Hi Folks Please join me in welcoming somebody named Booth to the List. Hope you going to be very happy with us. I'm not sure what surname you are researching, so have used your surname as a guide to add a snippet of news from an Eastern Cape Newspaper. Herald, 8 Dec 2003 Hugh Baakens' Diary Yesterday's 'Sweethearts in Song' charmed PE [edited] Two very senior staff members were raging at each other down the corridor at Newspaper House, the home of the Herald. Both men had a great interest, and involvement, in local music. One more as a critic, the other as an enthusiastic choral singer and sometimes as a critic, too. The row was over a soloist in an oratorio, a singer with a very famous name: Webster BOOTH. He'd been performing at the Port Elizabeth oratorio festival, and one party to the quarrel had written a crit making plain that BOOTH was past his best and ought to retire. The other man was a member of that choir and he felt that the critique had been unkind or, at least disrespectful, to a great name in the world of music, which, of course, BOOTH, in his heyday, had been. The BOOTHs were indeed something special. Year after year, Webster BOOTH and his charming and talented wife, Anne ZIEGLER, would come to Port Elizabeth so he could participate in the Messiah, and sometimes the BOOTHs would stage a duet soiree of their own. Their gracious old-fashioned stage manner towards each other, bows and curtseys much to the fore, charmed local audiences as they had charmed their multitudinous fans all over the world in earlier years. Webster BOOTH would be dapper in white tie and tails, and Anne ZIEGLER superbly coifed in low-cut evening gowns, her skirts a-spangle over crinolines. Their manners towards each other would not have gone amiss at Louis XIV's Versailles. The BOOTHs didn't have any children, but they enjoyed what they did best, finding pleasure in serenading one another and their loyal band of fans. Sometime in the 1950s, it seems, they came to retire at Knysna with all the accoutrements of stardom, including fluffy dogs. But as old age crept on, they decided to return to their native England (despite her somewhat Germanic stage name, Anne had been born Irene Frances EASTWOOD in Liverpool in 1910). Their last public performance together came a year before BOOTH's death in 1983. Now news has come, via London's Daily Telegraph, that Anne, too, has died, aged 93. In its splendid obituary, it said: "Her gentle soprano and his wholesome tenor were a welcome comfort to radio listeners during and after the war years when their romantic light-classical duets became favourites of the Light Programme''. "Billed as 'Sweethearts in Song', Anne ZIEGLER and her husband specialised in popular operetta and musical comedy. Wearing evening dress, and with hands clasped, the couple would gaze into each other's eyes trilling such tunes as 'Only A Rose', 'We'll Gather Lilacs' and 'If You Were the Only Girl in the World'." The Daily Telegraph could not resist a tease about their performance in 'The Vagabond King', in which BOOTHS's character had to make an escape from a Napoleonic prison in the company of the character played by ZIEGLER. "There is plenty of good singing," it commented at the time. Mr. BOOTH and Miss ZIEGLER frequently risk their lives by bursting into loud song when they ought to be escaping." This charming couple's 20 years in South Africa were a blessing to many, not least Port Elizabethans to whom they gave much pleasure. Best wishes Becky