Elizabeth Poston

[2] She won a prize from the RAM for her one movement Violin Sonata, which was subsequently broadcast by the BBC on 9 July 1928, with Antonio Brosa as soloist and Victor Hely-Hutchinson piano.

[4] When she returned to England at the beginning of World War II Poston joined the BBC and became director of music in the European Service.

During the war she is said to have carried out secretive work as an agent; at the BBC she apparently used gramophone records to send coded messages to allies in Europe.

She wrote the score for the 1970 BBC television production of Howards End (broadcast on 26 December 1970 as Play of the Month, now lost[10]) while living in Rooks Nest House, which was the setting for the novel.

The Nativity (1950), a sequence of newly composed carols and adaptations from folk songs or Medieval manuscripts retelling the Christmas Story, was premiered as a radio feature produced by Terence Tiller, but had an afterlife as an extended choral work for concert performance.

[9] The book contains five of her own original settings, including a short song version of Jesus Christ the Apple Tree that was the germ of her famous choral piece, fully realised six years later.

[1] A catalogue of her works by her friend Dr John Alabaster published in 2018 lists some two dozen of her compositions considered lost.