ABSTRACT
The new decade of the 1950s, and the decision to re-enact the Great Exhibition of 1851 a century later as the Festival of Britain, epitomized the post-war euphoria of the period. The nation was both willing and able to re-invent itself, with much of the focus on London, though by no means exclusively so. In the field of music, each city planned its own programmes and events while London witnessed the opening of the Royal Festival Hall. Barely a year later King George VI died and a new Elizabethan age began. While these occasions generated more work than ever for Ibbs and Tillett, there was an air of sadness which overshadowed its work between the spring of 1951 and the autumn of 1953, two and a half years during which Kathleen Ferrier battled against the cancer to which she eventually succumbed. Although the disease may have begun as much as 15 years earlier, more definite signs seem to have appeared in June 1949, followed by rheumatic discomfort in October, and neck and shoulder pains two months later in December, yet it was only in March 1951 that the disease was finally diagnosed. These were difficult times for Emmie Tillett, for death had already claimed her husband in 1948 after only brief years of marriage. Now it took her mother (to whom she was extremely close) at the end of 1950. Ferrier's courageous fight against her insidious disease has been documented elsewhere in memories penned by professional colleagues, her sister Winifred, and by her biographers, but Emmie Tillett kept material about the singer, for they had become close friends after her husband's companionship during the singer's first American tour in 1948. Letters written by Kathleen Ferrier (to family, colleagues and friends as well as to Ibbs and Tillett) can be found in the author's Letters and Diaries of Kathleen Ferrier (2003), but Appendices 16-18 here contain both sides of the correspondence between the singer and her agent.
