For over a hundred years the firm of monumental masons
founded by the Evans family has plied their
trade from premises at 207 Smithdown Road. Thomas Herbert Evans was one of the
family who ran the business a century ago and in 1915 his wife gave birth to a
daughter, Florence Annie. Using the name Nancy Evans, she became one of the
country’s leading operatic singers for whom Benjamin Britten created the role
of Nancy in his opera Albert Herring.
Nancy Evans was born on 19th March 1915 at 36
Granville Road L15. The family then lived briefly at nearby 39 Egerton Road
L15, before moving in the mid-1920’s to 17 Menlove Avenue L18. She was educated
at Calder High School and was trained by John Tobin, one of the area’s leading
conductors and music teachers, who directed the Liverpool Repertory Opera
Company. Another pupil of Tobin was a young girl named Irené Eastwood, who also
lived in the Mossley Hill area, and the two became close friends. Irené would
later change her name to Anne Ziegler and enjoy a very successful singing
career with her partner and husband Webster Booth.
Nancy made her operatic debut in Liverpool aged seventeen in
the role of the Sorceress in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and in the same
year made her first BBC broadcast. Her father Thomas had Decca make a private
recording of his daughter and they promptly signed her up for a recording of Dido
and Aeneas. In 1939 she was employed for a season at Covent Garden under
the conductorship of Sir Thomas Beecham. It was there that she met Beecham’s
assistant artistic director, Walter Legge, whom she married in 1941. Their
daughter Helga was born in 1942.
The wartime years saw her engaged in an odd mixture of
engagements which included appearing with Tommy Trinder and the Crazy Gang at
the London Palladium, touring Europe and the Middle East entertaining troops
with ENSA and making her Proms debut under Sir Adrian Boult.
In 1946 she alternated with Kathleen Ferrier in the role
of Lucretia in the premiere of Benjamin
Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia. The producer of the opera was Eric
Crozier and Nancy Evans fell in love with him. Already estranged from Walter
Legge, they divorced and she married Crozier on Boxing Day 1949. Crozier and
Britten were a major influence on her later career. The magnitude of her
success was reflected in her making over 300 broadcasts for the BBC, performing
at thirteen successive Proms seasons and working with the greatest accompanists
and conductors of the age.
She continued performing until her retirement in 1990, a
year in which both she and Eric Crozier were awarded OBE’s. He died in 1994.
Nancy Evans died at a nursing home near
Aldeburgh on 20th August 2000.
