Lilias Sheepshanks
Concert pianist, Army wife, philanthropist and socialite
LILIAS SHEEPSHANKS, who has died aged 92, gave up a promising career as a concert pianist for the life of an Army officer’s wife; nevertheless, she was close to many of the great musical figures of her day including Sir Malcolm Sargent, who was her godfather, Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Another friend was William Walton, whom she encouraged to start composing again after years of depression. He dedicated to her Anon in Love (1960), six songs for tenor and guitar.
Despite such a genteel pedigree, Lilias Sheepshanks could make even sailors blush. As a governor at the Royal Navy’s Royal Hospital School at Holbrook, Suffolk, she declared: “You must give all the sixth-form condoms.” Surveying the red faces of her fellow governors, some of them admirals, she added, unabashed: “You cannot deny reality.”
She was also credited with introducing the then Prince of Wales to Laurens van der Post, who played tennis with Britten close to her Suffolk home. Royal courtiers were not keen on the mystic’s influence over the future King, with one of them telling her: “You should be locked in the tower.”
Lilias Mulgrave Noble was born in London on January 13 1931, the youngest of three children of Sir Humphrey Brunel Noble, Bt, great-grandson of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Celia (née Weigall); her twin died at birth.
Brought up in Northumberland, she attended no fewer than five boarding schools. During the war the family lived at RAF Uxbridge, where her father was engaged in secret work. She resented not being allowed to play with her older brothers in gas shelters and gun pits.
A talented pianist as a child, she studied piano and singing at the University of Edinburgh. That was followed by a scholarship to the École Normale de Musique de Paris. By 20 she had performed at the Wigmore Hall in London.
In 1950 she became engaged to Captain Robin Sheepshanks, in the King’s Dragoon Guards, but her tutor, Edwin Fischer, was so furious at her abandoning a glittering career (“You are married to the piano!”) that, three months later, she broke it off.
The couple did eventually marry in late 1951 and settled on the Sheepshanks family farm at Rendlesham, Suffolk. Despite bringing up four sons, keeping chickens, breeding Arab eventing horses and helping to run the estate, she found time to play the piano for several hours a day.
All this nearly came to an end in the late 1960s when Lilias Sheepshanks suffered severe spinal trauma after an accident during routine surgery. She spent the rest of her life walking with callipers or a cane, often in considerable pain.
She never again rode a horse or sat for any length of time at a keyboard, and for more than five years she was all but bedridden. Yet she taught herself to drive before beginning her charity career in earnest.
She was a governor at the Royal Hospital School for 17 years from 1983, during which time she was involved in setting up a confidential helpline for pupils. She was also involved in turning the school co-educational in 1990 and visited the girls’ houses, encouraging them to stand firm in the maledominated environment.
She was a governor at other schools and colleges, a Samaritan, a bereavement counsellor, a member of the deanery synod and, with Robin, a founder of the drugs and alcohol support charity Adfam in Suffolk. Occasionally she contemplated reviving her musical career, but her husband was not persuaded.
Lilias Sheepshanks was appointed OBE in 2001. Robin, who served as chairman of the Prince’s Trust Suffolk Committee and as deputy lieutenant, was appointed CBE in 1989. He died in 2007 and she is survived by their four sons, the eldest of whom, David, is a former chairman of Ipswich Town FC.