HIlda Hester Collens was born in 1883. She wanted to be a teacher and a music teacher at that, from a very young age. However, in childhood she witnessed the accidental drowning of one of her brothers on a skating lake which, her family assumed, was the cause of a slight tic or hesitation in speech she developed. Her father tried to convince her that no teacher could be successful with such an impediment but she persevered, becoming a music teacher at Sale High School for Girls.
She was also taking private tuition from Tobias Matthay, a pianist and pedagogue, and would travel to London for lessons regularly. She took Matthay's Manchester pupils at the start of the First World War when his main representative in the region signed up for military service. Then in 1920 she quit the High School and created the Matthay School of Music (Manchester Branch) for the purposes of providing a more holistic music training to students who wished themselves to be music teachers, or more well rounded performers.
She opened the school in a studio room above a shop on Deansgate with just a handful of pupils and within a few years had a successful enterprise. It changed from private to publicly funded in 1943, adopting the name Northern School of Music and continued strongly until it closed in 1972 to create what is now the Royal Northern College of Music.
Hilda suffered from ill or fragile health for many years but she worked almost every day the school until, after coming home from a day at the school in 1955, she suffered a heart attack and died.
A memorial window in her name was funded by the Northern School of Music's supporters and installed in St Ann's Church in St Ann's Square (Manchester city centre). It was the first such decorative window to be made entirely of Perspex and can still be visited today.
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