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This file contains transcriptions of obituary notices in the Bulletin of the Hymn Society. At present only Volumes XV, XVI and XVII of the Bulletin are represented (January 1997- ) , and only some of the notices therein have been transcribed. Others will be added as time permits, with occasional entries from sources other than the Bulletin. To return to the list of names of individuals mentioned in these Volumes, click here > > >
Notices are included here for --
John Knight Gregory died in November 2002 at the age of 73, after several years of growing infirmity. He grew up in Wembley Park, and was trained for the ministry of the Congregational Church at Mansfield College, Oxford, after gaining a Bachelor of Commerce degree; and was awarded a doctorate (Oxford D.Phil.) for his thesis on Holy Communion in Nineteenth Century Congregationalism. He had distinguished ministries at Headgate Congregational Church Colchester, Hutton and Shenfield Union Church (Baptist and Congregational) and at Bishops Stortford Congregational Church. In 1972 he was appointed the first Editor of the United Reformed Church magazine Reform. During those years he contributed prayers to the ground-breaking Contemporary Prayers for Public Worship, edited by Caryl Micklem, and later some of his hymns were published in New Church Praise. His hymns and prayers revealed a fertile mind wrestling with questions of faith and doubt.
His editorship of Reform lasted for only four and a half years; but his influence within the newly united Church was considerable, confirming the view of those who had known him at the Congregational Forums at Swanwick, that he was a person of rare talent combined with a wicked sense of humour. He went on to found his own publishing business in Cambridge; and it was there that he eventually returned to his churchgoing at St Columba's United Reformed Church, where his funeral service took place on 4th December 2002.
He is survived by his wife, Pat, and two children, Nick and Debbie.
[ Based on an Obituary in Reform contributed by John Reardon, published in the issue of February 2003, p.23.]
Rosemary Guillbaud, who was born on 4th June 1915, died peacefully at Addenbrooke's Hospital in her home city of Cambridge on 25th June 2002. The eldest daughter of Harold and Margaret and a Cambridge graduate in modern languages, she became a skilled Bible translator (from the age of ten, when she first went to Africa), and is also known for a single translation of a hymn from Burundi by her contemporary Emmanuel T. Sibomana. `O how the grace of God amazes me' (from 1946) has become a favourite in Grace Baptist and other evangelical churches. Originally sung to There is a happy land, it was given a new tune Grace of God in the 1950s by the late Fred Barff, a younger fellow-missionary of Rosemary's. Fifteen adult members of the Guillebaud family, spanning four generations, have worked in central Africa; Rosemary retired in 1979 after 39 years in Burundi.
[ H.S.Bulletin No.233, October 2002, p.299. See also Bulletin No.232, p.275.]
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Michael Edward Hewlett, who for most of his career was a team vicar in the diocese of Exeter, died on 23 February 2000, aged 83. His notable talent for light verse was put to the service of hymnody; most British hymnals and supplements of the 1970s and 1980s have at least one contribution from his pen.
[ H.S.Bulletin No.223, April 2000, p.65) ]
The HymnQuest project, Version 2.3 (January 2003) lists 39 hymns by Michael Hewlett which appear in current hymn-books, with the full text of 36 of these, and a longer biographical notice.
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Caryl Micklem, who died on 2nd June this year [2003], began life in Oxford, and ended his pre-retirement career there. By birth, upbringing and temperament he was profoundly influenced by its traditions, though with the exception of his final pastorate his best achievements were made elsewhere.
His father Romilly had been an undergraduate at New College Oxford, and then a student for the Congregational ministry at Mansfield College where he became Chaplain and Tutor in 1922. Caryl was born on 1st August 1925; and his boyhood up to the age of 13 was spent in the shadow of the College; its influence was reinforced by the appointment of his uncle Nathaniel as Principal in 1933. Schooling at the Congregationalist Mill Hill School (whose former headmaster, Sir John McClure, had been chairman of the editorial committee for the 1916 Congregational Hymnary) continued Caryl's congregational upbringing; and he returned to Oxford to read English at New College, before enrolling in 1948 at Mansfield for a theology degree course, intending to complete the full 3-year post-graduate ordination studies.
His Mansfield course was interrupted, however, by his father's continued ill-health. In 1949 Romilly had moved to Oundle; but it soon proved necessary for Caryl to join his father and share the pastoral care of the Congregational Church there. As a graduate he was eligible for ordination as a Congregational Evangelist in what was then known as "List B", while continuing part-time studies at Mansfield. In 1951 he qualified for full accreditation as a Congregational minister, and in 1953 moved to Banstead for the first of his three major pastorates in sole charge.
His ministerial career continued throughout in the Congregational Church, later in the United Reformed Church, with pastorates at Allen Street Kensington (1958-78, from c.1972 shared with the (Australian) Presbyterian minister, Glyn Miller, and from 1974 with additional responsibility for the URC at Fulham); and finally at St Columba's, Oxford. The last-named church, formerly the basis of the Church of Scotland university chaplaincy in Oxford, allowed Caryl to excercise his many sympathies and pastoral gifts in what was a significant home-coming.
Like several of his younger Oxford contemporaries, he was closely involved in the critical re-examination of the language of Christian worship which began in the 1950s and 1960s. Together with John Marsh (who had been one of Caryl's tutors), his father had collaborated with John Huxtable and James Todd to produce a Book of Public Worship (OUP 1948) which influenced many Congregational ministers of the time. In his turn, Caryl presided over a group of ministers of a later generation, editing the collection published in 1967 as Contemporary Prayers for Public Worship (SCM Press), which was followed by two further collections. The editorial Introduction to the 1967 book, though not explicitly attributed to him, clearly bears the marks of his thinking; it is a historically valuable statement of the problems of language in worship, of which many Christians were then becoming conscious, and a remarkably up-to-date indication of the ways in which these would be tackled by a succeeding generation of worship-leaders and hymn-writers.
It was in hymn-writing, however, that his gifts of scholarship and felicitous language were conspicuously developed. His interest in hymnody, which would have been a natural consequence of his father's and his uncle's example, was profoundly influenced by Erik Routley, who had been appointed Tutor, Chaplain and Organist at Mansfield College in the year in which Caryl began his theological course, but whom Caryl had come to know six years earlier when Erik was still a student. Caryl's debt to Erik, and the inspiration which Erik provided in matters of word and music, is movingly described in the opening chapter, written by Caryl, of Duty and Delight: Routley Remembered (Hope/Canterbury Press, 1985); and its personal resonances will be shared by many people who knew one but not the other.
Caryl's first incursion into hymn composition seems to have been with music rather than words. Congregational Praise was still in preparation when Caryl began his Mansfield course; but Erik (who was Secretary to the Editorial Committee as well as a member of the Music Committee) had already invited Caryl to compose two tunes for words which the compilers wished to include (CP 198 and 699). Many more tunes followed - HymnQuest lists 24 published tunes, including nine to his own words - though it is perhaps for his hymn words that he will best be remembered.
He did not participate directly in the "Dunblane consultations" (notwithstanding Ian Fraser's impression to the contrary - see HSB 217, p.181), and neither of the two Dunblane Praises collections (1965 and 1967) includes his work - unless any of the anonymous items in the first volume may reflect his contributions. In the resulting developments in hymnody, rightly called an "explosion", however, Caryl was decidedly active; in Duty and Delight he describes the meetings and discussions which began at his manse in Kensington and continued to foster the composition of new hymns.
In 1967 he became a member of a committee of the Congregational Union concerned with liturgy, which subsequently evolved into the Doctrine and Worship committee of the United Reformed Church. It was natural for him to join the editorial committee for the first hymn-book publication of the URC: the New Church Praise supplement to the existing hymn-books of the Congregational and Presbyterian churches. Eight texts and twelve of his tunes were included in that collection; four of the texts and three of the tunes have been taken in books of other denominations.
With the decision by the URC to prepare a new main hymn-book, Caryl joined the editorial committee for Rejoice and Sing, and became Convenor of the Music sub-committee, both guiding the work of the latter and representing its choices to the main editorial committee which made final decisions. Many of the music arrangements in the final book owe much to his detailed work; and his hand-written music MSS formed a substantial part of the material eventually submitted to the printers.
