of the Celanese Corporation of America and baritone singer, in 1931. The following year she returned to singing and recorded Siegfried with Lauritz Melchior at Covent Garden. Between 1932 and 1935 she sang at Covent Garden, Sadler's Wells and at the Promenade Concerts under Sir Henry Wood, with the London Philharmonic under Sir Thomas Beecham and with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the first worldwide hook-up broadcast. Her regular accompanist was Harold Craxton. At Covent Garden in 1932 she was Isolde in Tristan und Isolde and Brunnhilde in "Siegfried" opposite Lauritz Melchior, the only time they appeared together. She was Tosca, an unlikely Carmen, sang in Mendelssohn's Elijah and gave Lieder and song recitals. Leaving England finally in 1935, she found that she had lost the tour to the new sensation, Kirsten Flagstad (but she remained an unstinting admirer of the great Norwegian). Easton's last appearance on the operatic stage was as Brünnhilde in Die Walküre in New York on 28 February 1936. In an interview in New York in 1935 she suggested the reason for her absence from the Metropolitan Opera: "It was an accident during a performance of Carmen in England a year ago which incapacitated me for a number of months last year. Reeling in Carmen's death-throes, I happened to catch my heel in the skirt of my dress and fell, twisting my spine, directly in the path of the curtain. The audience hadn't the remotest idea that the apparently lifeless Carmen who lay there was almost lifeless – and indeed, I actually would have been two minutes later if I had not retained sufficient consciousness to edge out of the path of the descending curtain on its way to deposit about a ton of iron weighting on my head. However, all these things must be taken in one's stride". On one occasion, Florence Easton was engaged to sing the title role in Madama Butterfly in Washington, D.C., a place celebrated for the strictest child labour laws of any city in the country. The child 'Trouble' (Butterfly's son who appears only in the last act), is always recruited locally, and a resourceful stage manager from somewhere produced a midget. Nobody told Mme. Easton, lest she be a bit squeamish. It is customary for the child playing Trouble to be introduced to the soprano at the first intermission to get him (more often her) accustomed to the Japanese