Kathleen Riddick (17 July 1907 - 5 February 1973) was a British musician, one of the first women in Britain to establish herself in the male-dominated profession of conducting.
[4] Later in the 1930s, Riddick gained a recommendation from Robert Jaffrey Forbes, principal of the Royal Manchester College of Music, to study conducting with Nikolai Malko in Salzburg.
[6] This was followed on 29 October 1951 with a concert at the recently opened Royal Festival Hall, including the premiere of Stanley Bate's Introduction and Allegro, op 24, a work dedicated to Kathleen Riddick.
[8] Concurrently, Riddick founded a second, fully professional ensemble, the London Women's String Orchestra, which performed for the first time on 25 May 1938 at the Aeolian Hall, to very positive reviews.
[9] The orchestra engaged with contemporary composers, taking on UK and world premieres of music by Stanley Bate, Henk Badings, Arnold Cooke, Paul Hindemith, Bohuslav Martinů, Alan Ridout and others.
Along with a very few predecessors (such as Rosabel Watson, Florence Ashton Marshall, Gwynne Kimpton and Ethel Leginska)[13] and her near contemporaries Avril Coleridge-Taylor, Iris Lemare and Kathleen Merritt,[14] Riddick was one of the pioneers who opened up the world of conducting to women musicians in Britain.