I know that in my old age I become more and ‘possessed’ by the devil – I call him Tityvillus, as I suspect he is that famous musical character of the English Middle Ages … who makes me see everything in a ridiculous light.

Old age is not for the faint-hearted.

Dent's seventieth birthday on 16 July 1946 was celebrated by a garden party at the Hirsch family home in west Cambridge, with friends and colleagues who were also ‘tacitly expressing to him their gratitude for his inestimable service in helping to secure the Paul Hirsch Music Library for the nation’. Dent had written an article in The Times, ‘Need for a central music library: Value of the Hirsch collection’,

stirring up public interest in the case. One of the world's great music collections was now in the British Museum, the cornerstone of a national music library, bought with a ‘special grant’ from the Treasury and a grant from the Pilgrim Trust of 120,000 pounds. ‘At the end of the war, it was far from easy to raise such a very large sum of money, and the successful conclusion of the delicate negotiations was due in no small measure to Dent's powerful advocacy, both in public and behind the scenes.’ The Chancellor of the Exchequer was Dent's old Cambridge friend Hugh Dalton. Although offered a knighthood by the Attlee government, Dent turned it down, never mentioning it in his letters.

Cambridge finally rewarded Dent with an honorary doctorate in 1947, but far more important to him, Music was at last on the Tripos, with a solid curriculum in place. Visiting Cambridge was now unalloyed pleasure; each time Dent could see all around him just what he had been working to achieve there, with the Marlowe Society more active than ever, the Greek Play revived, and eventually the Cambridge University Opera Society thriving beside the CUMS and the CUMC. And his part was appreciated: