By the 1850s it was apparent that the plethora of collections of hymns then circulating needed to be replaced by a single volume in which the dross had been eliminated and hymns of quality provided for the entire Christian year – this last requirement indicating the growing influence of the Oxford Movement. In 1858 two London parish clergymen, William Denton and Francis Murray, both hymn-book compilers, decided while travelling together on the Great Western Railway that the time was right for such a volume. A meeting was convened at St Barnabas, Pimlico, in London, a committee of High Church parish priests formed and over the next two years a huge number of hymns were scrutinized, of which 273 were chosen. Nearly 50 per cent of these were translations from ancient Greek and Latin sources, just over one-third were nineteenth-century creations, and the remainder originated in pre-nineteenth-century England or Germany. Hence the inspired title Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861), which quickly established itself as an essential ingredient of Anglican worship not only in Britain but throughout the English-speaking world.
No less inspired was the choice of editors. The Revd Sir Henry Williams Baker, Bart., who was entrusted with the words, was for 27 years Vicar of Monkland, near Leominster, and himself a notable hymn writer responsible for ‘The King of Love my Shepherd is’ (Psalm 23), ‘Lord, Thy Word abideth’ and ‘O praise ye the Lord’. William Henry Monk, organist of St Matthias Church, Stoke Newington, and Professor of Vocal Music at King’s College, London, applied the skills employed in the creation of a tune for ‘Abide with me’ to the choice of singable tunes for the other 272. His choices – which involved the commissioning of new tunes where none was already available – were probably more critical than those of the words editor in determining whether or not particular hymns would become popular. It is the measure of his success that so many of the tunes originally attached to the hymns have remained in use for 150 years and in many instances are now inseparable from them.
The immediate popularity of the book led to the production of a 113-hymn supplement (more than half being published for the first time) in 1868, and further supplements were added in 1889 and 1916. But this led to an overall decline in quality and drastic revisions were needed. This process has continued and the Proprietors (now the Council) of Hymns Ancient and Modern have remained an independent profit-making enterprise.
It is not easy now to appreciate the extent to which hymn singing entered into the culture of Victorian England. Starting as a novelty, it spread like wildfire not only to the churches but also to schools, public houses and wherever people gathered socially – more significantly to private houses where families and friends gathered round a piano or some other instrument to sing what soon became regarded as ‘old favourites’. Ian Bradley, both an authority on and a stout defender of the Victorian hymn, has described hymns as the folk music of the Victorian age and even gone as far as likening them, perhaps with less justification, to modern soap operas.
They still stand in need of their defenders since, from the time of The English Hymnal (1906) onwards, they have been subjected to the severest of criticism from professional church musicians – subjectivity, emotionalism, banal verse and unbelievably bad music being the chief charges. That this is true of a significant proportion of the huge output can hardly be denied, but more recently there has been a growing recognition that among the Victorian material that has nurtured the devotional life of several generations of Christian believers, there is pure gold. In any event, churchgoers continue to love the best of them and complain strongly whenever they are neglected.
6. Frederick Ouseley and St Michael’s College, Tenbury
The name of the Revd Sir Frederick Ouseley, Bart., means nothing to the overwhelming majority of churchgoers, though some may perhaps recall that from time to time their choir has sung his short and simple anthems ‘From the rising of the sun’ and ‘How goodly are thy tents’. His masterpiece, the short unaccompanied eight-part ‘O Saviour of the world’, retains a prominent place in the cathedral repertoire. Members of some choirs will be aware that he composed a few single chants for psalms which are still in use. Of his hymn tunes only ‘Contemplation’, set to Joseph Addison’s great hymn ‘When all thy mercies O my God’, is still widely used, though even this has been excluded from many modern hymn books. This is a meagre legacy from a man who composed about 75 anthems and 13 service settings and was considered to be one of the leading church musicians of the mid-Victorian era, but this was a point at which the standard of church music was, with notable exceptions, very low.
Ouseley is, however, to be remembered for the pioneering choir school he founded at Tenbury in Worcestershire and for a remarkable music library which included many important manuscripts. The choir school survived, often against formidable odds, until 1985 when financial problems caused closure. The library was then transferred to the Bodleian in Oxford and the chapel remains the parish church. The existence of the school and the library owed everything to his considerable personal wealth and to his lifelong commitment to raising the standard of music in parish churches and cathedrals.
Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley was born in Grosvenor Square, London, in 1825. His father, the first baronet, was a distinguished Oriental scholar and served as ambassador successively to Russia and Persia. The Duke of York, the Duke of Wellington and the Marchioness of Salisbury were godparents at the baptism.
From the age of three he displayed extraordinary musical gifts and it was said that he could play before he could talk. By the age of five he was composing waltzes and marches and once cried, ‘Only think, papa blows his nose in G’. At six he played a duet with Mendelssohn and, although he had no formal training, composed an opera when only eight. He was privately educated by the Vicar of Dorking and went in 1843 to Christ Church, Oxford. In his final year there the cathedral organist resigned and he offered his services as honorary organist until a replacement could be found. This took several months and during this time Ouseley was solely responsible for all the cathedral’s music.
He had inherited the baronetcy in 1843 and, although it was at the time unusual for anyone of his social standing to seek Holy Orders, he nonetheless prepared for ordination in order ‘to do something to revive the music of the sanctuary’. In 1849 he became a curate at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge in London – a church markedly influenced by the Oxford Movement. He arrived in the parish when a new St Barnabas district church was about to be consecrated in Pimlico and lived in the nearby clergy house with three other curates. This enterprise in a slum area was seen as providing an opportunity for initiating the most advanced form of Catholic-style worship and, almost immediately, it attracted an extreme Protestant faction which, under the banner ‘No Popery’, began demonstrations that led to riots and the desecration of the new building.
After about 18 months of this, and with no support being offered by the Bishop of London or other senior diocesan church officials, the Vicar of St Paul’s and his curates resigned. Ouseley was still in deacon’s orders but during his brief time in Pimlico he had been responsible for the choir and was concerned that the crisis at St Barnabas would leave the boys stranded. He therefore purchased a large house near Windsor, took the boys into residence, engaged one of his fellow curates as master of the school, created a private chapel and started twice-daily cathedral-style services. Men of the choirs of Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s who lived within reach came to lend a hand.
Having got his project under way, he went on a tour of Europe visiting cathedrals and other major churches, meeting church musicians and collecting rare church music. He had by this time taken an Oxford BMus with a cantata The Lord is the True God, which was deemed good enough to be performed at the Three Choirs Festival at Hereford in 1858. On his return from Europe in 1852 he began making plans for what would become St Michael’s College, Tenbury. At the same time he decided that his vocation was also to be a country priest and, with the ready co-operation of the Bishop of Hereford, R. D. Hampden, the laying of the foundation stone of St Michael’s College in 1854 was followed, a year later, by his ordination to the priesthood.
In the same year his achievement in publishing two volumes of anthems – the first comprising his own works and the second those of the English masters of the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – led to his appointment