Helen Hamlyn is the lady of the first night

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Cheap dates: Elina Garanca as Carmen in the first of this year's Paul Hamlyn Performances at the Royal Opera House

Social conscience: Lady Hamlyn pictured at her home, says that doing charity work at a young age made her realise

When Lady Helen Hamlyn first sponsored a night at the Royal Opera House for people who had never before seen opera, let alone been to Covent Garden, she met an Afro-Caribbean woman whose gratitude both delighted and shocked her. “We were chatting afterwards and I remember it very well. She said she hadn't thought she was allowed to come into Covent Garden. And that was the word she used: allowed'. Well!”

Lady Hamlyn leans back in her spotless taupe-coloured sofa and widens her eyes in astonishment. “It really hit me because I suppose I took the Opera House for granted, and I didn't think anyone could think they weren't allowed in.”

That was back in 1986 — the bad old days, pre-refurbishment, of desperate backstage conditions, an extraordinarily elitist image and incipient financial crisis. But the night itself was a celebration, a 60th birthday present from Lady Hamlyn to her husband Lord Paul Hamlyn, the multi-millionaire publisher, philanthropist, opera-lover and, later, patron of New Labour. The tradition of heavily subsidised Paul Hamlyn Nights continued for the next 12 years, helping 250,000 people experience live opera for the first time, but ended in 1999 when “Paul was really desperately ill” with cancer and Parkinson's disease and spent much of his time in France.

Lord Hamlyn died in 2001 but this week, as those nights of affordable opera are revived in a much-modernised ROH, Lady Hamlyn has “felt his spirit” in the auditorium once again. On Saturday, the opera season opened with Carmen, starring Roberto Alagna and Elina Garanca, before an audience who paid as little as £7.50 a ticket (with a top price of £30). Last night, the ballet season kicked off with Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling featuring Carlos Acosta and Edward Watson [see review, left], with similar box-office prices.

The scheme has not been without its critics, however. The means by which those tickets were sold — all the seats at both performances were made available to, gasp, readers of The Sun, theoretically a ready-made audience of opera and ballet virgins — has provoked a certain amount snobbery in opera circles.

“It's true a lot of my friends said, Hang on Helen, how could you do it with The Sun?'” says Lady Hamlyn. “But that's the whole point, isn't it? I don't want to subsidise tickets for people who already go to Covent Garden.

“We have such incredible arts institutions in this country — the best in the world — and it's not that a lot of people can't go to them, they jolly well don't go. Now of course there are some for whom it really is too expensive — and let's face it, it is — but there are others who just feel it's not for them. If we don't break down these barriers and make people understand that these places are open to everybody then some of these institutions just aren't going to survive. And that would be a huge loss.”

Lady Hamlyn is a little in danger of sounding like Lady Bountiful here, bringing high culture to the great unwashed mob and insisting that it will do them good. “People talk about culture as though it's a kind of bad medicine,” she counters, “but it's a hugely enriching and important part of people's lives. This is just one way to help bring it to people who don't otherwise have the opportunity.”

It is also, of course, the fundamental philosophy upon which the populist Lord Hamlyn built his publishing career. “The main objective of his life's work was to bring books to people who didn't buy books,” she says.

I meet Lady Hamlyn in her extraordinary modernist home plonked in the heart of Chelsea. It is a severe, box-like structure from the outside, designed by Erich Mendelsohn in the Thirties but the interior is full of curves and soft carpets, thin-planked wooden floors and huge glass windows.

She is 75 this year, dressed today in bold red and black. You immediately sense a fierceness as she bustles about her downstairs study, re-arranging a schedule so precise that she might well be planning a military assault. Her butler brings tea; her secretary is upstairs; and a third assistant later sees me out. The house feels hugely efficient, smooth-running, muted. The management and design of the Hamlyns' homes was always Helen's job while her husband was alive.

“He bought this house the afternoon he came to see it. Paul never agonised over anything; he always knew just what to do. He was incredibly intelligent and such fun to be with.” For an instant, she falls silent and looks away into the garden. “It's hard for me to talk about him now because I just burst into tears. We had 30 years together and [his loss] will always be raw.”

