His first production, in October 1932, is The Legend of the Tsar Saltan by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a colour-filled piece seldom seen in London, let alone in railyards. It must have gone down well, because the next opera is Sadko by the same composer, followed by Alexander Borodin's Prince Igor. Then come three more Rimsky-Korsakovs: Mlada, Ivan the Terrible and The Snow Maiden. Where else in the world, outside Russia, could you have seen a Rimsky cycle in the 1930s? Swindon has become the epicentre for an underrated composer of quiet influence, most decisively on Igor Stravinsky.

The singers are local amateurs; Mrs Muriel Fairclough gets a credit in minor roles. Costumes and scenery are handmade by society members. "The devotion to Russian Operas is almost entirely due to the fact that they are folk operas and provide an opportunity for a large number of people with a diversity [sic] to take part," the programme explains, warding off any suspicion of Soviet sympathies. 

By 1939 the Society is booming. Its list of patrons has swelled from one page to three and the booklet is thick with consumer advertising. Frederick Ashton and Constant Lambert come from London's Sadlers Wells Opera to see Massenet's Cinderella in Swindon, the final ball before the war.

Opera resumes in Swindon in 1946 with Borodin's Prince Igor and an "augmented" orchestra. A revival of Mlada is reviewed by The Times, which belatedly acknowledges that Swindon is now "the place to look" for Russian opera.

Harry Fairclough has other ideas. In 1948, he puts on an English folk opera, Hugh the Drover by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The grand old man of English music turns up at the premiere and is seen in the scrapbook, taking a bow with the cast. VW becomes patron of the Society. Before the year is out, Swindon receives a grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain. Harry Stanley Fairclough has become an engine of national policy, raising arts from grass shoots.

Swindon's Festival of Britain opera, The Travelling Companion by C.V. Stanford, is praised by The Times. It is succeeded by a rare staging of Goyescas by the Spanish composer Enrique Granados, together with one of the first performances anywhere in the world of Kurt Weill's naive American singspiel Down in the Valley.

And then, after two more revivals, the scrapbook stops. The only further item in the album is a loose sheet from Harry Stanley Fairclough's memorial concert in St Luke's, Swindon, a performance of the Fauré Requiem. 

Why Swindon opera had to end can only be conjectured. It may be that the cushion of an Arts Council grant caused the society to collapse on its withdrawal. Perhaps the conductor's energies were sapped by the cancer that killed him. Or maybe the times had changed, so much so that young people were no longer prepared to spend evenings singing in a chorus and sewing costumes. They sat now in cinemas and coffee bars, absorbing commercial, imported American culture. Homemade had become a dirty word. Working-town England in the 1950s lived off the peg, on the never-never. Harry Stanley Fairclough was a man out of time.

We can only guess how his album came south nearly half a century later, with a £15 price tag knocked down to £10. Muriel must have left it to a daughter or niece who kept it among her unclaimed effects in a damp flat, not far from the sea. But this is no cause for pathos. Few book discoveries have given me such profound joy, illuminating on a cloudy afternoon a truly useful musical life, a life for the arts.