Elster Jamieson Kay was born in Swansea in 1917. After reading History at Selwyn College, Cambridge (BA 1939, MA 1943) he became an opera singer, and in 1963 published a well-regarded book on bel canto. During the early 1960s he worked on the script of a prospective film, ‘The Golden Journey’, ‘made up by me from the play Hassan by J.E. Flecker, the music of Delius, and original material’, and dedicated to the memory of Sir Thomas Beecham, who died in March 1961. Kay presented the original script to Cambridge University Library in October 1963, while he was living in Cambridge. He died at Lancaster in 1980. The film seems never to have been made.