UVW – a high-heeled and a high-souled woman*
Ralph Vaughan Williams was married twice. His first wife was Adeline Fisher, whom he married in 1897. She came from an intellectual family: her siblings included the eminent historian H. A. L. Fisher, and Virginia Woolf was her first cousin. Adeline provided strong support to Ralph throughout her life but suffered from rheumatoid arthritis which rendered her increasingly immobile, necessitating the move in 1929 from their house in Cheyne Walk and all its stairs to a more spacious home in Dorking, The White Gates. Adeline had clear handwriting, which, as time went on, Ralph didn’t, so she wrote out many of his letters for him to sign. As her illness progressed her health deteriorated and she died in 1951.
In 1953 Vaughan Williams remarried. He had become close friends with his future second wife, Ursula Wood, in 1938, when she had approached him about a scenario for a ballet she had devised on the ballad ‘Clerk Saunders’, and he had taken her out to lunch to discuss it. Ursula was born in Malta on 15 March 1911, the eldest child of Captain Robert Lock of the Royal Artillery and his wife, Beryl. At the time her father was aide-de-camp to his father-in-law Arthur Penton, Commanding Officer in Malta. After a peripatetic upbringing during which she developed a love of writing, she married a gunnery officer, Michael Wood, in 1933. Michael died of a heart attack in 1942.
It is notable that Vaughan Williams was suffering somewhat from ‘writer’s block’ in 1938 but a spell in Wiltshire, along possibly with the fact of meeting Ursula, helped to free this and led eventually to his Fifth, and in some ways most popular, symphony. Thereafter they developed a close rapport, alongside Ralph’s continued devotion to his disabled wife Adeline. His marriage to Ursula seemed a natural progression after he had come to terms with Adeline’s death. Ursula was a vital support for Ralph in the years leading to his own death in 1958 and in tending his legacy thereafter, for example by ensuring that most of his manuscripts are preserved in the British Library.
Ursula published seven collections of poems (five in Ralph’s lifetime) which were eventually reissued as a collection by Albion Music. She contributed words to nine of Vaughan Williams’s major works (most notably his Four Last Songs, published in 1960). After Ralph’s death she wrote her biography of Ralph (R.V.W.: a biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Oxford 1964) which remains a key study and a mine of information for all who have researched the composer’s life and music. She also wrote three novels and the libretti for two operas, by Elizabeth Maconchy and Charles Camilleri, while poems by her were set by a number of composers including Herbert Howells, Alun Hoddinott and Malcolm Williamson. She also wrote an autobiography Paradise Remembered, published in 2002 by Albion Music, while a biography of Ursula by Janet Tennant entitled Mistress and Muse was published in 2017, also by Albion Music.
Ursula’s outgoing personality not only led to her close relationship with Ralph but also made her many friends. Throughout her life she was immensely kind, generous and supportive of them, and after her death on 3rd October 2007 remains warmly remembered by those who knew her.
Ralph and Ursula set up the RVW Trust in 1956 to support young British composers, and assigned his performing rights income to it. In 1989 she asked Hugh Cobbe, then Head of Music of the British Library, to collect Ralph’s letters, transcribe them and organise the transcriptions into a database. A collected edition of 757 of the letters was published in 2008 by OUP and the database, which now stands at over 5000 letters, continues to grow and is available to browse here. Later, in her will, Ursula set up the Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust, to which she assigned both his and her royalty income to be used in support of performances of Vaughan Williams’s own music. Both trusts operated until 2022, when they were combined into the Vaughan Williams Foundation.
Hugh Cobbe July 2024
*In July 1940, RVW wrote to Ursula “Do you know the old saying that women should be divided into the high-heeled and the high-souled? – you are both my dear.” VWL1492
Hugh Cobbe was a close friend of Ursula Vaughan Williams and, at her request, became editor of Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895–1958. He is a Founder Trustee of the VWF.
