Obituary: Lady Margaret Douglas-Home

Margaret Douglas-Home was a great enabler of young musicians through her work with the Burnham Market Festival, in Norfolk, which she founded in 1974, when she was already in her late sixties, and directed for the next 18 years. At Burnham she provided a platform for a host of performers who have gone on to make their names internationally, including the pianist Roger Vignoles and the opera singers Felicity Lott and Judith Howarth.

Douglas-Home originally started the festival to raise money for repairs for Burnham Westgate, a typical flint north Norfolk church, set at the end of the green in the picturesque Georgian village of Burnham Market. But the concerts were from the first not just a good cause - they have contributed to the village school and all five churches in the neighbouring villages of Burnham Thorpe and Burnham Market - but an artistic success, becoming fully professional soon after they were started.

The contemporary composer most closely associated with the festival is Richard Rodney Bennett. For one festival, he wrote - and joined in performing - a version for four hands at the piano of his waltz from the film Murder on the Orient Express. For the 21st festival, in 1994, he dedicated to Margaret Douglas-Home a song sequence, The History of the The Dansant, of three poems by his sister Meg Peacocke. The songs have since been performed in London, at the Wigmore Hall, when the score was formally presented to Douglas-Home.

A typical Burnham programme, performed at weekends in August, largely by young musicians - Douglas-Home was for many years on the board of the Royal College of Music - includes a broad mix of chamber music, jazz, literary evenings, and small orchestral concerts. In 1986, Sir Neville Marriner brought his Academy of St Martin in the Fields to Burnham to play a concert as a memorial to Margaret Douglas-Home's younger son, Charles, editor of the Times and a devoted musical enthusiast, who had died of cancer the previous year.

Margaret Douglas-Home had a very direct approach to music, which was born out in her playing at the piano, which was both up-tempo and involved. I remember the first time she accompanied me - we were rehearsing a Mozart song for a family concert - and she startled me by the pace at which she launched the second, quicker, section; and knew at once that she was right and that my teacher and I had been rehearsing at quite the wrong speed. She was as much at home in an after-dinner performance of "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" as she was in a trio by Schumann, and up until her 90th year, after several years of being slowed up by emphysema, she was still receiving lessons, and tackling a new piece by Shostakovich.

The last public record of her as a performer is of her playing "Ain't Misbehavin' " and Viennese salon music at her family house, Althorp, in Northamptonshire, for a television documentary which was prompted by her autobiographical volume A Spencer Childhood (1994) and which it is hoped will be broadcast in the near future.

She was born Margaret Spencer in 1906, the sixth and youngest child of Bobbie Spencer, later sixth Earl Spencer, and Margaret Baring, the modest, warm-hearted and unconventional daughter of the first Lord Revelstoke, the banker.

It was from the Baring side that Margaret Spencer took her musical lead. Her mother was the favourite sister in a talented brood that included the novelist and Russophile Maurice Baring and the two eldest boys, John and Cecil, successively second and third Baron Revelstoke, who turned the fortunes of the family bank around after the great crash of 1890 over which their father had presided. Margaret Baring played the violin to the highest amateur standard, encouraged by her mother, Emily Revelstoke, who was herself a first-rate fiddler and who befriended the leading musicians of the day, including the violinist Madame Neruda, the cellist and composer Alfredo Piatti and the towering Clara Schumann - enormously influential as both a teacher and a pianist - all of whom performed in private concerts at the Barings' house in London.

In later life, Margaret Douglas-Home felt this tradition very strongly, even though she had not been able to take it on first hand from her mother, who, already weakened by influenza, had become ill after giving birth to Margaret, and died two days later. The young Margaret's godmother was the Queen, formerly Princess Alexandra, who 20 years previously had gone to hear Clara Schumann play at Emily Revelstoke's house in London, a house where Margaret Douglas- Home herself played in 1989.

One poignant product of her mother's death was that in her youth Margaret had usually to spend her birthday without her father, who on the week marking the anniversary of his wife's death spent much of his time visiting her grave at Althorp and was too moved by grief to spend time with his youngest daughter. Margaret Douglas-Home described this aspect of her childhood in a perfectly achieved article she produced for Country Life in July 1981, the month that her great-niece Diana Spencer was married to the Prince of Wales.

