Hugh Cobbe, Chairman of the National Folk Music Fund, reports on the formal winding up of the Fund
The National Folk Music Fund was established on 21st July 1958 with three eminent trustees: Sir Colin Anderson, a shipping magnate on the board of the Royal Opera House, Sir Arthur Bryant the historian and Dame Margot Fonteyn-Arias, the renowned ballet dancer.
The Fund, whose overall object was ‘to provide repair maintain or preserve books or recordings and recording apparatus or films and film apparatus or any combination thereof as additions to or forming part of any public library in England wholly or partly devoted to folk dances or folk music or both and in particular the Cecil Sharp Library’, was started with a donation of £50, probably provided by Ralph Vaughan Williams who, as President of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, launched the fund very shortly before his death. It was primarily intended to create an independent endowment fund for the Cecil Sharp Library which, immediately after his death, was renamed the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library in his memory. The Chairman, at the time I joined the Fund as a trustee in 1988, was Ursula Vaughan Williams and I succeeded her as Chairman after her death in 2007.
During its lifetime the NFMF, whose resources were always limited, gave grants for projects connected with maintaining and conserving folk music collections in public libraries and for carrying out research based on them. However, in line with the fund’s formal objective, priority was always given to supporting the work of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (VWML), though grants were also given to the British Library and for occasional personal research projects.
Eventually in 2016 the trustees decided that the time had come to wind up the Fund and pass over its assets to help assure the future of the VWML. Agreement was reached with the English Folk Dance and Song Society as to how the money would be used, a major component of which was the refurbishment of the Library completed in 2018. While most assets were handed over to EFDSS in 2017 and 2018, the pandemic led to a delay in formally winding up the fund. However, this eventually took place in 2023 when the small balance of assets remaining was passed to EFDSS while the trust’s records were placed for preservation in the VWML. Thus the 65-year long period of support provided by the National Folk Music Fund to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library and other folk music collections in public institutions was brought to an end.
The final trustees were Hugh Cobbe (Chairman), Martin Williams (Treasurer), Siân Griffiths (Secretary) and Janet Topp-Fargion (of the British Library).
