"On a clear day, you could have heard her across the English Channel" - thus joked Sir Thomas Beecham. But the booming voice of Contralto Clara Butt was the stuff of legend. At one audition, she boomed out a low E and frightened the examiners! She gained her DBE as a result of the WWI concerts that she organised. In later life, she had cancer of the spine, and made many recordings from her wheelchair.