DORA FOSS WAS THE MOST WARM, vital and lovable person, and to me, of course, above all, a wonderful friend, and it is as a friend of nearly fifty years’ standing that I have been asked to say these few words about her. I was a school girl in the early 1930s when I first remember her and Hubert coming to lunch with my parents at their house in Chorleywood where we used to spend the summers. Dora often told me of the first time she met Henry and Muriel Wood, my parents, for Hubert took her to meet them on the Sunday before their marriage in July 1927, and apparently my father and Hubert never stopped talking musical ‘shop’ from the second they arrived until the second they left, and I remember Dora saying that it served as a wonderfully useful introduction and warning as to what her future life, married to Hubert, would be. A little later on, Dora and Hubert moved to Rickmansworth and became fairly close neighbours, and there was much coming and going between the two households.

My father was a great friend and ardent admirer of the Fosses, and used to describe Hubert as ‘the liveliest of live wires’. Dora fulfilled wonderfully the role as conductor of all that electricity that Hubert generated. Of him as Head of the Music Department of the Oxford University Press, Professor Edward Dent wrote: ‘His work was nothing short of epoch-making in English Music.’ .