Betty Humby Beecham

Betty Humby Beecham, Lady Beecham (1908 – 2 September 1958) was a British pianist, who married the English conductor and impresario Sir Thomas Beecham in February 1943. She was 29 years his junior.

Betty Humby was the daughter of Daniel Morgan Humby, a dentist and member of the Royal College of Surgeons. At the age of 10, she was the youngest ever person to win a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. When she was 14, she taught 30 pupils of her own, and two years later she became a piano professor, under Myra Hess at Tobias Matthay's London music school. Later she married an Anglican parson, Rev. H. Cashel Thomas, who in the early 1940s was vicar of St. Philip's in London. They had a son, Sir Jeremy Cashel Thomas, born June 1, 1931.

With the outbreak of World War II, Betty Humby Thomas organized concerts in British cathedrals. In 1940, she left Britain for the United States with her young son Jeremy. While in the U.S. she hoped to raise money for London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, where her brother was chief surgeon.

Having met in the 1930s in England, in the U.S., Betty Humby Thomas and Sir Thomas Beecham were reintroduced by Andrew Schulhof, who managed each of them. He later arranged for them to perform the Delius piano concerto together in June 1941 at a studio concert for CBS.

Betty Humby Thomas married Sir Thomas January 19, 1943, one month after his divorce was granted from wife Utica Celestia Welles. According to John Lucas's biography, Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, they were married in secret before a police justice in Manhattan. They lived in New York City at 31 East 79th Street.

Her best-known recording is probably that of the Delius concerto, with her husband conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, in 1946, shortly after he had founded it. This recording of October 1946 replaced an earlier version, made with the London Philharmonic Orchestra on October 3, 1945, which was not released.

According to the Lucas biography, her performance of the Delius concerto at Lafayette, Indiana, on December 1, 1950, marked the end of Lady Betty's playing career.