Last night we enjoyed a splendid concert here in church – six organists playing a wonderfully varied programme to delight and entertain as only music can. But we’re having something of a musical weekend. Today is the birthday of Ralph Vaughan Williams he was born on this day 136 years ago and this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of his death. We are being encouraged to mark this significant anniversary in church and we do so by singing hymns at this service and at Evensong – hymns that are set to tunes by Vaughan Williams.

So what of the man? Well, thankfully, unlike some very early composers we know a fair amount about his life. He was born the son of a Vicar (poor man!) in Down Ampney in Gloucestershire and after the death of his father when he was only 3 Ralph moved with his mother to the North Downs in Surrey to live with her family. She was the granddaughter of Josiah Wedgwood, part of the Wedgwood pottery family and another distant relative, a great uncle to Ralph, was Charles Darwin.

After an education at Charterhouse, Ralph attended the Royal College of Music and studied under Charles Villiers Stanford before reading history and music at Trinity College, Cambridge. He returned to the RCM to study composition with Hubert Parry but his work of composition took time to bear fruit and he didn’t publish his first piece until he was 30. Later he was to compose, amongst other things, nine symphonies in a surprising range of different styles and yet, despite these variations, he has often been said to be characteristically English, in the same way as that of Holst, Butterworth, Delius and Walton.