tour of Switzerland which included the Lucerne Festival. Towards the end of August, as war became increasingly likely, she broke off the trip and returned home. After the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939, Holst worked for the Bloomsbury House Refugee Committee, which supported German and Austrian refugee musicians interned under emergency regulations. In January 1940 she accepted a position under a scheme organised by the Pilgrim Trust, to act as one of six "music travellers", whose brief was to boost morale by encouraging musical activities in rural communities. Holst was assigned to cover the west of England, a huge area stretching from Oxfordshire to Cornwall. When the government set up the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), responsibility for the music travellers passed to that body. With little practical support from CEMA, Holst's organisational talents, according to her friend Ursula Vaughan Williams, "developed brilliantly". According to Holst's own account, her duties included conducting local brass bands and Women's Institute choirs ("fourteen very old women in hats sitting round the edge of a dark, empty hideous tin hut"), and organising sing-songs for evacuee children. She arranged performances by professional groups, and what she termed "drop-in-and-sing" festivals in which anyone could join. She wrote of "idyllic days" spent over cups of tea, discussing the hopes and dreams of would-be music makers. Her compositional activity in these years was limited by time and pressures of work, but she produced two recorder trios—the Offley and Deddington suites—and made numerous arrangements for female voices of carols and traditional songs. Dartington In 1938, Holst had visited Dartington Hall, a progressive school and crafts community near Totnes in Devon, which had been founded in 1925 by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. In 1941–42, while travelling for CEMA in Devon and Cornwall, she was invited by the Elmhirsts to make her base at Dartington. In the summer of 1942 she was persuaded by Christopher Martin, the centre's administrator, to resign her CEMA role and work at Dartington. He had in mind a music course, "the sort of thing that your father did in the old days at Morley College". Beginning in 1943, Holst established a one-year course, initially designed to train young women to organise amateur orchestras and musical events in rural communities. Gradually it developed into a more general musical education for a broader student intake. Under Holst's leadership the course quickly