at Cambridge mentions that her extensive diaries reveal a very unhappy marriage, but there is no word about it in her typescript autobiography, which she had intended for publication. In this source she describes her early career from the mid-1890s thus: "For ten years, I might say twenty years and more, songs, piano soli, quartettes, trios, song cycles, hymns, all flowed from my happy pen. They were so prolific, these years, that I sometimes, if tired, feared to look at a poetry book lest a poem might strike me and set itself instantaneously to music in my head, and I should be inclined to run away and set it down.” An active member to and benefactress of the Pan-Celtic movement which existed from 1899 until c. 1910, and one of the attendants of the Pan-Celtic Congress of Caernarfon of 1904 (who was photographed there in Celtic revival dress and modern dress), she was made the first woman President of the National Eisteddfod of Wales in 1906, with fellow presidents of the calibre like the Lord Mayor and the Bishop of London and two lords. A few years later she was also made a "Bardess of Wales", i.e. a member of the Welsh Gorsedd of the Bards of the Isle of Britain, under the title "Harp of Ireland". She was the first woman to conduct at the Royal Albert Hall. And in 1910 she was a V.I.P. at a banquet given in Dublin by Lord Aberdeen, the then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to honour 'Irish Women of Letters'. Her biggest single commercial success was when she won the competition for the Prize Song for the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902. More than 300 composers sent in their contribution, and Alicia Needham went away with the £100 award for a song which she wrote in a last-minute fashion while she was accidentally staying in a room at Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel. The death of her husband in 1920 meant a serious change in Alicia Needham's course of life. She was forced to sell the house and furniture, paintings, books and china and had to move into a considerably smaller flat in a less fashionable district of the city. She writes in her autobiography (p. 67-8): "[...] my music-room shelves left empty, and four tons of books sent away to storage, all the best things and treasures sold, I only keeping enough