These short memoirs capture the spirit of the 1970s and 1980s when the King’s Lynn Festival had an established pattern and place in King’s Lynn each summer. In that period for 37 years it was organised by Ruth, Lady Fermoy (until 1989) and often featured great musicians who were her friends from the national scene.  When at Sandringham, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother often attended as Royal Patron even until her last summer in 2001. 

Paul Berry (1953-2026) lived and worked locally almost all his life – as a Lynn News reporter, then a teacher, writer and poet, and for Social Services and the NHS countering drug misuse.  He died in January 2026, unexpectedly but peacefully the day after completing this writing, and publication here is by permission of his widow, Tina.

1. A musical education begins among the ten-bob seats

This summer marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of King’s Lynn Festival of Music and the Arts – inevitably foreshortened simply to King’s Lynn Festival. Three-quarters of a century ago, the wife of the constituency’s Member of Parliament, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, arranged a celebration to mark the restoration of the town’s Guildhall of St George. Coinciding with the Festival of Britain in London, the Lynn Festival was a great success, going on to become an annual event which, in the early years, attracted audiences to the town from all over the country.

Those early festivals lasted just over a week. The packed programme of recitals, talks, films, excursions, a church thanksgiving service – and, for one year only, a medieval jousting display at the Linnets’ home ground – was usually sandwiched between orchestral concerts which took place at St Nicholas’ Chapel.   Ah, those memories of dedicated festival-goers keen to be seen being seen: the men in evening suits, the women in dresses which swept the streets, heading from nearby car parks, converging on the chapel, most of them clutching cushions to mitigate the effects of several hours sitting on St Nick’s hard wooden pews.

Of course, if only they’d booked the unreserved seats, they could have saved themselves a small fortune and enjoyed the comfort of the Borough Council’s green tubular stacking chairs with matching canvas backs and seats which, kind of, moulded and flexed to your shape. You sat in, rather than on them.   In 1970, those seats, usually at the rear near the font, cost just ten shillings (50p) and, by the simple expedient of turning up early, you got to choose whereabouts you sat in the unreserved block.

My family had just moved into a new bungalow in South Wootton and, to augment the furniture brought with us from Fakenham, Dad bought a stereophonic radiogram from Bensley’s in St James Street. (Owner Peter Bensley lived in Wootton, and also owned a petrol forecourt and electrical goods shop in Gaywood where the Co-Op funeral directors now operate.)  While Dad was drawn to the sentimental songs of Jim Reeves and any instrumental music which exploited the stereo capability of his new, light teak toy,   I was able to start my first hesitant exploration of ‘classical’ music with recordings of The Planets by Gustav Holst and Grieg’s Peer Gyntwhich then retailed at 14s/11d (about 75p) on the Classics for Pleasure label.

Not long after this came the important discovery that, once a year, leading orchestras could be heard playing music in King’s Lynn for less than the price of an LP.  And with Dad kindly agreeing to deliver and collect me from town, my introduction to live classical music was underway, courtesy King’s Lynn Festival of Music and the Arts.   I remember Benjamin Britten conducting the English Chamber Orchestra with Peter Pears singing Les Illuminations, and afterwards hurrying round to the side door in hopes of getting their autographs, only to find they had departed after their last bows and were already on their way home to Aldeburgh – probably in that wonderful Alvis car the composer owned.

And so it was in St Nicholas’ Chapel,  seated in the ten-bob unreserved seats at the back behind the font, that my musical education began.  On Friday 24 July 1970, I remember listening in awe as Sir John Barbirolli conducted the Hallé Orchestra in a programme of works by Edward Elgar. Scarcely five days later it was announced the conductor, who had been awarded Freedom of the Borough of King’s Lynn in 1969, had died from a heart attack.

His biographer later recorded that Sir John had been walking into St Nick’s with soloist Kerstin Meyer, who was singing Elgar’s Sea Pictures in that evening’s concert, when he suffered a heart seizure. He went on to rehearse the orchestra through part of the programme during the afternoon, and in the evening no-one in the audience could have guessed what had happened;  he conducted the entire concert with vigour and verve.  The next day, after a second concert at the chapel, he bade farewell to the orchestra who were beginning their annual holiday, and left for his London home.  He began rehearsals with the New Philharmonia Orchestra ready for a tour of Japan, telling his wife, ‘I really was in tremendous form today’.  He had kippers for supper and read until going to bed after midnight.  A short while later,  he suffered his final heart attack in the early hours of 29 July.  How appropriate that his final concerts took place in Lynn, the summer town he loved.   The Elgar concert was critically acclaimed and had been recorded by BBC Radio 3 for broadcast later. Fortunately, it has since been re-mastered and released on CD, one which has a special place on my shelves – and the playing of which never fails to release a flood of Festival memories.

