I first met David and Gill Munrow in Cambridge in about 1965. It was summer and we were all in the garden at 54 Bateman Street, the home of Mary Potts, whose late husband was L. J. Potts, the literary critic and English don at Queens’ College. When I was Organ Scholar there ten years earlier our rooms were on the same staircase. I must have passed muster with him because he told his wife: ‘I like that Organ Scholar – he reads books!’

Mary Potts had a very special role in the early music revival which has not been acknowledged. A mere mention of her more distinguished pupils, who included Christopher Hogwood, Colin Tilney and Peter Williams, is enough to indicate that she ought to be better known now. She knew harpsichordists of international reputation such as Gustav Leonhardt, Raphael Puyana and Kenneth Gilbert. Her own performances were on a more modest scale but she played in and around Cambridge for over fifty years, and was a centre for early music activities long before David Munrow propelled these into a new public orbit through his recitals, lectures and broadcasts. Her influence could perhaps be seen as complementary to that of Thurston Dart in the official Cambridge University Music Faculty.

Mary Potts was born in 1905 and studied at the Royal College of Music from 1923 to 1928 as a pianist but also took harpsichord lessons with Arnold Dolmetsch and was a regular visitor to Haslemere for some years. When she married L. J. Potts she moved to Cambridge in 1930. Her own harpsichord was made by the eighteenth-century Swiss-Englishman Burkat Shudi: it was bought from Dolmetsch, and some of the first rehearsals of Munrow's Early Music Consort took place in her music room. She died in 1982 and will long be remembered for her generous and sympathetic encouragement of younger musicians. Doris Orr, widow of Robin Orr, Professor at Cambridge, remembered all three of her children taking piano lessons and she much admired Potts as a teacher. Barry Ife told Paul Thwaites that he recalled her teaching ‘as if she was handing down that musical tradition of the past, without the separation of hundreds of years, so completely had she absorbed the values and culture of the times’.