My mother, Sue, who has died aged 84, was the agent, manager and confidante for the composer Benjamin Britten and the tenor Peter Pears, and was at the heart of one of the most creative periods of English music.
The daughter of Marjorie and Arthur Pears, a naval officer, Sue was born in West Malling, Kent, but grew up in Kenya. During the war, Marjorie was in charge of a camp of Italian prisoners of war near Mombasa, but Arthur was captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore in 1942 and the couple subsequently divorced.
Music lessons were hard to come by but Sue learned the piano and sang in every choir she could find. At the age of 16 she sailed for London alone and was reunited with her father. Through him she met his youngest brother and her uncle, Peter Pears. Sue studied singing and piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, and kept house for Pears and Britten, his partner, at their home by Regent’s Park.
In 1958 Sue took a job with Ibbs and Tillett, then the largest London concert agency, while also working for the Aldeburgh festival. She married Jack Phipps, an arts administrator, in 1964 and they set up home in Islington, north London, where they established their own agency, representing Britten and Pears, who also moved next door.
Already an inspirational stepmother to Jack’s children, Polly and Simon, Sue’s horizons widened after my birth in 1968. She trained as a tai chi teacher with Pytt Geddes and was soon teaching her own classes.
When the Phipps family moved to Halliford Street, also in Islington, in 1970, Britten and Pears built a studio adjoining their property, to use as their London base. The building now bears a green plaque commemorating the composer.
Later on Sue became interested in osteopathy, eventually specialising in polarity therapy, though only practising part-time. Meanwhile her music-making was becoming more important, as she finally devoted herself to singing. Together with Jack, in the late 1990s she started a concert series in Alderton, Suffolk, Summer on the Peninsula.
After Britten’s death in 1976, biographers and film-makers found Sue to be an insightful commentator on the great composer that she had known so well. But she will be remembered for her generosity and warmth of spirit, combined with intellectual curiosity and a sense of fun.
Jack died in 2010. Sue is survived by me, Polly and Simon, and by five grandchildren.
