Today, Britten Pears Arts is a major arts organisation with an international reputation, staffed by professional administrators, programmers, educators and fundraisers, promoting year-round activity at Snape Maltings and elsewhere in East Suffolk. Almost eighty years ago, when the inaugural Aldeburgh Festival was launched in 1948, it was a very different story: one full-time member of staff and an army of willing volunteers.

The origins of the Aldeburgh Festival are well known. Driving back from an English Opera Group tour in Europe during the summer of 1947, Peter Pears voiced a thought: rather than travelling halfway across continental Europe to perform in other people’s festivals, ‘why not have our own festival at home in Aldeburgh?’, where Britten and Pears were to move that September. The wheels were put in motion, a public meeting called and a Festival Council of local worthies (including the mayor and the vicar) formed. Much of the donkey work – amazingly, given the pressures on his time – was undertaken by Britten himself, with some assistance provided by the third member of the founding triumvirate, Eric Crozier, librettist of Saint Nicolas and Albert Herring. Measuring up the Jubilee Hall, working out seating plans for the Parish Church, choosing and costing programmes, engaging artists, publicity and tickets, all needed to be done.

Into these feverish preparations stepped Elizabeth Sweeting, a lively, intelligent, independent woman then in her mid-thirties, and working for the English Opera Group that Britten and others had founded in 1947. During the war Sweeting had taught English Literature at London University and, while a safe academic career could have followed in peace time, her overwhelming passion for theatre and the performing arts took her away from teaching, first to West End theatres and working for the impresario Binkie Beaumont. A secondment to Glyndebourne’s London-based box office gave her valuable financial experience and brought her into the orbit of Britten and his circle – Britten’s first chamber operas, The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring, were premiered in the Sussex opera house in 1946 and 1947 respectively –  and she joined the skeleton staff of the EOG. After observing her considerable organisational skills for the EOG, Britten invited her to be the first General Manager of the Aldeburgh Festival. She worked closely with Britten and Pears, administering all aspects of the first eight Aldeburgh Festivals – from booking artists to tearing ticket stubs – beginning with the inaugural festival in 1948.

She was to become one of the most significant facilitators in the performing arts in the post-war era, and a pioneering figure in the new profession of arts administrator. Her tenure as Manager of the Oxford Playhouse in the 1960s and 1970s was followed by five years as Director of the Arts Council of South Australia. Her inspirational guide, Theatre Administration (1969), was a vital handbook for those following her.

Justin Vickers and I have edited Sweeting’s honest and lively memoir of her Aldeburgh years, written in the mid-1980s, to be published complete for the first time by the Bittern Press during this year’s Aldeburgh Festival. It offers an insider’s account of what those early festivals were like – charting both their highs and their lows. The volume also includes most of the extant correspondence between Sweeting and Britten and Pears. Beginning in 1948, it extends from her time working at Aldeburgh through to her Oxford years and her period in Australia.

Sweeting’s memoir and the correspondence are complemented by a contextualising introduction and detailed annotations throughout, and there are many photographs from those early Festivals, together with facsimiles of previously unseen documents.

The book – Elizabeth Sweeting: The Best and Happiest Days – is essential reading for anyone interested in Britten, Pears and the Aldeburgh Festival. Bittern Press will be launching Elizabeth Sweeting: The Best and Happiest Days during the forthcoming Aldeburgh Festival at a free event on 18 June (10:30–16:30) at The Red House, together with Painting Britten, Bittern Press’s book accompanying  Jane Mackay’s major new exhibition of paintings inspired by Britten’s music. All are welcome.