NEEDHAM, Alicia Adélaide

  Alicia Adélaide Needham studied at the Royal Academy of Music graduating 1887. She married Joseph Needham in 1892 and in 1900 gave birth to their only child, also called Joseph.Actively supported by her husband, who organised concerts for her and arranged her earliest publications, her musical career began in 1894 with a number of publications and piano and song recitals.

She wrote some 700 compositions: many songs, duets, trios and quartets for voices and piano, piano music, some orchestrations of songs, choral hymns, marches for brass bands, and one church service. She was the first woman to conduct at the Royal Albert Hall and also the winner of the competition for the Prize Song for the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902. More than 300 composers sent in their contribution, but Alicia Needham won the prize for a song which she wrote in a last-minute fashion while she was accidentally staying in a room at Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel.

More than 200 published works can be found in the British Library, some of which are song cycles and similar collections with up to 12 pieces. She seems to have stopped composing before 1920 and little was heard of her henceforth. She died, largely unnoticed by the public, on Christmas Eve 1945 in London.

Thanks to her son Joseph Needham's later fame as a highly distinguished biochemist and sinologist, the private belongings – including the papers of his mother – of him were archived, first at the University of Bath, and now in Cambridge.