from A to A so deliberately as to allow every step to be scrutinised, had to confess to a marked "break" on F sharp, or thereabouts.' In July 1896 he took part in the first performance of Liza Lehmann's In a Persian Garden, with Mme Albani, Hilda Wilson and David Bispham, the composer accompanying. In the second series of Promenade Concerts, 1896, he made an appearance in a concert of nationalist flavour with the soprano Fanny Moody and organist Walter Hedgecock, and a choir of 400 boys. In 1897, at the sixth concert of the Royal Philharmonic Society (dedicated to 'Her Majesty's Record Reign'), he sang Frederick Cowen's Scena The Dream of Endymion under the composer's baton. He was with David Bispham at the thirteenth biennial Festival at Cincinnati (under Theodore Thomas), in 1898. A grand occasion of 1902 was the British and American Festival Peace Concert at The Crystal Palace, London, in commemoration of the South African War, at which Ben Davies was among the British soloists led by Mme Albani, including Clara Butt and Charles Santley, and (for America) Bispham, Ella Russell and Belle Cole. He and Ella Russell, with Ada Crossley and David Ffrangcon-Davies, that year opened the Sheffield Festival (under Henry J. Wood) with a performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah. Nearly a decade later, he was among the soloists (with Agnes Nicholls, Ellen Beck, Edna Thornton, Thorpe Davies and Robert Radford) in J. S. Bach's Mass in B minor at the Queen's Hall, in the penultimate concert of the 1911 London Music Festival. That year he also toured Australia, his accompanist being Edward Goll, who married and settled in Melbourne and became a noted piano teacher there. In May 1912 he was, with Cicely Gleeson-White, Ada Crossley and Herbert Brown, in the soloist group with the London Choral Society to sing Beethoven's Choral Symphony for the Royal Philharmonic under the baton of Arthur Nikisch. In 1916 he sang an aria from Der Freischütz under Beecham for the Royal Philharmonic, and he sang in the July 1922 Centenary celebration concerts for the Royal Academy of Music – again in the Queen's Hall. Recordings The earliest recordings by Davies are Pathé brown wax cylinders from the mid-1890s . Davies had an early start among British singers in making gramophone records, beginning in 1901. Joe Batten noted:Sir Landon Ronald persuaded [him] to make his first records. He had laughed at