Holy child, how still you lie

‘If an author is allowed favourite texts, this is one of mine’; so writes Timothy Dudley-Smith in his autobiographical commentary in Lift Every Heart. He wrote it at Sevenoaks, Kent, in Sept 1966, ‘in the days following the birth of our youngest child’. (So James D-S would later say ‘I know that Holy child is mine!’) It appeared in the evangelical church magazine inset News Extra for Dec, as well as on the family Christmas card that year. In 1969 it was one of several TDS texts featured in Youth Praise 2, adjacent to the ‘Calypso Carol’ (374), and has since appeared in many main hymnals of which HTC was the first. The author points to a desirable change of mood between stzs 5 and 6, ‘before the gentle reprise of the final verse’; also to a permitted variation in 5.2 (adopted here as elsewhere) from the original line, ‘sons of men to seek and save’.

The tune HOLY CHILD, composed by Michael Baughen at Manchester in early 1967, has belonged with the words from YP2 (which he edited in 1969) onwards, arranged there by David G Wilson. The composer was then Rector of Holy Trinity Platt, a Manchester suburb; the carol was sung there at the first broadcast ‘Songs of Praise’ to feature Cliff Richard, which set a record audience figure for the BBC programme. Everyone had to sit on the floor of the new church hall because otherwise the ceiling would have been too low for the cameras to cope with. One churchwarden felt that this item brought ‘a spiritual breakthrough’ in the programme; the rector/composer wrote that ‘the atmosphere changed into a greater seriousness of God’s presence and grace among us’. The tune treats the text as 31�?�2 8-line stzs, or rather, alternates from stz to stz. HTC has Noël Tredinnick’s arrangement, Hymns for the People (1993) chooses Roger Mayor’s, and Praise! has Phil Burt’s to offer. David Peacock has also composed FAIRMILE, an alternative in HTC, while Brian Hoare’s gentle RUXLEY is introduced in Carols for Today (1986).

b Manchester 1926. Tonbridge School, Kent, Pembroke Coll Camb, and Ridley Hall Camb; ordained (CofE) 1950. After ministry at Northumberland Heath (nr Erith, Kent) and Bermondsey (SE London) he worked with the Evangelical Alliance, editing Crusade magazine before moving to the Church Pastoral Aid Society, becoming Gen Sec in 1965. Subsequently he became Archdeacon of Norwich (73–81), then suffragan Bp of Thetford until his retirement to Ford, nr Salisbury, in 1992. A writer of verse (including a mastery of the comic sort) from his youth, he is seen by Prof J R Watson (in The English Hymn, 1997) as igniting the late 20th cent ‘hymn explosion’ with his 1961 Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord, one of the hymns from that period in the widest use. He is the author of over 250 hymn texts in a similar number of hymnals worldwide, first collected in Lift Every Heart (1984), most recently in A House of Praise ( 2003). The latest of 4 smaller supplements, A Door for the Word, appeared in 2006, and 2 smaller booklets of his texts with accompanying music were published in 2001 and 2006: respectively Beneath a Travelling Star and A Calendar of Praise.

For many years the Bible commentator Derek Kidner was a mentor for most of TDS’s early drafts. While some were begun or completed at home, on trains or elsewhere, several were the fruit of family holidays on the Cornish coast, as a pre-breakfast employment (and delight) overlooking the beach near The Lizard. As reviewers have often observed, his texts are notable for their varied metres, disciplined rhyming, and biblical content; the theme of redemption through the cross and the shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ is a theme encountered consistently, naturally and with variety; so is the fact that ‘the Lord is risen’. Without plagiarising, the hymns deliberately draw on a wide range of earlier poets and other authors for suggested ideas, as the attached notes fully illustrate. 37 items are included in Sing Glory (1999); 18 are in the N American Worship and Rejoice (2001), 9 in the 2005 edn of A Panorama of Christian Hymnody and 33 in the new Anglo- Chinese Hymns of Universal Praise (new edn, 2006). His other books include A Flame of Love: A personal choice of Charles Wesley’s verse ( 1987), Praying with the English Hymn-writers (1989), and a 2 vol biography (the first) of John R W Stott (1999, 2001). He has served on editorial groups for Psalm Praise (1973) and Common Praise (2000), and has addressed and been honoured by both the N American and British Hymn Societies, respectively as Fellow and Hon Vice-President. In 2003 he was awarded the OBE ‘for services to hymnody’. Hymn festivals in Tunbridge Wells and Salisbury, together with an extended BBC ‘Sunday Half Hour’ on New Year’s Eve, marked his 80th birthday at the end of 2006, following the publication of a seasonallyarranged selection of 30 texts in A Calendar of Praise (with music, mostly traditional). In an opening address to the Hymn Soc’s Guildford conference in its 70th year (also 2006), TDS spoke of his (and our) ups and downs as ‘Snakes and Ladders’, concluding with that greatest of ‘ladders’ from Gen 28, referred to in Elizabeth’s Clephane’s text (699) which has meant everything to him: ‘so seems my Saviour’s cross to me/ a ladder up to heaven’. Nos.10, 20, 25, 26, 32, 34, 41, 56, 60, 63, 65, 69B, 72, 73, 91B, 115, 119H, 134, 141, 218, 238, 320, 327, 351, 360, 389, 402, 405, 410, 413, 436, 459, 466, 488, 497, 516, 531, 553, 558, 623, 628, 659, 688, 697, 746, 750, 784, 823, 924, 925, 939, 949, 951, 1001, 1002, 1005, 1006, 1009, 1019, 1020, 1025, 1042, 1077, 1136, 1166, 1174, 1214.