2. For Lynn people, by Lynn people

The early King’s Lynn Festivals really were a celebration of the town and its residents coming together to enjoy the very best of music and the arts. There was massive involvement from local people with a small army of volunteers who staffed art exhibitions (headed up by Dorothy Davison, a teacher at St James Boys’ School), or wore smart evening dress and red lapel-badges on duty as stewards at music concerts (led by Chief Steward, Robert Wells-Morgan, who taught at St Edmund’s School and lived at the Old Rectory at North Wootton).

In those early days, Lady Fermoy was keen to provide a festive programme that offered food not just for the soul and spirit, but also for the body. There were fewer coffee shops and eateries then (imagine Lynn without Costa or McDonalds!), and the answer was to create the Festival Club – or, in today’s parlance, a pop-up restaurant. Part of the complex at St George’s Guildhall includes a long, narrow, hall-like room with picture windows looking across the river to West Lynn. This would eventually become home to a separate commercial venture, the Riverside Restaurant.

Here, under the watchful and formidable eye of the wife of a senior town clergyman, toiled another team of volunteers, this time drawn from local ladies’ groups – the Trefoil and Townswomen’s Guilds, the Business and Professional Women’s Club, Women’s Institutes, and similar. They would prepare simple light salads, quiches, and sandwiches which patrons could enjoy at indoor tables, under sunshades on a raised terrace overlooking the river, or at picnic tables on the lower lawn. As voluntary organiser, the clergyman’s wife took charge of rotas, allocated tasks, and ordered in supplies from local shops (there existed such novelties in the High Street then). She positioned herself at a small table by the end of the servery, with a petty cash tin, from where she would price each plateful, take payment, and dispense change.

At the river end of the room was a bar, run by local vintners Peatling & Cawdron, daring to sell a range of alcoholic beverages. The worthy lady in charge of food and her Canon husband were leading advocates of the Band of Hope, a temperance organisation in its last throes back then.  Woe betide any customer who took their tray of food to buy an accompanying drink from the bar! Their progress would be monitored from where she presided, and if their eyes met they would be returned with an impenetrable stare from the clergyman’s wife.

Currently, individual performances in the festival may be accompanied by separate programmes. Previously, a lavish, perfect-bound programme book was produced with extensive notes to accompany all exhibitions and concerts, including texts and translations for any lieder or choral pieces. There were photographs of artists and performers, and often specially commissioned articles by leading critics and writers giving background on performances or themes. One year, programme book covers were designed by students from Norwich School of Art; another year featured a specially commissioned design by cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, whose family had links with East Winch and whose art was being profiled in a festival exhibition.

Printing costs were high and were never fully met by the cover price so, inevitably, there were adverts. Yet some of these were works of art in themselves. Local outlets of national organisations had tailor-made ads designed by their corporate agencies. The Duke’s Head Hotel, then part of Trust House Forte, had a very professional advertisement extolling the virtues of an exclusive smörgåsbord (reproduced with Swedish diacritics!) eating experience being served in the ballroom before and after festival events in the evenings.

Pleasingly, many local businesses supported the publication, entering into the spirit and coming up with special adverts. In a fine piece of copy, Lynn bookseller John Prime (with premises in St James Street) welcomed browsers to his shop, noting there were already two resident browsers who lived behind a curtain in the shop in the flat above – his two daughters. Even a local garage owner was moved to poetry at the thought of appearing in the prestigious volume. ‘Miles of smiles, if you deal with Giles’ assured the eponymous owner of a business selling second-hand cars and undertaking vehicle repairs in Blackfriars Street opposite the town’s telephone exchange.

There were many others from the community who volunteered their support to ensure the success of those festivals. As soon as the term ended, another schoolteacher would be busy arranging the stacking tubular chairs into rows – the very ones I sat in at St Nick’s – and sticking adhesive seat numbers to pews, corresponding with numbers printed on tickets. Elsewhere, another young local man who worked in an accountant’s office always used two weeks of his holiday to assist festival stage manager Ken Franklin with all things backstage and technical.

For the week of the festival, Lynn was a town en fête. There was excitement and anticipation in the air – the chance to savour international music and culture on the doorstep. It was not just a festival in King’s Lynn, it was a festival of the town, created and sustained by local people for the enjoyment of its community, frequently drawing audiences from way beyond the Borough’s boundary.

