Grizabella like a crooked pin." The character of Grizabella featured in an unpublished poem that T. S. Eliot wrote for his godchildren, intending to include it in "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats". However, as his widow, Valerie Eliot pointed out, he thought it was too "sad for children" and so did not include it in the finished work. Valerie Eliot came to the 1980 Sydmonton Festival concert where Andrew Lloyd Webber premiered some of his settings of the Old Possum poems, and gave him the paper with the fragment of Grizabella written on it. From there Lloyd Webber and director
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats Scheffler (2009). The contents of "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats", along with the names of the featured cats where appropriate, are: In 1954, English composer Alan Rawsthorne set six of the poems in a work for speaker and orchestra entitled "Practical Cats", which was recorded soon afterwards, with the actor Robert Donat as the speaker. At about the same time another English composer, Humphrey Searle, composed another narrated piece based on the poems, using flute, piccolo, cello and guitar. This work, "Two Practical Cats", consists of settings of the poems about Macavity and Growltiger. The best-known musical adaptation of