The character of the article is to be found again in her A Spencer Childhood, a delightful, freshly expressed picture of the childhood she spent between Althorp, Spencer House, in London, and a shooting box at North Creake, near Fakenham, in Norfolk. Her brothers and sisters were much older than her and away from home, and she had no Spencer cousins. She describes how the family musical tradition came to her through her mother's nieces, two sets of sisters: the talented Margaret and Victoria Reid, both fine string players (Victoria's son Leonard Ingrams is the founder and director of the opera festival held each summer at his house Garsington, near Oxford), and Daphne and Calypso Baring. The Baring sisters were beautiful, she wrote,

and different from all the others, even their mother's knitting was unlike the other aunts'. I knew that the girls' frocks were bought at Lanvin, and it always worried me that when they arrived on foot for tea, they peeled off their white woolly knickers and laid them on the Lanvin coats. It was their mother who made them different - she was American [Maude Lorillard, daughter of a New York tobacco magnate], beautifully turned out and wonderful to look at. Their drawing-room was painted royal blue, exotic and novel compared to our "off white" one. Their musical parties had taste and expertise.

With the Reids and the Barings Margaret studied with the Williams brothers - remarkable teachers of strings - and played in family chamber ensembles whose hand-written programmes she preserved in her scrapbooks.

She studied first in England, piano and violin, and then, after her father's death in 1922, when she was 16, in Paris. She returned to London when she was 18 for her coming-out dance at Spencer House, and studied with the Williams brothers at the Royal College of Music, in London, where both her sisters, Delia Peel and Lavinia Annaly, had been pupils.

In February 1928 the second eldest of her three brothers, Cecil, a naval officer, was thrown from a pony at a polo match in Malta, and suffered a fractured skull. She and her sister Lavinia set off on the long air journey via Italy and reached the island, where their uncle Maurice Baring was by chance visiting, three days before Cecil died. He was buried at sea from his ship HMS Queen Elizabeth, and their uncle Maurice penned an elegy, which ends:

The wreaths thrown over the side

Drifted upon the tide

And sank.

And now the band

With pipe and clarion

And the quick step summoned

every hand

To carry on.

She was married in 1931 to the ornithologist Henry Douglas-Home, brother of Alec, the future prime minister, and the playwright William Douglas-Home. They set up house in Frognal, north-west London, and had two sons and a daughter; the marriage was dissolved in 1947.

During the Second World War, Margaret Douglas-Home worked with Kenneth Clark in the Publications Department of the National Gallery and went into publishing with Herbert ("Bertie") van Thal, in London, as Home and van Thal. After the Second World War she and her children lived in a Lutyens cottage on the Knebworth estate, in Hertfordshire, before moving to London in 1953.

Since 1946 she and her children had taken family holidays in the part of Norfolk near North Creake that she had grown to love as a child. In about 1960 she moved to the area permanently, to Burnham Market. In her first house in the village, Trimmers, she set up an antique shop which she ran until the advent of VAT made its administration an extra burden, and played in local musical groups.

When she stepped down as director of the Burnham Market Festival in 1992, and handed over to Jenni Wake-Walker, wife of her great-nephew David Wake- Walker, the Lady Margaret Douglas-Home Trust was set up with the object of promoting young musicians, partly but not exclusively by sponsoring their concerts; but also, in the future, through bursaries and grants for purchasing instruments.

Margaret Douglas-Home's last literary enterprise was her work on a biography of her ancestor Georgiana Poyntz, wife of the first Earl Spencer and mother of the more celebrated Georgiana Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire. The grounding for this assemblage of fascinating diaries and letters was the work that Margaret's brother Jack, seventh Earl Spencer, had done in the muniments room at Althorp, where, helped by his assistant Miss Finch, he laboured for years in sorting the family correspondence which has provided an invaluable archive to researchers into the famous Spencer collection of family portraits.

In her own picture of Georgiana Poyntz, Margaret Douglas-Home showed all sorts of intelligent insights, deriving from an easy sympathy with her subject. Sadly, she did not keep her health long enough to see the text into a finished form for publication.

Living for close on nine decades, Margaret Douglas-Home had become something of a survivor, one of the last of her generation in her extensive family, who had to bear not just a motherless childhood and her brother Cecil's death but also surviving both her sons (her elder son, Robin, died in 1968). But despite these losses, she was someone in whom it was difficult to trace self-pity: not in the energy with which she pursued her life; not in her bright eyes set above high cheekbones; and least of all in her characteristic, slightly hoarse, laugh. A laugh that seemed to come right from her diaphragm and which emerged between almost every other sentence that she spoke.

Louis Jebb

Alexandra Margaret Elizabeth Spencer, musician, writer, publisher: born London 4 July 1906; Director, Burnham Market Festival 1974-92; married 1931 Henry Douglas-Home (died 1980; one daughter, and two sons deceased; marriage dissolved 1947); died Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk 26 May 1996.