THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

August 28th, 1958.

Mrs Ursula Vaughan Williams,
10, Hanover Terrace,
Regent’s Park, N.W.1.,

Dear Mrs. Vaughan Williams,
As a comparative stranger I hesitate to write to you at this time.  Yet I hope that you will not take it amiss.
Though I was never an intimate friend of Dr Vaughan Williams, I am deeply indebted to him.  I shall never forget his energetic and noble stand on my behalf in the year 1941, when an official ban on my music by the B.B.C. laid upon me as a result of my support for a movement officially disapproved by the Government of that day, drew from him a vigorous, public and entirely effective protest, which did much to dislodge the Director General of the B.B.C. from his attitude.
It was then a deep joy to me to be invited some years later to contribute to a concert in celebration of Dr Vaughan Williams’s seventy-fifth birthday and to receive from him a letter of commendation for my work, which I so gladly wrote as a tribute to him.
One of the most recent occasions on which he lectured on “Nationalism in Music” may very well have been the evening, given under the auspices of the Composer’ Concourse, of which I had the honour to be at that time the Chairman.
In view of these various links which it was my good fortune to possess with Dr Vaughan Williams, I felt bound to express to you the grave sorrow which I feel at his passing.  One can but hope that the sense of loss which so many people must be feeling deeply now may set in however small a measure as a source of consolation.
I remain,
Yours very sincerely,