Horder, Mervyn

Composer

b 1910, d London 1997. Like H H Milman (see Authors’ index) he was the son of a royal physician—in this case Sir Thomas (the first Lord) Horder, who numbered Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones among his pupils. Winchester Coll; Trinity Coll Cambridge (BA, MA). He inherited his father’s title and wrote a biographical sketch The Little Genius (1966), also a small compilation In Praise of Norfolk. His main career was as a music publisher; after some interesting wartime travels he was chairman of Duckworth’s 1948–1970, and a composer of song and hymn tunes including carols, naming many after East Anglian villages. He set to music in small song collections the words of Betjeman (1967), Shakespeare (1988), Dorothy Parker (1990) and Burns (1996), among others, and edited The Easter Carol Book; much of his music was recorded and broadcast. A keen singer, pianist and Hymn Society enthusiast, he also contributed articles to The Bookseller, The London Magazine, and other literary journals. He lived in a small St John’s Wood flat where many of his few possessions had been rescued from rubbish-skips; that did not apply to his two back-to-back upright pianos where he composed and arranged music, and played duets with friends. He gave his occupations as ‘music, idling’; he sang in St Augustine’s Kilburn choir, to whose practices and services he would cycle up to his mid-80s. Nos.121A, 621, 917.