Helen Craddock Perkin (25 February 1909 – 19 October 1996) was an English pianist and composer, best known today for her association with John Ireland during the 1920s and 1930s.
At 16 she entered the Royal College of Music, continuing her lessons with Alexander, and subsequently (through the Octavia Travelling Scholarship),[2] studied orchestration with Anton Webern in Vienna and piano with Eduard Steuermann.
By then she was broadcasting regularly as a pianist, with a repertoire that soon stretched from Haydn and Schubert through to Ibert, Ravel, Berg and Egon Wellesz.
[6] Fiona Richards suggests that Ireland's relationship with Perkin was "a demanding and possessive one", and she later confessed "the situation became so impossible that a break had to be made".
[7] The rift was hastened by her marriage in 1935 to the avant garde architect George Mountford Adie (1901-1989), after which the two ceased to communicate for many years.
Although she revived both her composition and performing careers after the war, the long break did affect the scope of her opportunities when compared to higher profile contemporaries such as Eileen Joyce and Myra Hess.
[17][8] After World War II Helen Perkin and her husband visited the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff in Paris.
[20] George and Helen Adie were depicted as the fictional characters Mr and Mrs Todd Ashby in Carl Ginsburg's Medicine Journeys: Ten Stories (Center Press, 1983).