To have helped one brilliant young musician make his way in the world is a satisfying reflection on a lifetime’s achievement. To have done the same for dozens of extraordinary young musicians deserves repayment in kind – and next month Belinda Norman-Butler is getting just that.

Belinda, 100 in December, was one of the first to recognise the outstanding talent of the then teenage prodigy Nigel Kennedy in the days before his punk clothes, Mohican hairstyle and “mockney” accent. She helped him on his way to becoming one of the most successful – if controversial – violinists of his generation. As soon as she heard him perform at the Menuhin School where he was studying she invited him to London to audition for a scholarship scheme she had set up. Keen to make sure everything went smoothly, Belinda met him from the station and took him to the audition. He began with the Brahms violin concerto but, after three notes, a string broke. Disaster! It was a borrowed violin and there were no spare strings in the case. He still won the award.

Fellow violinist Tasmin Little overcame flying bats and pigeons about to descend on her in mid-performance before Belinda and her committee awarded her a life changing scholarship to Banff. There no dramas for cellists Steven Isserlis and Robert Cohen, when they auditioned – and won – important scholarships to America.
And almost all have remained friends with the woman Cohen describes as “one of the most lively, inspiring and fascinating people I have ever known”

As a tribute to this remarkable woman who has devoted her life to music and young people, Isserlis is giving a gala concert in the magnificent surroundings of the Goldsmiths’ Hall later this year. It’s a very public thank you from the hundreds of young musicians who have had some of the Norman-Butler magic sprinkled on them in the last quarter century.

Forty years ago, before the culture of giving had taken root, Belinda Norman-Butler organised another gala concert at the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall to raise money for a pioneering scheme she had devised; the English-Speaking Union (ESU) Music Scholarships.

It was 1969 and the conductor Seiji Ozawa had told Belinda that he and his orchestra, then called the Boston Chamber Players, were about to tour Europe.

Belinda recalls: “He offered to give a concert in London which would help us raise money to send young British musicians to America. The only problem was they were coming in about sixteen weeks time, which didn’t give us very long to organise everything.”

Undaunted, Belinda accepted the challenge. Today she may seem a frail lady of advanced years, (‘old’ just doesn’t do for her) but everyone who knows her speaks of her determination and commanding presence alongside the twinkle in her eye. After all, this is a woman who as a child survived having her tonsils removed in a makeshift operation on the kitchen table. “We got hold of the Banqueting House and although there was rather a lot of noise from the street as the windows didn’t really fit properly, we raised £1,500, a lot of money then.”

Since it cost almost £5.000 to send each student on a course there were many more fundraising events before 1975 when Nigel Kennedy, the first student, auditioned for a scholarship to the Tanglewood Music Centre in Massachusetts. Sir Robert Mayer, the philanthropist and promoter of music for young people, had advised Belinda not to launch the scheme until a truly exceptional student appeared. Even playing with one broken string, 18 year old Kennedy’s outstanding talent was already obvious. Ozawa told him: “I’ve only heard three notes, but that’s fine – you must go to Tanglewood.”

In the years that followed Belinda expanded the scholarship scheme to other major summer schools in America and Europe and some 250 talented musicians have benefited. Although the one they missed was Simon, now Sir Simon, Rattle, who was turned down for a scholarship. The oversight is a source of much embarrassment and teasing.

“But everything grew out of that first concert,” Belinda explained over coffee in her beautiful Victorian house in West London, her home for the last sixty years. When she and her husband Edward bought the house in 1946, the year after World War 11 ended, the road was not the pretty street it is today having been badly bombed. Theirs was chosen as it was the only house which still had a roof. Opposite, was a crater filled with stagnant water where Belinda’s two young children played, rather worryingly she tells me, with inflatable canoes once intended as emergency life rafts for airmen over the Channel. Belinda retains a clear memory of those difficult but rewarding days.

“I remember the feeling of peace, how everyone wanted to be as nice as possible to each other. But we were often very cold as there was nothing to heat the house with. There was almost no petrol available so no cars, which meant the children could play cricket in the street. And there was a lot of borrowing as everything from chairs to spoons were in short supply.”

