Joan Hammond

Dame Joan Hilda Hood Hammond, DBE, CMG (24 May 1912 – 26 November 1996) was an Australian operatic soprano, singing coach and champion golfer.

Joan Hilda Hood Hammond was born and baptised in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her father, Samuel Hood, was born in England. He married his first wife Edith, then left her and took up with Joan's mother, Hilda Blandford, by whom he also had two sons in England. He informally added Hammond to his name, and they represented themselves as "Mr and Mrs Samuel H. Hammond", although they were not married at the time.

Hammond was born in May 1912, not long after the family had arrived in New Zealand. She was only 6 months old when her family moved again, to Sydney, Australia. Her parents finally married in Sydney on 25 May 1927, the day after her 15th birthday, although there is no evidence Samuel's first wife Edith had died by that time, or that they had ever divorced.

Hammond attended Pymble Ladies' College and excelled in both sports and music. She studied violin and singing at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music in Sydney, and played violin for three years with the Sydney Philharmonic Orchestra before studying singing in Vienna in 1936.

Hammond won the women's junior golf championship for New South Wales in 1929, and the women's amateur state championship in 1932, 1934, and 1935. When she became well known as a golfer, she started to sign her name as "Joan Hood Hammond", and newspaper articles would sometimes hyphenate this as "Joan Hood-Hammond"; however, she later dropped the "Hood".

An encounter with Lady Gowrie, the wife of the then Governor of New South Wales, Lord Gowrie, made the young Joan Hammond's dreams of studying in Europe possible. She would often refer to Lady Gowrie as her "guardian angel". Hammond's fellow golfers in New South Wales raised enough money for her to leave Australia in 1936 to study in Vienna. She also studied with Dino Borgioli in London. She toured widely, and became noted particularly for her Puccini roles. She returned to Australia for concert tours in 1946, 1949 and 1953, and starred in the second Elizabethan Theatre Trust opera season in 1957. She undertook world concert tours between 1946 and 1961. Her autobiography, A Voice, a Life, was published in 1970.

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