Melba’s Girls

Abstract

In January 1919 Melba returned to London to prepare for the first post-war Covent Garden season. It was one of the coldest months she had ever known and the once luxurious liner in which she sailed from New York prophetically offered her little comfort with its war-worn paintwork and broken portholes. She was physically and emotionally chilled. She found London a ‘new, untidy, haphazard metropolis, so grey and so strange, from the London which I had known’.