Postscript 2: The Caldecott Hymn Books
Several people have mentioned, in their memories, the Caldecott Hymn Book, a slim, words-only volume neatly bound in red boards and littered with misprints such as “Immortal, invisible, / his [sic!] from our eyes”. We sang these mistakes lustily and ostentatiously. Who could say anything when “that’s what it says”?
This was the senior hymn book. There was also a junior hymn book. I have recollections, too, of a very old-looking hymn book consisting of typescripts bound in blue cloth. Maybe this was the predecessor of the red book, or an earlier junior hymn book.
The junior hymn book that evolved in our days had ring binders and new hymns were added from time to time. The hymns came from various sources and, as I have mentioned above, at a certain point Betty copied the music out so as to have it in one place. This book therefore consisted entirely of hymns that were sung and tunes were available for all of them. This will seem an obvious statement until you read my discussion of the red hymn book. If this material has been conserved, it could still make a viable hymn book for a junior school.
The red Caldecott Hymn Book was printed in 1961, but Betty always spoke of it as before her time or as something done when she was too new to have much say. Barry Northam, who left in 1960, remembers singing from a hymn book consisting of typescripts littered with errors. Probably, then, the red book was a reprint, with few or any changes, of something much older – maybe the blue book I saw in the cupboard. It was, in any case, a classic case of a hymn book put together by somebody who does not know what a hymn book should be. Betty disclaimed all responsibility for it and I take it the somebody in question was Miss Leila. The authors of the texts were not named and back then there would have been copyright issues with a lot of them. This was clearly an act of naivety. Miss Leila would never have countenanced a bootleg publication or the evasion of copyright dues, though unwittingly she did just that.
As for the hymns themselves, there was fortunately a core of standard classics such as “Immortal, invisible”, sung to the standard tunes. A casual visitor to our Sunday services would not have found anything unusual in our hymn singing. There were also many hymns that we never sang. Even this may not seem so very unusual. Anybody who attends church regularly and leafs though the hymn book used in their church will realize there are plenty of hymns they have never heard. But the various hymn books, the “English Hymnal”, “Songs of Praise” and the rest, have tune books and if somebody wishes to include one of the unknown hymns in the service, the music is available. It may be a poor tune – which is why it is never sung – but it is there.
A lot of hymns in the Caldecott Hymn Book were poems that had caught Miss Leila’s eye but had no tune we knew of. I asked Betty why this was. Her answer was that they had all been sung once, when Miss Potter, the co-founder of the Community, was still there. She had a powerful voice, one that could lead the congregation to sing practically anything. Some of these words had music specially written for them. Maybe Miss Potter took it with her when she left. There was a dusty manuscript book at the bottom of the white cupboard containing a number of vocal pieces, some by Mabel Saumarez Smith. According to my memory, it did not supply the missing hymns.
Betty had a whole shelf in the Music Room, above the record cabinet, dedicated to hymn books with tunes. Some were quite rare. When Miss Leila got the idea that she wanted one of the “unknown” hymns sung, Betty would get busy with the metrical indexes of all these hymn books in the hope of finding a tune that would fit. Not that she necessarily gave way to Miss Leila if the only tune found was too difficult or just awful. I remember coming into the Music Room when she was playing through a possible tune by Vaughan Williams. We both agreed it was too dismal to use. I wonder which it was? Vaughan Williams wrote much splendid stuff, but everyone has their off days.
At least one hymn was vetoed for other reasons. This was “Into the woods my Master went”. I see from Internet this is a poem by Sidney Lanier and several hymn books have a tune for it by one Peter Lutkin that does not look too bad. One of my (not particularly musical) contemporaries breezed into the Music Room as we were looking at it and doubled up with laughter at the implications of the first line. I doubt if Betty was amused but she maybe realized that lots of people would be. We never sang it.
One very famous poem in the Hymn Book which we never sang was “Ring out wild bells to the wild sky”. This is from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and any number of musical settings exist that might have been used. All those I have seen come to grief with the rhythms of the first line and I have the idea that Tennyson’s marvellous words are greater music than any tune that could be fitted to them. I suppose one of these had been sung in Miss Potter’s day.
Several of the hymns in the book had to be written off because the poetry itself was too irregular to allow a tune that a congregation could pick up, though I suppose the choir could have sung them if suitable music existed. The one Betty most frequently mentioned was “Salute the Sacred Dead”. I can shed some light on this. The words are part of a Commemoration Ode by the American poet James Russell Lowell. I do not know what children were supposed to make of them:
Salute the sacred dead,
Who went, and who return not. – Say not so!
'Tis not the grapes of Canaan that repay,
But the high faith that failed not by the way.
Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave;
No ban of endless night exiles the brave;
And to the saner mind
We rather seem the dead that stayed behind.
A musical setting of these words was published in 1919 by the already-mentioned Mabel Saumarez Smith. Given her early association with Caldecott, there is little doubt that this is what was sung. I should be curious to see it.
The hymn that most fascinated me began
O Lord our God, we are strangers before Thee, and sojourners, as were
all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is
none abiding.
It continued in this vein for at least two entire pages. No music for it was known and I made a few fruitless attempts to set it myself, as an anthem for the choir, not as a congregational hymn. I did not get far. I have identified the words as “The Building of the Temple” by Sir Henry Newbolt. It is described in the collected edition of Newbolt’s poems as “An Anthem heard in Canterbury Cathedral”. The composer is not named. I suppose the Cathedral choir school would have records of its performance, maybe even the score. No published work by Mabel Saumarez Smith has this title, but I would make a small bet it was another of hers.