’ll write again soon.
Much love to you both
Kaff

She spent 1952 in pain—backache, referred to publicly as ‘mi rheutamics’ or ‘screwmatics’. Often she was cold. Hotels in provincial Britain had to be told to bank up the coal fires in her bedrooms. Recording Das Lied with Walter in Vienna, she at one point collapsed. Her itinerary that year included Aldeburgh and Edinburgh. She consulted a leading oncologist, Sir Stanford Cade, who suggested a ‘bilateral adrenalectomy’, though this was not at the time pursued. Radium therapy was renewed. After Ferrier had performed for the Queen at a country house party that summer, the monarch sat with her and asked how she was. Her reply, as given in Leonard’s biography: ‘Just the odd ache, Ma’am. You have to expect these things.’
In February 1953, she was scheduled to sing four performances of the new Orpheus with John Barbirolli at Covent Garden. That was thought to be the most she could manage. During the second performance, on February 6, the femur in her left leg snapped and partly disintegrated. She vomited through pain—but in the wings—and continued to sing till the close. After a morphine injection, she took several curtain calls and received well-wishers in her dressing room. She never sang in public again.

Dearest Benita,
I am so sorry I have not written for such an age, but I have been terribly busy rehearsing ‘Orpheus’, and then at the second performance I snipped a bit of bone off in my leg, so here I am once again, reposing in University College Hospital! I am having treatment every day and it is already much better, but I shall probably be here for another month at least. I don’t feel a bit poorly, but am not allowed as yet to stand up on my legs, but hope I’ll be all right for some more performances of ‘Orpheus’ in May.
Your wonderful, amazing, delicious, heavenly, gorgeous chocolates arrived a couple of days ago, and I haven’t tasted anything like them for ages. They are so pretty, too. Thank you so very much—you do spoil me terribly… and how I lap it up!!
I had to miss going to Buckingham Palace [she had been awarded the CBE], but have heard a whisper that I may be pushed in to one of the summer Investitures. I do hope so, because I’ve got a new hat and coat!
The first night of ‘Orpheus’ was absolutely thrilling, with a very distinguished audience shouting their heads off at the end. Everyone was thrilled and the notices were all splendid, which makes it all the more disappointing that I could not carry on.
I have your face towels here with me—that you sent for Christmas—so have a constant reminder of you both. Bernie is here nursing me most of the day, not that I need it much, so that makes it very pleasant.

I do hope you are both full of beans and thank you again with all my heart for innumerable kindnesses. Much love to you both and God bless, Kathleen

Dearest Benita,

Thankyou so much for your sweet Easter card & handkerchief—it brightened my day considerably, and it’s such a lovely hanky. I’m still in hospital, but leaving in the morning—whoopee, whoopee—& going to a new home at 40 Hamilton Terrace, which Bernie tells me is looking lovely. I should have gone three days ago but caught a bug from somewhere & a temperature & a very queasy stomach, so had to stay—I was furious! But I’m quite all right now & looking forward to the morning. My legs are much better & I can take a few steps, but not too many & for the moment will be whizzing round in a wheel chair.

We had 48 steps to my old flat & it meant that once up them and I should be a prisoner there, so Bernie & Win had to rush round & find something else. We’ve been very fortunate and got a maisonette (half an old house) with a bedroom & bathroom downstairs for me & a lovely garden, which is something I have always yearned for. We’ve had the house papered & painted (to hell with the expense!) so I can hardly wait to see it.

I am going to have a complete rest this summer & work quietly for Edinburgh. Will write again when I’m home & tell you all about it.

Much love to you both from Kathleen

On May 3 a profile of Ferrier in the Sunday Times said that during the Covent Garden Orpheus she had concealed from the audience ‘the fact she was suffering most painfully from arthritis’, and that ‘we must possess our souls in patience and wish her well’. On May 22, Ferrier wrote in her pocket diary: ‘Dr Eccles—must have mi ovaries removed’. All later entries have been crossed out.

Her ovaries were removed in June. On July 27, she had Sir Stanford’s double adrenalectomy. Earlier, she had worried about the operation’s effect on her voice. There was no point worrying about that now.

Dear Mrs Cress,

I am so sorry that I did not send you a cable or let you know about Kath, it must have been an awful shock to you—we were just snowed under with the Press and millions of other things and I just did not manage to do it. But I would like you to know that Kath was perfect to the end, the last few days she had injections and slept most of the time and just went very quietly in her sleep as I had hoped and prayed she would.

If this had to be in the first place, one just must accept it and make the necessary adjustments, Kath would expect that of us. She had so much to bear these last few months, if she was not going to get out of bed then it is much better thus and I am convinced that the essential part of Kath is never very far from those who loved her—so don’t grieve too much sweetie, be thankful that now nothing can hurt her or cause her pain and know that she is happy somewhere. Do keep on writing to me.

All my love

Bernie [Hammond]

Kathleen Ferrier died on the morning of October 8, 1953. She was forty-one. Barbirolli said that it was ‘one of the great tragedies of our time’. Bruno Walter wrote that ‘whoever listened to her or met her personally felt enriched and uplifted’. But her nurse, Bernie Hammond, said the simplest thing: ‘She was an extraordinary person, and an ordinary one.’