Remembering Freda Berkeley

My first encounter with Lady Berkeley was in about 1999 when I phoned her, with some trepidation, seeking her support for a Lennox Berkeley Society. I had been captivated by a recording of Berkeley’s Divertimento broadcast on Radio 3. She was very charming and, in that beautiful voice, immediately asked me to call her ‘Freda’, and promised her support. She said she had been thinking for some time that there should be some kind of society for Lennox. She sent a list of possible members, as did Julian Berkeley and Tony Scotland.

Freda invited Jim Nicol, my co-founder, and me to lunch at the Cheltenham Music Festival in, I think, 2000, during Michael’s directorship, after a recital by Christopher Maltman and Graham Johnson, which included Lennox Berkeley’s Five Auden Poems, as well as Schubert Lieder. At lunch Freda introduced us to some notable members of the audience, and I remember meeting her friend Lady Dorothy Heber-Percy, whom Freda signed up as a member. (I was especially interested to meet Lady Dorothy because she had served as a Photographic Interpreter in the WAAF during the war, when my husband Patrick was in RAF Intelligence.)

Some time later we felt ready to hold an initial meeting of the new Society, for which Freda kindly let us use her Bayswater apartment, and she attended many subsequent meetings. Jim Nicol chaired the meeting and a committee was formed. Such were our humble beginnings.

One of our earliest members, the pianist Carol Barker, played for Freda during her final year at the Royal College of Music and remembers being regaled with cream cakes afterwards. (Carol’s dissertation was on Lennox Berkeley’s piano music.) I wonder whether Freda was following Nadia Boulanger’s tradition of treating her students to sumptuous patisserie, as described by Tony Scotland in his wonderful Lennox and Freda.

I had the greatest admiration and affection for Freda; without her, Lennox’s music might not have reached the heights that it did. There are only a few months’ difference in age between us, so I flatter myself we were immediately on the same wavelength. She had a kind heart, and I remember hearing that Malcolm Williamson, then Master of the Queen’s Music, once phoned from New Zealand in the middle of the night for some words of comfort from her, forgetting about the time difference, and Lennox got angry and told her to put the phone down.

During the Second World War, though we had not yet met, we both attended lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery and Wigmore Hall, and I like to think – who knows? – that we may have coincided as long ago as that. I remember dear old Myra Hess, who organised the National Gallery concerts, playing Bach with a beatific expression on her face, and the pianist Denis Matthews giving a recital in his army uniform. The director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark, used to display one painting per week, with detailed information; the rest had been sent for storage in a cave in Wales, to protect them from the Blitz. (We saw Kenneth Clark in the documentary film Out of Chaos, about the Official War Artists, for which Lennox wrote the score.)

As well as the concerts, there were also other art galleries, libraries and, of course, the shops. I was working at the British Council then, for a man called C. Geoffrey Mortlock (who lost a leg in a rugby accident and couldn’t join up; later he became Deputy British High Commissioner in St Lucia). On Fridays a group of my friends used to have lunch at Dickins & Jones in Regent Street (it’s now defunct), where they did a half-crown special hors d’oeuvre as a main course, and there was a mannequin parade in the restaurant. Freda was working in the BBC Music Department in those war years and I remember reading that she and Lennox used their lunch-hours to do their courting in a park around the corner from Broadcasting House. And look what it led to!