Elsie Griffin

Beginning her career by entertaining British troops in France during World War I, she popularised such songs as "Danny Boy".

John Arlott wrote of her, "Hers was the voice in Fred Weatherly's songs, "Danny Boy" and "Roses of Picardy", that is preserved in the mind's ear of surviving 1914–1918 trench fodder.

[5] After further concert work in 1918,[6] Griffin was engaged by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1919, immediately appearing on tour in the leading roles of Josephine in H.M.S.

[7] Her colleague, Derek Oldham said of her Mabel, "Every note dead in its centre, every run as clear as a whistle, and the whole number sung with an ease and mastery which has never been bettered.

[1] She continued to play or share these principal soprano roles and sometimes the two smaller ones, finally adding to her repertoire the part of Casilda in The Gondoliers in 1925.

[11] She performed frequently in concerts, oratorio and variety, giving on one occasion at the London Coliseum "a not over-exhilarating exhibition of that after dinner, drawing room type of singing which is happily a thing of the past.

She also toured with the Carl Rosa Opera Company from 1934 to 1937, singing leading roles in Die Fledermaus, The Barber of Seville, Carmen, Romeo and Juliet, The Tales of Hoffmann, Faust and The Elixir of Love.

"[20] When the 1929 recording was reissued on LP in 1981, a critic for The New York Times wrote that her "'secure coloratura and bell-like purity of tone' made her the definitive Mabel.