Frederick Delius died at his home in Grez-sur-Loing on 10 June, 1934, in appalling agony, with Jelka beside him in a wheelchair.

Jelka herself had been very seriously ill for several months before Delius’s death, having two major operations, and on 16 May she wrote to Fenby:

He was there within days. The contrast between the beautiful French countryside he had come to love and his friend’s condition was dreadful, and as soon as he arrived, he went upstairs, ‘took the delicate hand he offered me and kissed his brow, for he was weeping like a child’. Over the next three weeks Delius’s condition alternated between slight improvement and increasing deterioration, and it had not been helped by the news of the deaths of Elgar on 23 February, and Norman O’Neill ten days later. Local doctors and nurses performed temporary wonders, but there was no question but that Delius would soon follow them.

Many years before, Delius had told the Harrison sisters’ mother that he wanted to be buried in a country churchyard in England, but as a temporary measure he was laid to rest in the cemetery at Grez on 12 June. In due course, St Peter’s Church at Limpsfield in Surrey was chosen, and almost exactly a year later Fenby accompanied the coffin from France for the reburial on 26 May 1935. It was estimated that the occasion drew about 1,000 people to the church; Beecham gave an oraison funèbre, and conducted a section of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in Summer Night on the River, the serenade from Hassan and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. Tragically, Jelka came down with pneumonia on her way to England for the service, was unable to attend, and died on 28 May 1935 in a Kensington nursing home.