Hubert was an avid reader of English literature and particularly of English poetry, and he composed poems from childhood. Many were occasional poems, for births, birthdays and anniversaries; others were linked to places and events. Most are clever, light and humorous, and reflect the musical talent which he possessed in abundance. While in the 1920s he contributed a few poems to such journals as The New Witness and New Age, they were generally written for private enjoyment. This small selection is devoted to the poems he dedicated to his beloved Dora. Some carry a date and/or the occasion.

AFTER THE DEATH OF MY MOTHER DORA in early 1978, I discovered, amongst her effects, a number of chapters she had completed about various musicians and writers with whom she had come into contact between the wars. As the wife of my father, Hubert James Foss, the founder-manager in 1923 of the Music Department of the Oxford University Press, she rejoiced in entertaining a wide range of distinguished men and women at Nightingale Corner, their house in Rickmansworth, and later in the Hampstead Garden Suburb. When my father died in 1953, aged only fifty-four, my mother inherited the huge tomes which were familiarly known to us as the ‘Commonplace Books’; they were filled with correspondence, articles, letters, programmes, newspaper cuttings of reviews, etc., and there were also dozens of files containing hundreds of individual letters. During her twenty-five years of widowhood, my mother researched deeply into all these and, as a result, was able to compile the memoirs within this book, together with her many lively reminiscences, which add a vital personal touch to the chapters. A few of her memoirs are more sketchy, but the correspondence in them is extremely valuable. What is written here by my mother gives us a unique and witty picture of the renaissance of English music in the 1920s and 1930s.

Over the past decades – in fact forty years – in which I myself have grown old, I have tried to discover a way forward to publish these remarkable memoirs, together with a selection of the huge mass of letters to and from my father, ‘his’ composers and noted literary figures of the time. In the 1990s I had the pleasure of assisting Stephen Lloyd when he was writing his book on William Walton. He found our archive invaluable. More recently, I became, for Stephen's Constant Lambert book, virtually a copy-editor; and, of course, through these contacts, we became good friends. Later, I had a sudden thought that maybe he could be my editor for this volume, which I am so keen to publish before it is too late. What a relief I felt when he accepted my invitation! He is the perfect editor. He is experienced about publishing and knows the period of English music in the 1920s and 1930s extremely well.

WHEN I LEFT SCHOOL, I went to the Hampstead Conservatoire and had piano lessons first from Hilda Weber, and later from her father, Carl Weber, then one of the foremost pianoforte teachers of the day. I adored my lessons and practised for hours daily, but never reached anything approaching a professional standard. My mother then insisted on my halving my piano lessons – ‘You will never be anything but second rate,’ she said, ‘but you HAVE got a voice’ – and taking singing lessons from Henry Beauchamp. At that time I considered that playing the piano was ‘real’ music and that singing was just a social accomplishment. I was definitely unhappy at this enforced change in my musical education.

My mother was right. With first-class training I progressed very rapidly and at nineteen won the gold medal at the London Academy of Music – an institution long defunct.

The years of the war interrupted concentrated work and during the last two years I was a full-time VAD. I had many opportunities for singing ‘in public’ – though I had to sing ‘popular’ songs. Even so, I tried to book a lesson from Mr Beauchamp whenever I could find time.

After the war I felt I wanted to broaden my very conventional outlook, and early in 1920 I deserted Mr Beauchamp for a time and paid for two courses of lessons with Signor Manlio di Veroli, the well-known teacher in London. On many points we disagreed.

Margery Allingham

Margery Allingham (1904–66) was a popular writer of crime fiction whose novels usually featured the aristocratic detective Albert Campion (‘well bred and a trifle absent-minded’), who first appeared in The Crime at Black Dudley (1929). Allingham wrote over twenty novels, together with short stories and novellas. She is probably best known for the 1952 novel Tiger in the Smoke that was adapted in 1956 as a film, but omitting the character of Campion. Foss was a devotee of crime fiction.

181. 8th September 1950 Margery Allingham to HJF

D'Arcy House, Tolleshunt D'Arcy, nr Maldon, Essex

Dear Mr Foss,

Many thanks for your kind letter.

By all means see what you can do with the ‘Pig’ and the BBC. I don't think any of my tales have been broadcast (save those written expressly for the medium) and I'd never given much thought to the idea.

Go ahead and see what happens. I fear my agents (W.P. Watt & Son) may insist on putting a finger in the pie if anything comes off but you will find us reasonable, affable and anxious to please –

Good luck,

Yours sincerely

Margery Allingham

I'm very fond of the ‘Pig’ and I'd love to hear it on the air.

ON 17 February 1947, in a ‘Round Letter to Friends’, Percy Grainger wrote in his characteristic if quirky ‘Blue-eyed (Nordic) English’:

Cyril Scott, Percy Grainger and their friends and contemporaries have often been classified as the ‘Frankfurt Group’, a term chiefly of convenience with which to denote the coterie of expatriate composers who, by studying abroad, stood apart in outlook and education from the mainstream of the conservative British musical establishment at the turn of the century. This term does not apply to the pianists Frederic Lamond and Leonard Borwick, who preceded Scott & Co.; to fellow English students Herbert Golden and Thomas Holland-Smith, who studied at the same time as Scott; or to others such as the Australian composer and pianist F. S. Kelly, who followed afterwards. Nevertheless, there may be some confusion as to the actual composition of the Group, since Grainger admits the Danish cellist Herman Sandby to his list, while noticeably absent is the name of Norman O'Neill, who had died tragically in 1934 as the result of a road accident. Grainger may well have been thinking of the ‘living limbs’ of the Group, but even though Scott properly numbers O'Neill among this gathering and writes warmly about him in his later autobiography (his Danse negre of 1908 is dedicated to Norman and Adine O'Neill), his name is omitted from the title page of Scott's first autobiography, My Years of Indiscretion (1924), which is dedicated to Grainger, Quilter and Gardiner as ‘the friends of my student-days’, a dedication that may itself appear odd because Scott's and Gardiner's periods of study at Frankfurt did not officially overlap.