Mary Berry (conductor)

Mary Berry, CBE (also known as Sister Thomas More, C.R.S.A., 29 June 1917 – 1 May 2008) was a canoness regular, noted choral conductor and musicologist. She was an authority on the performance of Gregorian chant, founding the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge to revive this ancient style of music.

Berry was born in 1917, the daughter of a chemist who was vice-president of Downing College. As a young woman, she went to the Perse School before spending a year at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, where she became a pupil of the conductor and teacher Nadia Boulanger. On returning home, she was awarded a Turle scholarship at Girton College, where she studied with Thurston Dart, but continued to study during her vacations under Boulanger.

An interest in plainchant was encouraged by Berry's supervisor, the Trinity College don Hubert Stanley Middleton. After receiving the university's John Stuart of Rannoch Scholarship in Sacred Music, she took her parents to the Abbey of Solesmes in France, which for decades had been a leader in reviving Gregorian chant.

In 1939, upon graduation from university, Berry joined the Red Cross and nursed at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. In March of the following year, she went to Belgium, where she became a novice with the Canonesses Regular of Jupille, under the religious name of Mother Thomas More. But two months later the canonesses were forced to flee the invading Germans on the last train to Paris, having wrapped their few possessions in red blankets. They moved to a former Cistercian monastery in Dijon—in Vichy France, where they resumed their monastic way of life and taught local children. Eventually a fellow novice, the daughter of an ambassador, obtained travel documents for the community to take refuge in Lisbon, where they started up two schools.

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