May Sabeston Walker c1910-?

This month’s composer was a serendipitous find, borne of my attempt (pre-Covid, currently in abeyance) of discovering all the female composers of song on the shelves of the Royal Academy of Music’s library. The list is lamentably short, but I discovered some new names – May Sabeston Walker was one of them.

There are many details currently missing from Sabeston Walker’s life, including her exact date of birth. She was born around 1910 in Kent, UK, and spent her early years in Thornton Heath with her parents and brother Edgar. Sabeston Walker was blind from birth, so at around 11 years of age, she was sent to the Royal Normal College for the Blind in Upper Norwood, North London, when she would remain for seven years.

The College specialized in training its students in music and physical education. The teaching was excellent, and Sabeston Walker was not the only student to go on to study at the Royal Academy of Music, where she entered in 1933. She studied singing, piano and composition, under teachers such as Astra Desmond and Benjamin Dale. She was extraordinarily successful, entering as an Anne E. Lloyd Exhibitioner for singing, and going on to win the Isabel Jay Gold Medal and the Rutson Memorial Prize, also for singing, and the Cuthbert Nunn Prize and a Josephine Troup Scholarship for composition, as well as the Dove Prize in 1935 for the most distinguished student. She left in 1936, having captured many column inches during her time there:

“Miss May Sebaston Walker (a 24-year-old blind London girl ) has gained the Rutson Memorial Prize for sopranos awarded by the Royal Academy of Music - previously Miss Walker had gained the highest award of the Academy for pianoforte aural training and harmony - she is also a composer having written a large number of songs together with a violin sonata and several pianoforte works - Miss Walker has been blind from birth but curiously enough she says she finds no difficulty in being unable to see the conductor’s baton.”

This article is typical of the kind of writing on Sabeston Walker at the time – a mix of admiration and respect for her musicianship, and a curiosity about her blindness that at times comes perilously close to sideshow spectacle. Sabeston Walker herself gave an interview in 1937, in which she willingly addresses questions around her blindness, though with an efficiency that has a sharp undertone of correction:

“My compositions are first written in Braille and then dictated for transcription into ordinary manuscript.
So you can realise that my life is a very busy one, especially as I have a home to look after with all the little details such as sending the laundry and ordering the groceries, to be sandwiched between my practice and composition work.
Now let me tell you something of a blind person’s, or at any rate my, point of view. When you are blind you must do something about it. You must train your other senses to compensate you for the loss of the one you do not possess. Don’t believe that the blind person’s senses are more delicate. They are not. Only training and constant usage makes them so. It is just because the other senses have to take the place of the eyes that these senses are made more keen. Nor is a blind person given any compensating talent. They have to work and develop any talent they have just as anyone else must.”

Sabeston Walker took part in many of the Academy’s pubic concerts to great acclaim, mainly as a singer in the early years, but increasingly as a composer. One review of her as a singer mentions Bach and Mozart as particular strengths, while another described her as possessing “a lyric soprano voice of light texture and pure tone”. She made her operatic debut on 15 July 1936, in a production of Alexander Mackenzie’s The Cricket on the Hearth given at Scala Theatre in London. Her own songs were often sung by fellow students, and there were also chamber works performed by the usual mix of teachers and current and ex-students. An example of this is the performance of her string quartet in 1936, given by the rather illustrious lineup of Frederick Grinke and Beatrix Marr on violin, Eileen Grainger on viola and Florence Hooton on cello. Other performances of note included her own renditions of her songs, and the Variations on a Folk-Song from Normandy, played ‘from memory’ by pianist Patrick Smerdon-Piggott.

By the time Sabeston-Walker left the Academy, she had several publications under her belt, mainly songs for solo voice and piano, and as a performer, was being managed by the renowned agency Ibbs and Tillett. She continued to give concerts and was active on radio. Her collaborating musical partners were often also ex-Academy students, such as pianist Harry Isaacs and harpist Rhiannon Jones. She moved to Chelmsford in Essex to live with her brother, starting a singing teaching studio. In 1941, she was given the honour of being made an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music (ARAM), for her services to music:

“CONGRATULATIONS Miss May Sabeston Walker, of St. Fabian’s Drive, Chelmsford, who, I hear, has been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music. It is a rare distinction. Miss Sabeston Walker has lived in Chelmsford only for a few years; she accompanied her brother, Mr. J. Edgar Walker, when he came to Essex as secretary of the Essex County Farmers’ Union. But during this time her singing has been heard in many local musical activities and in occasional broadcasts. Besides being a fine pianist, she has composed songs and instrumental works, several which have been broadcast.”

Indeed, her works that made it to the oxygen of public consumption included many songs – one particular recital headlined seven of these – as well as part-songs, a string quartet, a violin sonata, and works for solo piano. There is clearly a further body of works that is currently lost, including the manuscripts of several of these listed works.

Another way in which Sabeston Walker came into the public eye is that she was one of the first people to gain a guide dog in the UK. The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association had been formed in 1934, after the first dogs had been trained three years earlier, and Sabeston Walker trained with her first dog Wendy in 1937. The piece she wrote for the book edited by Association director Nikolai Liakhoff, described her new independence in glowing terms (although her passing mention of the ‘disability’ of her sex is telling, not least in the allusion to its impact on how people perceived her disability):

“Being a woman, I had not been educated to the idea of going about by myself, and even if I had I am sure that the double fear of traffic and of conspicuousness would have prevented my doing so. So I had to content myself with the help of human guides whenever I went out . . . I cannot say whenever I wished to go out, for my wishes had to depend upon whether or not a human guide was available. Then came my great opportunity. I read about these marvellous dogs which were trained to be the eyes of their masters, and I saw immediately the possibilities which were open to me. I trained with my first guide dog in May, 1937, and it was then that my real life started . .. . a life of my own.”

Sabeston Walker continued to be in the public eye into the early 1950s, but from this point, she begins to disappear from newspaper columns and from radio broadcasts. She published sporadically into the 1960s, and a teaching advertisement in the Chelmsford * speaks to a continuing involvement in the local music scene, but otherwise there is currently little to nothing on her later years. For a musician who was so stellar in the music scene for two decades, this is an enormous lack, one which these pages will be attempting to redress over the coming year. This includes performances of her existing works.