3. Only the best for the town

Festivals for the arts, cinema, literature, and every conceivable genre of music abound these days, but for the first two-and-a-half decades of its existence, King’s Lynn Festival of Music and the Arts was one of just a handful – a glittering jewel in a crown that included places like Aldeburgh, Edinburgh, Cheltenham, and Harrogate. When my faculty managers at the Technical Colege (now the College of West Anglia) received a request from festival organisers for a young person to join the Festival Committee and bring a youthful perspective, my name was put forward, as I had staged church-based poetry and music entertainments with the encouragement of the Rev A E Bennett  (The Woottons incumbent, 1964-1974). The chance to contribute to the organisation and staging of the annual arts-fest was to not to be missed, nor the chance to work behind the scenes during the festivals of 1972-1975.

There were no artistic advisors in those days – just a committee headed up by Ruth, Lady Fermoy, and a hardworking team led by administrator, the redoubtable Ruth Abel, and her mother who looked after the finances. The building at 27 King Street, alongside the arched vehicle entrance to the Guildhall complex, housed administration offices, rooms for meetings and exhibitions, and living accommodation for stage manager Ken Franklin and his wife Jean, the principal cleaner.  Committee meetings chaired by Lady Fermoy took place in the Fermoy Art Gallery and filled an afternoon.  The Committee composition was largely a mix drawn from the great and good in the area – farmers, solicitors, accountants, business leaders – with Keith Jeffery, the Arts Council of Great Britain assessor, present to ensure stewardship of finances, including a substantial grant from the Arts Council.

Lady Fermoy was a remarkable lady, the founder of the feast and the visionary who led programmes reaching new heights with each passing year. She was a classical pianist who had studied under Alfred Cortot at the Paris Conservatoire. Her musical career took second place when she met and married Maurice Roche, 4^th Baron Fermoy,  King’s Lynn’s Member of Parliament,  but the connections remained, and through her network of contacts she was able to bring leading artists, orchestras, and ensembles to the town. ‘Only the best for King’s Lynn’ was her guiding dictum when planning the programme.

It was said that she could charm the birds from the trees, and one who fell under her spell was a renowned cellist and orchestral conductor, who would always ensure he was in the country to be part of the festival, even interrupting a world tour to fly in for the 1964 event.   Giovanni Batista Barbirolli, of Italian origin but Cockney to the core, better known as John, was at the time principal conductor of Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra.  Its musicians were offered hospitality in the homes of music-lovers in the area in return for complimentary concert tickets, and they would often perform on two successive evenings.  Occasionally, when not involved with rehearsals, a team of golfers from the orchestra would meet with home players for a friendly tournament at the golf club’s course at Leziate.

In addition to musical knowledge and artistic vision, Lady Fermoy brought one asset of inestimable value to the festival’s organisation and prestige:  the patronage of HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. In 1956 Lady Fermoy was appointed a lady-in-waiting and, four years later, elevated to Woman of the Bedchamber in recognition of the close friendship that had grown between the two women.  The QM would move into Sandringham in July, purposely to attend festival events and the estate’s annual cottagers’ flower and produce show. It’s not hard to imagine the benefit of punters scouring the programme deciding which tickets to buy to be seen at the kind of prestigious music event she might attend.   In the box office, we often got to know who these people were;  indeed, some were blatant enough to ask which events she would be attending!  We never knew, of course. Front row seats for concerts at St Nicholas’s were always reserved by Lady Fermoy, but nothing was definite until late afternoon/early evening on the day of the concert when the QM’s private secretary, Sir Ralph (pronounced Rafe!) Anstruther, would phone from Sandringham to confirm.

As part of my role on the committee, I was invited to stage the Country Airs programme which had taken place in St Mary’s Church, South Wootton.  Before the Festival performance in the Guildhall undercroft – then a vaulted performance and exhibition space, later Crofters coffee shop – Lady Fermoy invited us to stage the programme before an invited audience at Uphall, her country home at Hillington. It was a memorable and convivial evening. With the benefit of age, I now look back and realise she was probably ‘checking us out’ before unleashing us upon a paying audience of festival devotees. We must have passed muster and our performance took place, unaltered, in the 1972 Festival fringe.

My association with Lady Fermoy did not end there. She graciously accepted an invitation to become Patron of Centre Poets, a literature group I started in 1976. She took her role seriously, on two occasions travelling from her London residence in Eaton Square to my parents’ home in Little Walsingham Close, South Wootton, to attend meetings. At one of these, having listened to the assembled company reading their creative writing, she offered to recite something for us.   This beautifully attired member of the Royal Household, with all a concert pianist’s poise and bearing, began after a dramatic pause:  ‘There was a young lady from Lynn,  who was so painfully thin,  that when she assayed  to drink lemonade,  she slipped down the straw and fell in.’

