MS Mus. 1714/1

These files were created by Ursula Vaughan Williams as research material for her biography of her husband. ‘O[xford] U[niversity] P[ress]...put out a call asking owners of letters from VW to lend them so that they could be photocopied and returned. The resulting photocopies went to Ursula and have remained in her files ever since.’ (Cobbe, p. 2)*.

There are mainly three types of content:

1. Ralph Vaughan Williams’s original correspondence. Letters from Ralph Vaughan Williams to various correspondents (a mixture of originals and copies)

2. Letters with Ralph Vaughan Williams as their subject. These are often covering letters with items sent in response to the OUP advertisement. They date mainly from 1959, but are filed in the year to which their contents refer.

3. Notes made by Ursula Vaughan Williams in the course of her research.

The biography was published by Oxford University Press in 1964. Mrs Vaughan Williams also added some of her later correspondence to these files.

Many letters have dates added and correspondents identified by Mrs Vaughan Williams. Some letters which were uncertainly or wrongly dated were subsequently more accurately dated by Hugh Cobbe in the preparation of his edition of the letters. They have now been placed in the sequence according to these new dates.

The sender or recipient of letters is always Ralph Vaughan Williams where not specified. From the 1930s to her death in 1951, Adeline Vaughan Williams, the composer's first wife, wrote many letters both to her sister Cordelia Curle ('Boo') and to Ursula Wood, afterwards Vaughan Williams: it is not always possible to tell which of these two is the intended recipient.

*In the following descriptions, 'RVW' refers to Ursula Vaughan Williams's biography of 1964, and 'Cobbe' refers to Hugh Cobbe's 2008 edition of the letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams.