He was born into a middle-class Catholic family in Recife in north-eastern Brazil in 1921. Despite the relative wealth of his family, he experienced poverty during the Depression of the 1930s, but unlike most children was able to complete secondary school and go on to study law at Recife University. She was a lady of charm, warmth and enthusiasm.Iris Margaret Elsie Lemare, conductor and concert organiser: born London 27 September 1902; died Askham Bryan, Yorkshire 23 April 1997.. She talked about her life with pleasure, no sentimentality and no regrets; she thought she had done her best by music even if she had not hit the heights.

Up to then she had been a keen walker, bird-watcher, swimmer and skier; she was also a dab hand at campanology. By this time she was unable to walk, crippled by a skiing accident only a few years previously. She also studied, as Tippett did, with Adrian Boult and received great support from him.
It was in 1931 that she started the concerts with Elisabeth Lutyens and the violinist Anne Macnaghten. At that time performances were very thin on the ground for British composers. Lemare conducted several of Britten’s early works, including the premiere of his Sinfonietta opus I and later his choral “A Boy was Born”.

She also premiered several works by Alan Rawsthorne, Christian Darnton, Elizabeth Maconchy and many others. At one concert the back desk of her strings included Benjamin Britten, viola, and Elisabeth Lutyens, violin.Some 40 new works were heard at the Macnaghten-Lemare Concerts, many of them by women (though it was by no means a feminist organisation) and many by composers who became well-known later on.Lemare became the first woman to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra, in 1937, and she also conducted the Oxford Chamber Orchestra and the Carlyle Singers. The following year she was invited by the BBC Singers to conduct a 50th anniversary performance of Britten’s “A Boy was Born”.The last time I saw Lemare was in her 90th year at her little house at Askham Bryan near York. She loved opera and conducted Handel’s Xerxes amongst other works in the late 1930s at Pollards, a house in Essex belonging to the Howard family.During the Second World War she founded the Lemare Orchestra. She featured many new or little-known works and her soloists included Joan Hammond, Benno Moiseivitch, Geza Anda, Peter Donohoe and many others. In the 1970s she worked in opera and presented works by Menotti, Maconchy and Britten, and the premiere of John McCabe’s The Play of Mother Courage.On her 80th birthday, when asked what she would like for a present she declared “a concert”, and got one, given by many musician friends. It included a Mozart Concerto played by John McCabe and a piece especially written for the occasion by Elizabeth Maconchy.

It seems that Sargent chose students to conduct, but never picked the only girl in the class until Tippett pushed her forward one day. Iris went to Bedales and then to Geneva to study at the Dalcroze / Eurythmics School. Later, at the Royal College of Music in London, she studied organ under George Thalben-Ball and won the Dove Prize. She also entered Malcolm Sargent’s conducting class, where she always remembered the kindness of her fellow student Michael Tippett. Iris Lemare will be remembered not only as one of the first women to have a career as a conductor but also as a fervent advocate of young British composers. In the Thirties she helped to form, run, and conduct the Macnaghten-Lemare Concerts (from 1934 to 1937 the Lemare Conerts), often with the help of the composer Elisabeth Lutyens

Her father was the well-known organist Edwin Lemare.

His colours are strong and fresh – full of light and space, place and memory. He spent his time between London, Etaples and Paris, where his only daughter Emma lives with his two granddaughters.Duncan Alistair Antoine Grant, printmaker and painter: born London 3 June 1925; staff, Royal College of Art 1955-90, Head of Printmaking Department 1970-90, Professor of Printmaking 1984-90 (Emeritus); married 1949 Phyllis Fricker (died 1988; one daughter), 1991 Joan Strickland (died 1995); died London 12 April 1997.. His second wife, Joan Strickland, who had worked with him at the Royal College, died in 1995.After leaving the Royal College, Grant concentrated on his work, exhibiting both in France and in England His later works are amongst his very best. His home was several storeys tall and packed with furniture, art- deco figures, thousands of corkscrews, bric-a-brac and curios punctuated by the work of Henry Moore, William Scott and other friends.His later years were touched by sadness. His first wife, to whom he had been married for nearly 40 years, died in 1988. He often told with relish of the occasion when he spotted two original Toulouse- Lautrec posters for sale in Portobello Road for a few pounds and, knowing them to be worth a small fortune, he nevertheless bargained the price down.