4. Behind the scenes and under the floor

For someone who had attended concerts in St Nick’s, then been invited to join the organising committee, the chance to work with the team staging the Kng’s Lynn Festival was the icing on the cake. The editor of the Lynn News & Advertiser, who had appointed me as a trainee reporter, agreed to postpone my July start providing I phoned reporters with tip-offs of any ‘interesting visitors’.

My first placement was with stage manager Ken Franklin, and I remember a journey through a narrow trapdoor hidden under carpet, into the void created by the Guildhall’s rake of seats and the building’s original floor. So, the boards which Shakespeare was thought to have trodden were also crawled over by a local poet and Contact contributor, gathering discarded sweet wrappers which had found their way from the auditorium above. It was a dusty job, and Ken, who perpetually wore a boiler suit as he accessed the darkest corners, suggested I might be better suited working in the box office – but not before I had been one of a party propelling the Guildhall’s Steinway grand piano across the Tuesday Market Place to St Nick’s. The upended piano bounced its way along on a miniscule wheeled trolley built for the purpose. It was probably intended for concert stages or studios but we used it to transport a concert piano, under a rough tarpaulin to preserve its dignity, through the Tuesday Market Place (which had live traffic on all four sides) and narrow St Nicholas Street. Reaching the destination we created our own performance art, swearing as we struggled to get the piano into position on the temporary staging in the chapel’s nave. We locked the chapel and left it ready for a tuner from Steinway’s showroom in London, who would spend much of the next day preparing the instrument for that evening’s recital.

Across the box office counter, working with manager Ashley Cooper who lived in Avon Road, I got to know many of the loyal patrons from across the UK, some of whom booked themselves into local hotels before coming in to collect a week’s worth of tickets pre-ordered by post. One morning, when business was quiet, I accompanied a team from the Lynn News & Advertiser with the poet laureate, John Betjeman, on a walk around Lynn to gather his reactions to the first iteration of Lynn’s ‘improvement plan’, which notably demolished Captain George Vancouver’s birthplace. We were accompanied by acclaimed Lynn-based church architect, Colin Shewring, for specialist advice. All went well. Betjeman loved the street view along King Street and was enchanted by Henry Bell’s Custom House. But he was aghast at what he saw in newly pedestrianised New Conduit Street, claiming planners had turned a historic town centre into a version of Slough. Nothing could have prepared us for the reaction when Betjeman realised chief photographer, Deryk Story, was lining up a shot of him standing in front of the Wimpy with its sloping concrete roof. He physically wrenched Deryk’s new 35mm Pentax camera from his neck and said he would not be photographed with such an aberration as background. The tour continued, and an excellent feature appeared from the pen of arts reporter and ex-Cambridge graduate, Veronica Crichton. Later that day, at a literary luncheon at the Duke’s Head, Betjeman sought out the photographer and apologised for his earlier behaviour, saying he had been so incensed by ‘what they had done to old Lynn’.

Not all my memories are quite as dramatic. Back then, the riverbank at West Lynn was dominated by the LinCan and Donald Cook canneries. During the short summer processing season, students would arrive from all over the country and work shifts to augment their grants, living in a veritable shanty town of tents along the riverbank. It was a lovely sight, watching the students come and go, at all stages of the day, to factories belching smoke and steam. Did they ever wonder what went on across the river, just yards from their temporary home? They couldn’t have guessed at the long, lingering farewells in the Guildhall courtyard under the same moonlit sky, as Cleo Laine and John Dankworth carried clothing changes from their dressing room to load into their estate car prior to the long drive to Wavendon in Buckinghamshire after an intimate, late-night concert. The night was young, lit by stars. They were riding high on post-performance adrenalin, in no haste to leave.

Yet my most vivid memories are as an audience member.   Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana in the Corn Exchange before it was converted, which included a children’s choir from West Winch Primary School.    The spontaneous encore with half the audience on its feet, after the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra performance of Janáček’s Sinfonietta seemed to raise the chapel roof several feet into the air.   Or that concert sometime in the late 1960s when a small, elegant woman, always the first to leave, stopped beside me, turned and engaged me in conversation.  Yes, I had enjoyed the concert.  For me, being at the back was an ideal place to appreciate the music and the fine acoustics.   She paused and smiled.   Yes, she replied, I often think how nice it must be not to be so close to the performers.   And then she was gone, through the arched west door, where Barty, her preferred chauffeur, would make short but sedate work of the drive back to Sandringham.  Where else could a lanky, long-haired local youth pay ten bob to hear a world-class classical concert, then have a quick chat with a member of the Royal Family while standing alongside his green tubular steel stacking chair?

By Paul Berry (1953-2026)