Madeleine Dring spent the first four years of her life at Raleigh Road, Harringay, before the family moved to Streatham.
She showed talent at an early age and was accepted into the junior department of the Royal College of Music where she began on her tenth birthday.
Dring formally began composition studies at the junior department with Stanley Drummond Wolff in 1937, in 1938 with Leslie Fly, and worked with Sir Percy Buck for the next two years.
Dring's love of theatre and music co-mingled; many of her earliest professional creations were for the stage, radio, and television.
The biography was partially funded by Dring's husband, Roger Lord, in order to disseminate information about his late wife's compositions.
[1] Several articles, compact disc recordings, and inclusions of Dring's biographical information in books about composers in the last decade have secured her name a place in the modern lexicon.
Over 100 pages of footnotes and references are included in this volume as well as complete works lists and document performances by Dring.
Occasionally she was taught by Ralph Vaughan Williams but again there is little obvious influence, and her music does not reflect the English folk song tradition, although she studied this genre as a singer.
As observed by Ro Hancock-Child, Dring preferred jazzy idioms, Gershwin, Cole Porter and the sunny style of Arthur Benjamin.
If her vocal music has ever been compared to Roger Quilter (possibly because of similar text choices) it is a mistaken comparison.
By contrast, Dring looked to the future, and thrived on novelty and surprise, hoping that what she wrote might gently shock or make you smile.
Dring's cabaret songs and West End Revue material sometimes featured her own lyrics and are full of clever writing, both musically and textually.