Ursula Vaughan Williams

Tony Palmer writes: Ursula Vaughan Williams (obituary, Oct 25) may have made one last and substantial contribution to keeping the memory of her remarkable husband very much alive.

She was the inspiration and constant encouragement behind the first full-length film (almost two and a half hours long) about the composer, to be shown complete on Five on New Year's Day. Together with her fellow trustees, Michael Kennedy and Hugh Cobbe, she made available letters and documents not published before, and the afternoon we spent together, for what turned out to be her last interview, only a few weeks ago in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library was a treasured and unforgettable experience.

Although frail, she was determined to make me understand his importance as a composer and his courage as a man. As she said: “He was the perfect man, a sweet man, a delicious man, and I loved him.” And being a poet herself, she had even suggested the title of the film: O Thou Transcendent.

Andrew Keener writes: Ursula Vaughan Williams may have been first and foremost a novelist and biographer, leaving assessment of her husband's music to distinguished commentators like Michael Kennedy, but her musical instincts and knowledge were underestimated at one's peril.

Producing recording sessions of her husband's A London Symphony in the early Nineties, I agreed to the conductor's suggestion that we include in the next take of the slow movement a small handful of bars that the composer had resolutely discarded when preparing the version familiar today. Even listeners who know this symphony might well have missed the brief additional music. Not Ursula: as the orchestra began to play the extra bars, a disturbed rustle of cotton dress behind me in the control room and that redoubtable head peering over my shoulder at the score left us all in no doubt of her thoughts on the matter.

The extra bars did not make it to the issued CD.

Captain Kenneth Lockwood

Eric Hulse writes: Kenneth Lockwood (obituary, Oct 11) was exactly one year younger than me. In the 1920s we went through Whitgift School together in the same forms and we became good friends. In July 1929 we went our separate ways after OTC camp and we mever met up again.

In retrospect I think that it is quite extraordinary that only just after a decade of leaving Whitgift he would be organising the escape of prisoners from Colditz. I consider it a great privilege to have known him in our boyhood.