25 January 2018

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No one can say Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) has been ignored and her professional and private life was too full of incident to be compressed into a short Post, details here. She is best-known for the 1911 The March of the Women (excellent photographs accompanying the recording) and ‘the enduring mental picture of her  was evoked by the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. Visiting her in Holloway Prison in 1912, he found the inmates marching and singing it in the courtyard while Ethel “beat time in almost Bacchic frenzy with a toothbrush”‘ (Telegraph, at the time when her Concerto for Violin and Horn was played at the Proms).