Belinda Norman-Butler was a dynamo of energy, the galvaniser of numberless committees, social, musical, architectural and literary. Her proudest and most significant achievement was founding the music scholarships of the English Speaking Union (ESU) and chairing the scheme for more than 40 years. She was a great-granddaughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, and she closely resembled her paternal grandmother, Thackeray’s daughter, the novelist Anne Ritchie. She was one of those women who are recognised as beautiful in both youth and in old age.

She was born Belinda Ritchie in London, the second of four children, in 1908. She had eminent grandparents on both sides. Thackeray’s daughter Anne had married (to some tutting in society) her much younger second cousin, Richmond Ritchie, who became Permanent Under-Secretary at the India Office. Their son William, invalided out of the First World War, was a Chancery registrar.

Her mother, Meg, or “Marnie”, was the daughter of Charles Booth, founder of the Booth Shipping Line. He used his fortune to research the reasons for poverty. He had married Mary Macaulay, the favourite niece of Lord Macaulay and the chief editor of Booth’s classic work of research, The Life and Labour of the London Poor, which was instrumental in bringing about the award of old-age pensions in the year of Belinda’s birth — 7s 6d was paid out weekly from post offices to those over 70. In 1972 Belinda celebrated her Booth grandparents in a well-received book, Victorian Aspirations; she also wrote shorter lives of her husband and of her elder brother James, who was killed in 1940 in the rearguard defence of Dunkirk.

The four Ritchie children had at first a “horrid and negligent” nanny. Early on, Belinda showed her willpower by making sure she was got rid of. She was replaced by Edith Hotchkin, who had a fine alto singing voice and was Belinda’s introduction to music. Belinda and her younger sisters Catherine and Mary sang in the choir of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Until the Great War the family lived in Durham Place, Chelsea. When Belinda’s father came home in 1916 they went to Ware, Hertfordshire. After an attack of the postwar flu in 1918, her brother James developed TB. Belinda joined him on the Isle of Wight for a year; her grandmother, Anne Ritchie, had bought a cottage there from Julia Margaret Cameron, the pioneer of portrait photography. She also stayed with her Booth grandparents at the Pugin-designed Gracedieu Manor in Leicestershire. Charles Booth, she recalled, spoke with a Lancashire accent.

Back in London, Belinda was happy at Miss lronside’s school, known as Rene’s. It was progressive, with much acting, music and play-writing but little science or maths. At home a French mademoiselle was hired. She punished the girls by making them eat extra porridge. Again she asserted her will and the Frenchwoman was sacked. Belinda left Rene’s at 15 to study abroad. She stayed in the grand house of the de Burnel family in the rue de Parnasse, Brussels, and went to the Conservatoire for her music and had French classes in a convent.

She returned to England in May 1928 and went to the Royal College of Music the following autumn to study piano and viola, with a view to teaching. One of her tutors was Ralph Vaughan Williams, a friend of the Ritchie family — Belinda always called him Uncle Ralph. On her first day at the college she was late and all the places at the back of the hall were taken so she sat up front. The conductor who was taking them for Brahms’s German Requiem was a striking man with dark hair. After the lesson he invited Belinda to lunch. She declined. Afterwards a fellow student said to her, “Didn’t you know who that was? That was Malcolm Sargent.”

Belinda met her husband, Edward Norman-Butler, in 1927 in the Cambridge rooms of a family friend, Desmond Bonham-Carter. Edward was 19 and she was not yet 18. He wrote to her once or twice, then asked her to lunch in Greek Street, London. He ordered white wine, which made her nose go red and her chilblains prick. The next day she began her stay in Brussels. In the summer of 1929 she was taken to Henley by some friends of her parents and again met Edward Norman-Butler. They were married in 1931 in St Martin-in-the-Fields.

In 1929 Edward had joined Martins Bank. In 1933 he was sent to Liverpool to continue his training. The couple moved to the Wirral. Liverpool, as a city, was dying; Belinda went to the launch of the last ship made there. When the bottle of champagne was broken, the launch was greeted with sullen silence by the watching crowd.

Edward next had a spell in Manchester, but in 1936 the couple returned to London, where he was to be a manager of the new Martins branch in Curzon Street. On their way home they encountered the Jarrow marchers. “The men,” Belinda recalled, “filed past in their neatly pressed dark-blue suits. We gave some of them money for tea.” Edward and Belinda never subscribed to the idea that prevailed in the Establishment, that it was easy to find work if you were unemployed.

With the outbreak of the war Edward was called up as a second lieutenant in the 69th Royal Fusiliers, and Belinda moved to Cambridge, where their couple’s daughter Catherine was born, during an air raid in May 1941. Edward was posted to North Africa in January 1943 where he endured severe blood poisoning after a scratch on his leg. He recovered in Cairo and later served in Malta and Cyprus (his game leg had saved him from taking part in the invasion of France from the south.)

He returned to England in 1945, weighing only nine stone and sporting a moustache, which he shaved off as Catherine disliked it. For a time the family lived at St Petersburgh Place in London, but in early 1946 Belinda spotted a half-ruined house in St Alban’s Grove. They moved there in May that year. Joining Edward in the Georgian Group and the Kensington Society, Belinda helped to save important buildings in Kensington. She was also in the Bach Choir. Her service on committees became relentless. In 1958 Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford) asked for her help in setting up a new organisation, the New Bridge, to help ex-prisoners to find jobs and friendship when they left prison. He suggested a ball, but Belinda held a huge meeting in Lincoln’s Inn instead attended by, among others, R. A. Butler, the Home Secretary, and Sir Robert Birley, headmaster of Eton, with the Eton sixth form.