My friend Kathleen Johnson, who has died aged 82, was a musician, composer and songwriter who dedicated most of her life to working for the Moral Re-Armament movement. She wrote many songs for theatre productions that toured the world for the movement, from India to Canada and the US.
Kathleen was born in Whitley Bay, near Newcastle, to Anne Johnson (nee Beswick) and her husband, Fred, a tax inspector and Methodist lay preacher. The family moved to Leeds, Cornwall and eventually London with his work.
She attended Horwell girls school, Launceston, and then won a scholarship to Queenswood school, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, a Methodist school.
Music was central to Kathleen’s life from her early years. From 1952 she studied piano, violin and composition at the Royal Academy of Music, graduating in 1956. Her mentor, Ernest Read, wrote: “She has been one of the very best students I have ever had. She is a fine musician.”
Kathleen had visited the Moral Re-Armament movement centre in Caux, Switzerland, with her parents as a teenager. After graduating from the Royal Academy, she returned there and aged 21, committed herself to its moral principles.
She taught music at Benenden school, Kent, for three years and then at the Chatelard School, Les Avants, near Montreux in Switzerland, and in 1960 she made the key decision to work for the MRA. The movement used large musical shows to promote its ideals. She spent six years in India from 1963, where she composed songs for a musical revue, India Arise, and coached the young people who took part. The show toured India and was then performed in Switzerland, the Netherlands and the UK.
Returning to the UK in 1969 when her father became ill, she worked on theatre projects, the first an adaptation of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald for the Westminster theatre, London. She returned to India for six months in 1973 to work on another revue, Song of Asia.
In 1973 she wrote the music for GB, a satirical review, at the Westminster, and in 1979 composed the music for Poor Man Rich Man, about the life of St Francis of Assisi, written by playwright Hugh Williams and starring the French mime artist Michel Orphelin. It premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe and toured in Europe, Canada and the US.
Through her work with the MRA, Kathleen met the Essex county cricketer Dickie Dodds. They married in 1985 and made their home in St Neots, Cambridgeshire. After Dickie’s death in 2001 she moved to Godalming, Surrey. Kathleen continued composing and giving piano concerts.
She was generous with her time and talent, often writing special pieces of music for friends.
She is survived by her stepson, Michael Dodds.
This obituary first appeared in The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/17/kathleen-johnson-obituary)
English