The year after his death, Lady Hamlyn also continued to donate to the Labour Party (Lord Hamlyn became reluctantly famous at the end of his life when it emerged that he had given £2 million to the party), but for the past eight years has refused to give anything. She still counts Tony Blair as a friend, and is particularly close to David Blunkett, whose wedding to Dr Margaret Williams last weekend she missed because of Carmen at the ROH. “He's incredibly intelligent ... he just happened to fall in love with someone who was highly unsuitable and did irreparable damage to his career. Vis a vis Carmen,” she says, alluding to Blunkett's affair with Kimberly Quinn, and Carmen's capricious powers of seduction.

“I don't know about the new Conservative Party,” she continues. “They are obviously going to take power next year, and I just hope they're the right people to deal with the current financial situation. I don't happen to know any of them, though I rather wish I did.” Does that mean she would she give to the Tories if they asked? “No, I wouldn't give now to political parties. I think it's up to them to sort themselves out, and to prove to us that they are capable of running the country.” She refers politely to Gordon Brown's “gravitas” but is realistic about the public perception of his shortcomings. “I'm sad that things appear to have gone belly-up for him. Obviously, it's not been as good as we had hoped, and I'm sure he'd be the first to recognise that.”

If she is not party political, Lady Hamlyn is clearly possessed of an acute social conscience. When her father, an engineer, died during the war, her mother sent her to the so-called progressive school St Christopher's in Letchworth, where Paul Hamlyn, who was eight years older and a refugee from Berlin (his family name was Hamburger), was also a pupil, though they didn't at that stage know each other.

She wanted to be a pianist but realised that both her hands and her talent were too small, and settled instead on art school. “My mother thought that was vaguely better than going on the streets but agreed eventually.”

To keep her “grounded”, however, her mother insisted on putting Helen in a women's university settlement — a kind of female-only campus — in Elephant & Castle, where the girls were expected to do social work among the poor. “She had sent me to France to learn French during the school holidays. Well, I didn't learn French but I had rather an exotic time and learned an awful lot of other things, so I was fairly sophisticated for my age by the time I came to London. My mother thought this sort of social work among the elderly and with youths from really desperate backgrounds would keep my head on my shoulders, and it was the best thing she ever did. It was a bit of a shock at first but I think it really changed my life. It made me realise for the first time that there are millions of people in the world who are a lot worse off than oneself in every way.”

She was given her own charity, the Helen Hamlyn Trust, by her husband as a 50th birthday present, together with two trustees, including David (now Lord) Owen. The quite separate Paul Hamlyn Foundation is chaired by Jane Hamlyn, the publisher's daughter by his first marriage. Helen never had children, and talks frankly of the three miscarriages and nine operations that led, eventually, to the sombre realisation that she would never be a mother. Instead, Paul became a kind of child to her. She supported him hugely, she says, “because he was the ultimate free spirit”.

Now, her time is taken up with complex restoration projects of buildings of global historical significance, ripping through mazes of red tape as she goes. Two years ago she sold the 13th century Château de Bagnols in France, which the Hamlyns together turned into a five-star hotel (and for which the French Government appointed Lady Hamlyn Chevalier d'Ordre des Arts et Lettres) and is now engaged in time-consuming work on three important buildings in India. Meanwhile, the Helen Hamlyn Trust sponsors numerous arts and education projects as well as a futuristic centre for robotic surgery at Imperial College.

On a much less elevated but no less significant level she is also a benefactress to the once clanky plumbing back at Covent Garden. All those years ago, she says, the first Paul Hamlyn opera virgins of 1986 were asked to comment on their experience. “They said two things: that the cups of tea were too expensive and that the ladies' loos didn't flush properly. And of course they didn't, do you remember? You had to pull and pull and then give up — with a great big queue waiting behind you. But it took those people to make the opera house sit up and do something about it.”

It turned out that the ROH had turned off half its water supply during the Second World War and afterwards had simply forgotten to turn it back on. Once they did, the loos worked properly again. “So that solved that,” says Lady Hamlyn, beaming.

You sense the detail of these things still excites her. There's no danger of her giving up this fortunate life of satisfying philanthropy. “We must all do what we can, you know. It's a huge privilege to be in a position to help other people and one must do it. It would be quite dreadful not to.”

 

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