Jesus, Prince and Saviour

To judge from his output, Timothy Dudley-Smith’s favourite festival is Christmas—but this is one of his many hymns for Easter. He wrote it at Ruan Minor, Cornwall, in Aug 1974, and explains in Lift Every Heart (1984): ‘This Easter text was written from the conviction that Easter is the most suitable time for Christian triumph; and that in Sir Arthur Sullivan’s ST GERTRUDE we have a tune of stirring power, wedded to words by Sabine Baring-Gould whose “militarism��? no longer makes them suitable for every occasion of rejoicing. Both tune and words have stern critics as well as stalwart advocates’. The new text was published in the church magazine inset News Extra in March 1975, and (for the first time with music) in the 1980 Songs of Worship. The opening phrase comes from Acts 5:31 (AV/NKJV, cf 413, note) the 3rd and 4th lines of stz 3 are most effective (as the author points out) when sung in turn by choir and congregation. The first stz has been revised since its first publication; formerly lines 3–5 read: ‘sinners crucified./ For a lost world’s ransom/ all himself he gave’. Changes are rare in a TDS text which had already featured in several books.

The tune ST GERTRUDE appears with its traditional words at 575; a 2nd choice suggested here is RACHIE (854), but the preferred option is ARMAGEDDON. John Goss adapted this, also for the words of 575, from a German melody ascribed to Luise Reichardt. This was published in 1853, and Goss’s version in 1872 in the Appendix to Mercer’s The Church Psalter and Hymn Book. The tune is named from the battle-ground of Revelation 16:16, probably itself based on the historic city of Megiddo but more recently a synonym for apocalyptic and decisive conflict. The music is now more often associated with Frances Havergal’s Who is on the Lord’s side.

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.