History of the trust
Then came the 1914-18 War. M and E. as they were best known to friends and family, were by then 30 and 28, not married nor employed, living in London during the winter and in the summer in St Anthony in Roseland, where in 1910, after the death of their father, their mother Edith Pinsent had bought the 2 converted Coastguards cottages. 
The previous owner, an artist, had added the fine wooden studio at the back which was to become so significant in future years. Here Aunt Edie and her 3 daughters could escape from town and entertain the extended family of Radford and Pinsent cousins with sailing and music. My mother was one of the cousins who came every year.
During the war M and E ran a community in Norfolk for families of Belgian refugees for one and a half years until the men were all absorbed in wartime employment, then they went out to Corsica with the British Red Cross to run camps for Serbian refugees fleeing from Yugoslavia – and finally both served in the women’s land army in Cornwall. In 1919 they decided to remain in Cornwall and build their lives here. They record the moment when that decision occurred in their book Musical Adventures in Cornwall. I make no apology for making extensive use of Maisie and Evelyn’s 
own words today. Apart from the fact that it is primary source material it is also distinguished by an inimitable voice which was well charcterised by Frank Howes when he said in his foreword, ‘Observe how ‘I’ and ‘we’ are interchangeable in their narrative. It is a pity that English grammar has no dual number like Greek, for here would be the happiest and most idiomatic occasion for its use – we two’.
They write, ‘So many of our beginnings in various fields of music in Cornwall are associated with some place or incident which we should never forget, as on 
that golden afternoon when, rowing up the Carrick Roads to buy plums, we finally decided not to go back to London but to stay in Cornwall and make our music there. When the equinoctial spring tides had washed away the last traces of the summer visitors, and only the winter steamboat service was running and Cornwall settled down to her old ways, we felt indeed a part of her as never before.’