During the four years of editorial preparation of RS, there were several instances of new music being required at short notice, for texts requested by the main committee; and two of Caryl's most attractive melodies were composed for this purpose - "Dryden Place", for a late editorial request for an all-age Easter hymn which prompted his "Too early for the blackbird" (RS 249); and "Bablock Hythe", for W.W. How's "It is a thing most wonderful". This last commission arose from a tiresome recommendation of the words committee to rearrange Bishop How's quatrains into three 8-line verses, to which Caryl responded with characteristic imagination and grace. But in addition to his significant music input, he contributed much to the selecting and editing of texts and to fresh writing where needed. Not many hymn-writers have successfully paraphrased 1 Corinthians 13, the simplicity of which conceals the profoundest theological insights into God's nature; but Caryl's version (RS 307) fully deserves its place alongside the more familiar one by Christopher Wordsworth.
Of Caryl's involvement with the Hymn Society, and of the Society's debt to him, many of our members will need no reminder. He, and frequently his wife Ruth also, were regular attenders at the annual conference, and his chairmanship covered a lively period of the Society's affairs from 1993 to 1999. He was a familiar contributor to the Bulletin with articles, reviews and correspondence; and on at least three occasions he introduced the hymns at the annual conference Act of Praise.
He will be known widely, among those whose interest is in hymns and worship, both verbal and musical, for his formative contribution to the liturgy of the twentieth century Church and into the twenty-first. But these activities were the public face of a more profound and creative ministry, exercised in pastoral care at Oundle, Banstead, Kensington and finally Oxford. It was fitting that for his last official charge he came home to the city and university where his family roots were so strong.
His final retirement to Pocklington enabled him, with Ruth and one or more of his children, to enjoy some of the leisure usually denied to ministers in active service. He had planned to take part in August in a celebration of his hymns arranged by his family and church friends, but it is unlikely that in the most important sense he would not have been present. His funeral service had included one of his best-known hymns, "Give to me, Lord, a thankful heart", whose line "give . . . the strength to finish what I start" has always haunted this contributor and must have been his constant prayer also. But he knew also the grounds for confident faith, typified in a hymn he chose for his father's memorial service at Mansfield, and echoed by many who " . . . wrestled hard, as we do now, with sins and doubts and fears . . .
- I ask them whence their victory came;
- they, with united breath,
- ascribe their conquest to the Lamb,
- their triumph to his death."
[ David Goodall, written for HS Bulletin No. 237, October 2003 ]
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~~~~~~~
Following a year of increased disability from an inoperable brain tumour, Canon Michael Perry died at home in Tonbridge Vicarage on 9 December [1996]. A member of this Sociaty, Michael travelled widely in the UK and in America and Africa in the cause of the Gospel through hymnody.
His own most popular work was `See him lying on a bed of straw' (the `Calypso Carol'), whose words and music he wrote while a student at Oak Hill Theological College. Later when Curate and then Vicar of Bitterne, Southampton, he served on the committees for Psalm Praise and Hymns for Today's Church, becoming Secretary of what was by then `Jubilate Hymns'.
He originated and promoted a wide-ranging stream of hymnals, song-books and worship resources including The Dramatised Bible, Church Family Worship, and collections of psalms and carols including much of his own fine work. Somehow he combined this with being Rector of Eversley (Hants) 1981-89, then Vicar of Tonbridge 1989-96, and membership of the General Synod and other church bodies.
As events turned out it was timely that 1995 gave us both Preparing for Worship and his own collected hymns and their background in Singing to God, from Hope Publishing. The best of his work is likely to serve our churches for many years to come.
As a friend and collaborator for most of his often breathless writing career, I can testify to the enormous value of having someone prepared not only to encourage with praise, but also ruthlessly to criticize, with charm and humour, lines or stanzas which simply would not do. His enthusiasm and flair will be missed among a very wide variety of friends, churches, and hymn enterprises.
[ C.M.Idle, in H.S.Bulletin No.210, January 1997, p.19 ]
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