MusicObituary

Ursula Vaughan Williams

Music patron, wife and biographer of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Although Ursula Vaughan Williams, who has died aged 96, had a long association with the musical world and understood it well, she was not a musician but a writer. She was the author of what was, for many years, the standard biography of her husband, Ralph Vaughan Williams, who died in 1958, and of poetry that appealed particularly to composers. Some set verses she had already published; with others she worked closely, providing librettos for several operas and large-scale choral works. Besides her husband, the total of about 30 composers included Gerald Finzi, Alun Hoddinott, Herbert Howells, Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy, Anthony Milner, Alan Ridout, Phyllis Tate and Malcolm Williamson.

The daughter of an officer in the Royal Artillery who subsequently became a major general, she was born Ursula Lock in Malta. Army life required the family to move constantly. Her schooling ended at the age of 17 after two terms in Brussels. By then her father was stationed on Salisbury Plain, where she passed the next four years, horribly bored and reacting sharply against the social round in which she was expected to take part. She read widely, occupied herself with archaeology and amateur dramatics, and finally escaped to London in 1932-33 to study at the Old Vic theatre.

In 1933 she returned to peripatetic army life as the wife of Michael Forrester Wood, an officer in the Royal Artillery who shared many of her tastes and was an accomplished amateur watercolourist. She began to develop her literary interests, writing poetry, devising poetry programmes for the BBC and reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement. While she was at the Old Vic she had seen a performance of Vaughan Williams's ballet Job, which impressed her enormously.

She knew nothing about the composer, but in 1937 decided to send him a ballet scenario of her own. He did not care for it, so she suggested a different subject, from Edmund Spenser. The author and the composer finally met in the following spring. By the summer, the score of The Bridal Day was finished.

Early in the war Wood was given a senior job in anti-aircraft defences and needed to live in headquarters. Ursula moved to London, where she did voluntary social work. In 1941 she published, as Ursula Wood, the first of her books of poems. Vaughan Williams and his disabled wife, Adeline, were living in Dorking, Surrey, for the sake of Adeline's health. Ursula visited them, and when Wood died suddenly of a heart attack in 1942, they had her to stay. She spent some weeks there and, as she wrote in her biography: "I found that I had become part of their lives as they of mine." She took paid employment in London as secretary and receptionist to a doctor who allowed her flexible hours. This enabled her to set Adeline's mind at rest by looking after her husband when he came to London to conduct or attend functions.

As time went on, she accompanied Vaughan Williams further afield, for instance to Three Choirs Festivals, and after Adeline's death in 1951 she helped him to refashion his daily existence. In February 1953 they married and settled in London, where he resumed many activities that he had long been obliged to restrict. She also encouraged him to travel abroad again. It could be said that without the happiness the marriage brought him in his last years, the course his music took might well have been less fruitful.

After his death, one of Ursula's first tasks was to tackle the biography that they had agreed she should write. She sought out and gained the confidence of a vast range of people, and in 1964 produced a work of lasting importance, RVW: a Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, the standard work, though the later definitive survey is by Michael Kennedy. Ursula's biography and all her later books, including her further volumes of poetry and four novels, appeared under her second married name, much against her will, because she did not wish to be seen to trade on it. Her autobiography, Paradise Remembered, was completed in 1972 but published only in 2002. To a wider public she became familiar through taking part in broadcast programmes about Vaughan Williams.

She was a tireless worker for musical causes, president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, on the executive committee of the Musicians' Benevolent Fund and the recipient of honours from the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music. Michael Tippett, who worked with her on the RVW Trust, remembered how she liked to "splash out". Her generosity to young musicians through this and other channels will long be remembered with gratitude. And gratitude is above all what her innumerable friends will feel as they remember her impulsive, enterprising and affectionate nature.

· Joan Ursula Penton Vaughan Williams, writer and musical patron, born March 15 1911; died October 23 2007

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