The most public part of the varied cultural life of my mother-in-law, Eilidh Urbach, who has died aged 104, came as a soprano in the 1950s. Singing as Eilidh McNab, she worked with Benjamin Britten and performed regularly on BBC radio, and she continued to be involved in artistic events until the last years of her life.
Born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, into a musical household, she was the daughter of Charles McNab, a grocer who sang and played the cello, and his wife, Nellie (nee Fitzpatrick). Eilidh displayed artistic and musical talent from an early age and, after leaving Kirkcaldy high school in 1939, studied at Edinburgh College of Art, commuting by train across the Forth Bridge, and then teaching art in a school.
