She made her London debut in 1907 and retired from the stage shortly before her marriage in 1922 to the English wildlife photographer Cherry Kearton.

The Wigmore performance did not impress Ezra Pound who wrote a scathing review for The New Age: "As Morley and Lawes scarcely preserved a trace of their beauties in the path of her assault, I fled before she began singing modern settings of Tennyson.

According to the Brisbane Courier-Mail, the chimpanzee would sit and sew with Ada for an hour at a time and accompanied the couple on many of their travels.

Ada Kearton's autobiography On Safari, an account of her travels through Africa, Australia and New Zealand with her husband, was published in 1956.

[2] According to the Standard Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa, Ada Kearton and Annie Visser were the first major South African singers whose recordings included works in Afrikaans.