History of the trust
Although it was clearly a significant precursor of the Falmouth Opera Singers, the Roseland Concerts were not cited by Maisie and Evelyn when asked “How was it that you started producing opera?” They would respond instead by saying, “Well there was a pageant in Falmouth and the producer was bitten by a rat!”. This was the Falmouth pageant of, I think, 1922 in which all the surrounding villages were to contribute one item. Two weeks before the event the SOS came through. They recall, ‘Having little idea of how serious a rat bite might be or of what a turning point in our lives this would turn out to be, we did not at 
first take this very seriously but promised we would do any thing to help, only to find that the whole production, which was in danger of falling to pieces, was in our hands. Pageants were just then the passion. We had had a little, a very little, experience of what such dramatic experiments 
could mean; something had to be done and we did produce some semblance of order out of what appeared to be chaos. The costumes only arrived on the same day as the show and were retrieved from the railway station by agitated messengers; the actors fell on them and dressed at random; two distinct Queen Henrietta Marias appeared to promenade the gardens at one point; the audience seated themselves firmly on the green lawn that was to be our stage, and after all attempts to move them had failed, were finally cleared from it by the beginning of the pageant, which consisted of a charge of Saxons….When it was over and we were packing up the idea came to both of us: why not do Gluck’s Orpheus?’