Belinda had spent the war years in Cambridge and it was there, while her husband was serving in North Africa, that she became involved with the ESU, helping to organise evening lectures with lemonade, mostly for students. And she sang with the prestigious Bach Choir, which managed to remain active in London and Cambridge throughout World War 11.

Belinda was a natural musician herself who had studied piano at the Royal College of Music. But she soon decided she was not cut out to be a performer. “I suffered terrible shyness and nerves. And anyway I realised I must make money so I took a teaching diploma instead.”

After the war, she worked first on the ESU Education Committee setting up six week exchange scholarships between young people in the United States and Britain, four every year from each country. She was concerned that exchange controls prevented almost anyone who was not engaged in business from visiting the US and feared that Americans would have a warped idea of what British people were really like.

Then, spurred on by the limited facilities for music and concerts – “Don’t forget the Festival Hall was not there until after 1951,” she reminded me – Belinda did what she could to revive musical life in the capital. The first concert she organised for the ESU – which itself is celebrating a significant birthday this year, it’s 90th – was in 1952. It was a memorable performance of Handel’s Messiah in Westminster Abbey, fortunately within days of the Queen’s Coronation so that the blue and gold furniture installed for the occasion was still in place, which was an enormous saving.

Recognising how much the successful evening owed to Belinda’s enthusiasm, determination and ever growing contacts – Sir Robert Mayer and Yehudi Menuhin were soon close friends – she was appointed to the Board of Governors. When she proposed that Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten should be invited to become ESU Vice-Presidents she was attacked by an economist on the Board who argued: “We don’t want any more of Mrs Norman-Butler’s long-haired musicians.”
Belinda was furious. “Well actually RVW is an OM …if you know what that means!”

But those who underestimated Belinda did so at their peril. Born on December 10th, 1908, Belinda Ritchie was descended from a nexus of liberal and intellectual 19th century families who believed in working hard to effect change, including the Potters, Trevelyans, Macaulays and Booths. “I do get on with things,” she admits. “When Frank (Lord) Longford told me about his charity, New Bridge, which works for prisoners’ welfare I realised I could collect a committee and I could get them interested because I was interested.” The premature death of her husband, Edward, in 1963 when he was only 56, persuaded her to throw herself into a wide range of charitable commitments.

Belinda had famous grandparents on both sides with many transatlantic connections. She is the great-great granddaughter of the author Thackeray, who made two pioneering visits to the United States, while her grandmother, Thackeray’s daughter, sold one of her father’s manuscripts to the Pierpont Morgan Library to help educate her children.

One grandfather Charles Booth, born in 1840, was founder of the Booth Shipping Line who spent six months a year in the United States. He was married to Mary Macaulay, favourite niece of Lord Macaulay and the chief editor of Booth’s great work, The Life and Labour of the London Poor. The book was an important catalyst in effecting such key issues of the welfare state as awarding old-age pensions to those over seventy, health and unemployment insurance and a minimum wage.

Belinda remembers Booth as she spent a summer with him in 1916 when she was eight and he seventy six.
“We were watching some dogs fighting and, when I asked him why, he explained that people can be too close and not close enough and then they fight. It was a tremendous moment for me because I felt he was not talking down to me as a child.” Many years later Belinda wrote a book, Victorian Aspirations, about Booth and his wife, Mary, who worked so hard on her husband’s behalf. “He was a difficult man who didn’t understand his family and expected them all to work as hard as he worked.”

The more we talk, I realise the rare quality of Belinda’s vitality, optimism and courage. The death of her beloved brother James in the early days of World War11 was a blow impossible to deal with. “Some things just won’t lie down,” she says. As she recalls the sacrifices made by so many of her generation her eyes well up.

As I leave we agree that music, of all the arts, has the power to move one to tears and also to heal. One of her most satisfying memories is singing Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in the Albert Hall in the presence of the composer.
“It may not have been the best performance but it was a glorious occasion.”
Copyright Anne Sebba

Anne Sebba is the author of Jennie Churchill : Winston’s American Mother

The Gala Concert with Steven Isserlis and Pianist Ana-Maria Vera, performing a programme of pieces by Poulenc, Schumann and Mendelssohn, is on Monday 24 November at the Goldsmiths’ Hall in the City of London. Further information from www.esu.org or tel: 020 7529 1550