Pulling out all the stops: Henry Gauntlett & friends

The chances are that if you go to a carol service this year, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ will be one of the old favourites on the programme. You may not remember all the words to all the verses, but everyone knows the tune – a tune which has been famous around the world for over a century. What you may not know is that it was written by Henry Gauntlett, who was born in Wellington just over 200 years ago. Gauntlett went on to become not only a prolific writer of hymn tunes, but also a talented organist, an enthusiastic organ designer, and writer.

The Gauntletts were not a local family, but at the time of Henry’s birth in July 1805, his father (also Henry) was serving as curate at All Saints Church in Wellington. Just a few months before his son’s birth, Henry Senior had one of his sermons published by Houlston’s of Market Square, seemingly one of the very first texts the company ever produced in what would be a hundred years of publishing – look out for more on them in the next issue.

Young Henry began his musical career aged nine when the family moved to Olney in Buckinghamshire, his father’s new parish. Encouraging the congregation to subscribe for an organ, Rev Gauntlett initially intended for his two musically talented daughters to take up playing duties on its installation. His son decided that he could do the job, however, and after only six months of lessons from his mother, was proficient enough to fill the post. The youngster showed promise and during adolescence began to make a name for himself – so much so that the chief organist at St Paul’s Cathedral wanted to train him as his deputy. His father discouraged a musical career, however, and so Gauntlett trained for the law instead, moving to London aged 21 to work with his brother as a solicitor. But Gauntlett’s passion for music didn’t end there. He took up the post of organist at St Olave’s in Southwark just a year after arriving in the capital, where not content with playing organs, he began to think about redesigning them.

Organists very often like to make the odd change to an instrument over time – a couple of new stops perhaps – but few of them set about revolutionising the whole way in which organs are conceived and built. This is exactly what a bold Gauntlett did from the late 1820s onwards, pushing for the adoption of a German-style of instrument with more pedals and so more musical possibilities. To this end, he collaborated for over twenty years with the great organ designer William Hill, whose firm would go on to provide the organ that still stands in Shrewsbury Abbey today. He also received the support of the famous composer Mendelssohn, who described the organ at Christ Church in Newgate, improved on Gauntlett’s initiative, as the best he had come across in England to date.

Mendelssohn didn’t only have great admiration for Gauntlett’s design ideas; he also rated him highly as a performer. In fact, when the composer premiered his grand choral work ‘Elijah’ at Birmingham Town Hall in 1846, he chose Gauntlett to play the organ part. It is astonishing to think that up until this point, music was only Henry’s hobby, and that in spite of all his musical interests and successes, he had remained a solicitor for twenty years. One of these part-time interests had been the founding of a brand new periodical, ‘The Musical World’, which he edited for many years. “I believe that in the earlier issues,” wrote his son in 1908, “nearly the whole of the matter came from his own pen.”

This wouldn’t be surprising. Certainly his pen was busy enough when it came to writing actual music; by the final years of his life, Gauntlett reckoned to have written around 10,000 hymn tunes. This works out at a dubiously copious three per day for thirty years, but if anyone had the drive and the creativity to notch up such a tally, it was this tenacious Wellington native. Mendelssohn praised his colleague in no uncertain terms: “His literary attainments, his knowledge of the history of music, his acquaintance with acoustical law, his marvellous memory, his philosophical turn of mind as well as practical experience – these render him one of the most remarkable professors of the age.” Remarkable indeed. Gauntlett’s life was one that pulled out all the stops – and even added a few new ones.

More organists entertain

Gauntlett died in London in 1876. Three years later, All Saints Church here in Wellington – the church in which he had been christened – got itself a new organ. It was built by the firm of Bevington & Son, which has the curious distinction of being the only organ-building firm to appear in a Charles Dickens novel (A Tale of Two Cities, if you’re interested). It received its inaugural playing from Dr Samuel Corbett, another locally-born organist much less famous than Gauntlett, but in some ways no less impressive. When this son of a King Street whitesmith had become organist and choirmaster at Wellington’s Christ Church in 1866, not only was he just 14 years of age, he was also blind. Never allowing his talent to be conquered by his disability, he studied music with George MacFarren in Birmingham (himself blind) and continued to St John’s College Cambridge. In 1879, Corbett became a doctor of music – the first blind man ever to achieve the title from Cambridge University.

The new All Saints organ that Corbett put to the test in 1879 is the instrument that remains in use today, though moved and altered since. It was, for instance, the instrument that a young Andrew Lucas studied at thirty years ago under the tutelage of then-organist Bill Smallman. “I loved the sound of the organ when I joined the church choir at the age of seven,” Andrew told me. “Bill used to encourage all the choristers to take an interest in it and offered me free organ lessons when I was old enough to reach the pedals.” Mr Smallman, who Andrew describes as his “greatest influence by far”, also encouraged him to study at the Royal College of Music when he left school, and his career has “just gone on from there.” In 1990 he did what the young Gauntlett had not and became sub-organist at St Paul’s Cathedral. Now he is the revered ‘Master of the Music’ at St Albans Cathedral and artistic director at the city’s International Organ Festival, which each year goes from strength to strength.

And what about here around The Wrekin? During the last two summers, local organist Michael Davey has proved that when given the chance, we too will come out to see good organists taking centre stage. Inspired by the arrival of a new state-of-the-art organ in town (at the rebuilt New Street Methodist Church), he has arranged monthly lunchtime organ recitals between May and August which have featured performances from local and not so local musicians. In both years, Michael has been more than happy with the response. "We were expecting twenty or thirty people for each concert," he told me in 2005, "and ended up getting seventy or eighty". This now looks like becoming an annual fixture.

Thanks to the talent and hard work of great musical imports like Michael, Bob Wysome and Francis Murton, along with natives like Christine Hollis, Peter Rodgers and so many more, church organs all over Wellington and Telford continue to be brought to life each week as they have for so many generations. Often the unseen ‘backroom boys’ of weddings and funerals, christenings and carol services, these dedicated musicians can easily be taken for granted – let’s make sure they’re not.

Acknowledgements: ‘Some Local Musicians, Past and Present’ by Marjorie McCrea; Biography of Gauntlett by Terence Crolley; ‘Peeps into the Past’ by ‘Dal Segno’; Michael Davey; Bill Smallman; Andrew Lucas.