AS booking opens for this year’s Three Choirs Festival in Here-ford, June Chase, who last year celebrated her golden anniversary as a founding member of the Friends of Hereford Three Choirs Festival Club, is preparing for this year’s club, expanded to offer a post-concert facility in the Zimmerman building.

June was initially persuaded by Ruth Franklin to give her a hand making tea and coffee for visitors and performers at the 1958 Three Choirs Festival.

“I was just married and had moved to Hereford, where my husband I were both school teachers,” recalls June, who taught art, design and architecture.

“I played tennis with Ruth and she said ‘You’ve got plenty of energy. Will you come and help me with the Three Choirs Festival?’ “In those days, the festival club was in just one room at the top floor of the Cathedral school and the only water was from a Victorian tap in the playground.

“So I carried up buckets of water to the top of the building to make the tea and coffee – tea was 3d and coffee was a shilling.”

Looking back, June admits to having been daunted when Ruth declared at the end of the 1958 festival: “We must be able to do something better than this. What about going to the Shire Hall?”

June said: “All I could think was ‘Oh my goodness, it’s enormous. What on earth are we going to do?’”

The move to Shire Hall proved a permanent one and, since its creation and the days of buckets of water, the festival club has grown into an all-day, week-long ‘festival home’ for visitors, artistes and chorus members, an operation organised with military-style precision by June.

“Worcester and Gloucester don’t do anything on the scale that Hereford does,” June says. “We’re known as the friendly festival. There’s a wonderful atmosphere that you can’t buy and you can’t manufacture, and some people only come to Hereford because it’s their favourite.”

Every day of the festival, the club offers lunches and suppers, snacks and drinks as well as a place to sit – or even catch up on sleep or to ‘put on their glad rags’ – with June marshalling a roster of about 400 volunteers, the youngest in their teens, the oldest in their 90s.

“We find something for everyone who wants to help,” she says. “One year a journalist from The Times went into the sandwich room, where some of the more elderly volunteers were making sandwiches. He never got anywhere near the Cathedral once they started sharing their reminscences with him.

“One lady told him about the day her mother told her to go and help Mr Elgar push his bicycle up Eign Hill.”

Another of June’s abiding memories is of the time that Roy Massey asked her to look after a visitor before a concert.

“And there stood William Mathias with his beautiful Celtic face and shock of wiry hair and I remember that he was very, very nervous before his commissioned work was performed.”

After 51 years, June is “hoping that someone will come along to take it on for 2012”, not least because she has only ever managed to see one concert when the festival comes to Hereford.

“I always go to the last one, because by that point, it’s time to clear up and pack up so I don’t feel I need to be on hand as I do the rest of the time.”

“Every year as you do it, you think, this is the best. Last time I sat at the last concert, I thought it was the most marvellous experience ... but I think that every time.”

The Friends of Hereford Three Choirs Festival raises considerable sums for the festival, much of it from the club.

“This year we have supported them with £30,000, £10,000 of which sponsors the concert on Tuesday evening, Haydn’s The Seasons.”

The next fund-raising event is a coffee morning and plant sale on Thursday, May 14, from 10am to noon.

n Find booking details and a downloadable festival brochure at 3choirs.org.