Garsington Opera has for me, and for many others, long proved one of the great joys of the British summer. All of us privileged to have attended over the years owe a considerable debt of gratitude to the late Leonard Ingrams (pictured) and his wife Rosalind for their generosity and good sense in founding the festival.

One’s memories of happy visits to the manor naturally tend to focus on times of clement weather. How lovely the gardens looked in the evening sunshine from a favourite picnic spot or eyed — as one almost uniquely could here — from one’s seat in the auditorium as the action on stage proceeded.

But there were occasions, too, when the British summer behaved as it obstinately can, making overcoats and umbrellas a necessity. It was like this on my first visit 20 years ago for Il mondo della luna, one of the rarely-done Haydn comedies that were a Garsington speciality in the early days.

At that time, though the audience benefited from a primitive covering, the loggia that doubled as the stage was open to the elements. As a deluge began, members of the cast were rushing around with brooms, pushing at the canopied set to prevent it collapsing under the weight of water.

The episode is recalled by Richard Osborne, in his superb new book Garsington Opera — A Celebration, produced as the company prepares to move to its new home on the nearby Getty estate of Wormsley. What remains firmly printed on the mind was that one of the cast was simultaneously singing about how wonderful the weather was on the Moon (“O che bel giorno!”).

Osborne has produced a comprehensive and superbly illustrated account of the Garsington years. Though affectionate in tone, it does not skirt controversial aspects of the festival’s history, including the implacable opposition of some of its closest neighbours. They often felt compelled to carry out a spot of urgent hedge trimming just as the orchestra struck up.

Osborne achieves what seems to me a bit of a ‘scoop’ concerning Leonard’s childhood involvement with Benjamin Britten, a pal of his parents and a frequent visitor to their Chelsea home.

‘Exciting as the contacts were,” he writes, “they were brought to an abrupt end after what Vicky [Ingrams’s mother] took to be inappropriate behaviour by Britten towards Leonard during a visit to the house of a mutual friend.” Osborne adds that Mrs Ingrams had watched Garsington’s 1996 production of Britten’s Albert Herring in “decidedly restive mood”.

Celebrity visitors to Garsington, of which there were many, included Britten’s librettist Myfanwy Piper, a friend of long-time supporter John Mortimer.

A celebrity moment I recall — which it seemed to me could only have happened at Garsington — involved Prince and Princess Michael of Kent on the manor forecourt conducting a heated exchange in their purple Bentley about their route home, a large map unfolded before them.

Other famous faces — and I do mean faces — I shall never forget at Garsington were those of Terry Waite and John McCarthy. Newly released from their Beirut captivity, they flanked me in the interval at the primitive outdoor urinal.

I regret the opera was not — as it should have been — Beethoven’s Fidelio.

n Garsington Opera — a celebration is published by Unicorn Books at £30. The curtain will rise on Garsington Opera’s new home at Wormsley in Buckinghamshire, on June 2, with a new production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. It will be followed by Rossini’s comic opera, Il Turco in Italia and, finally, the British premiere of Vivaldi’s virtually unknown work La verità in cimento.