I was 15 when I learned of Ann Drummond-Grant’s death. I’d written to Bridget D’Oyly Carte about my dream of meeting her and joining the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. The final paragraph of the reply read, devastatingly: “I am sorry to tell you that Ann Drummond-Grant died in September 1959, shortly after leaving the Company, so recordings are all we have left of her voice.”

For decades, all I knew about Drummie’s death was that she died, and that her death came as a shock to many. It took me decades to learn what she died of—breast cancer—and what treatments she was given. People didn’t talk about cancer in those days, except in whispers. Doctors spoke in euphemisms. The grimmer the prognosis, the more evasive the language.

Hence, her husband, Isidore Godfrey, did not name her disease in his letter to a family friend. Describing a relapse, he said, “the trouble burst out again, and worse than before”. “Trouble” is the word British doctors used with patients and their families. A carcinoma on an x-ray became “a spot of trouble.” I’ve come to doubt that either Drummie or her husband heard the word “cancer” the entire time she was ill.

From Goddie’s letter and interviews with people who knew her, I was able to piece together a timeline of Drummie’s illness for my book, That Voice. But what I wrote there was not quite correct. Charles Hayter, MD, a Canadian radiation oncologist, gave me new insight into her treatments, which were brutal—and probably futile from the start. (He’s written a marvelous memoir about the human aspects of radiation oncology. Info at www.charleshayter.com)

The first indication of Drummie’s cancer was in the summer of 1956, when she had an unspecified illness and underwent an unspecified treatment. The standard of care for breast cancer in the 1950s was radical mastectomy. Drummie seems not to have had that surgery. Why not? Conceivably she refused the mutilation and sought an alternative. Or perhaps the cancer was deemed inoperable. Whatever the case, she was likely treated with deep radiation therapy (DXR), which, depending on the machinery used, might have left her terribly blistered. But she returned to work that fall, and seemed fine for two years.

In late autumn, 1958, she was hospitalized again. It was said she was seriously ill and needed abdominal surgery. According to Goddie’s letter, though, she underwent deep radiation, not surgery. Again: Why? Dr. Hayter told me that the ovaries of breast cancer patients were irradiated to stop the production of estrogen, which feeds the cancer—not as a cure, but as a means of slowing its progression. (Today, this is accomplished with hormone-blocking drugs such as Tamoxifen.) Drummie was out of commission for three months. She returned to work in December, 1958, and managed to get through the London season by sheer force of will. The photo above is from the season’s last night. She’s at far right; her face is visibly thin.

By May 1959, she was hospitalized again. According to Goddie’s letter, she “received two different and very painful treatments”, which did not help. Dr. Hayter speculates that at this point, they may have tried inserting radium needles into the cancer, which would have been painful indeed. The treatment, whatever it was, left her so anemic that she needed six pints of blood. This may also have been caused by the spread of cancer into the bone marrow, which would itself have been horribly painful.

Shortly before she died, she was subjected to a final surgery, the removal of her adrenal glands. I speculated In my book that this was because the cancer had spread there. But the adrenals also produce estrogen, and Dr. Hayter tells me that in the late 50s, they would have been removed as a last-ditch effort to control the cancer.

Goddie’s letter, however, indicates that he still had hopes that the treatment would work. He wasn’t told it was a last-ditch effort, and I’m pretty sure Drummie wasn’t told either. So which is more cruel: the torturous treatment, or the fact that the patient and her husband weren’t told that it wouldn’t work? All the doctors knew perfectly well what the prognosis was. But they couldn’t and wouldn’t say so.