‘Olive’, replied Alwyn when Brian Murphy asked the name of his first wife. ‘Now, I met Olive at the Academy. She was a fellow student of mine with McEwen. Very attractive girl she was, and very talented indeed as a pianist. And she was doing a bit of composing too – little piano pieces, and things like that. I fell hopelessly in love with her, and from that time on, I just wanted to get married.’

Olive Mary Audrey Pull was born on 27 September 1900 at 57 Hilldrop Crescent, Camden Road, London, not far from Holloway Prison. Her father, William Joseph Pull, worked as a cabinet-maker and partner in the firm of Pull & Field, Piano Manufacturers. William Pull’s first wife died in March 1891, leaving him with five children, the youngest only a year old. He found a second wife in Jane Emma Pegler, whom he first saw among a group of nurses parading their charges at Kensington Gardens, and they were married in Bisley, Gloucestershire, in August 1891. She would give William Pull three more sons and three more daughters (of whom Olive was the last). Their London address gained some notoriety, for at number 39 Hilldrop Crescent lived Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, who was hanged for the murder of his wife, the music hall artiste Belle Elmore. Family legend had it that the Pull family had watched, perhaps through twitching curtains, as he was taken away by the police.

William and Jane Pull left London around 1910, when he bought a substantial property in Bisley and, according to his grandson Jonathan Alwyn, ‘established himself there as something of an unofficial squire of the manor’. Olive attended Stroud High School for Girls, but when Jane became bored with Gloucestershire life her husband moved the family back to London, returning to Holloway and settling at 63 Parkhurst Road on the other side of Holloway Prison from Dr Walker’s house in Carleton Road.