Lord, for the years your love has kept and guided

This hymn by Timothy Dudley-Smith is not only one of the enduring successes of the 1969 Youth Praise 2, but has consistently been voted among the finest texts of the 20th c; it topped 3 admittedly limited ‘polls’ around AD2000. It was written by request in Feb 1967 to mark the centenary of what began as the CSSM (Children’s Special Service Mission) and which merged with Scripture Union, formed in 1879 under the same auspices. By 1967 the author was General Secretary of CPAS (the Church Pastoral Aid Society)—‘owing much’, he says, ‘to the Scripture Union in my own spiritual pilgrimage’. He drafted his text on an early evening train journey from Nottingham to London. The words were first set to FINLANDIA (754, 769) for its launch at a service at St Paul’s Cathedral, the tune being chosen partly because orchestral parts were available. This marked 100 years of CSSM/SU’s evangelistic and Bible-teaching work among children, young people and latterly families. The word ‘commonwealth’ has sometimes led to the omission of stz 3, but is intended to refer to ‘the community in its common life and interests’ rather than the British Commonwealth; the word, however, has increased the hymn’s usefulness for the many wider occasions for which it has been chosen. From the same stz, the author says ‘I have sometimes had comments that the trilogy “pleasure, wealth and care��? is true to experience—a fact which should not surprise us, as it is drawn directly from Luke 8:14’. For Queen Elizabeth II’s golden jubilee in 2002, the author provided an additional stz between the original 3 and 4, ‘Lord, for our hopes, the dreams of all our living …’; this too was sung at an even bigger (and royal) celebration at St Paul’s in June that year but has since been discontinued by the author. One change made by him, first by permission and now for preference, is ‘we’ for ‘men’ at 4.1; in the same line and 4.3, however, an unauthorised ‘you’ has sometimes appeared in print instead of ‘him’.

In the author’s collected texts published in 2003, A House of Praise, this hymn is noted as having been translated into Chinese, Norwegian and Welsh, appearing on 12 recordings and in over 60 books.

FINLANDIA notwithstanding, and other tunes including HIGHWOOD (236), Thomas Wood’s ST OSYTH and John Marsh’s MABLEDON (c1980), the music with which the hymn has become known from YP2 onwards is LORD OF THE YEARS by Michael Baughen (not, as sometimes stated, jointly by him and David Wilson). The composer was Vicar of Holy Trinity Platt, in Manchester, and recalls that his work for ‘the main fabric of the tune’ took ‘a matter of seconds’. ‘I used to come down to make the morning tea in the kitchen and one day the post arrived just after 7.0 am. I opened the TDS envelope and saw the words of “Lord for the years��?. They spoke music to me instantly. While the tea brewed I ran to the piano, desperate to get it down on paper. My little son Philip had heard me and came down with his blanket; he curled himself up in a chair. Then, when I took the tea up he was singing the tune. A few days later David Winter came to us to preach and stayed with us. I played it to him. He said “That is a winner … it will go very far … I will try to get Cliff Richard to use it.��? He particularly liked the upward flip of the tune. The basic tune was then sent to David Wilson to be set down and arranged properly. Others have arranged it since. I always feel the instant tune was the Lord’s inspiration and I blush to take credit for it. Amazing how it is now used and with wonderful descants and arrangements! Re “debuts��? at Platt: they were usually tried out with the vibrant youth/student gathering on Sunday evenings and Lord, for the years was received with enormous enthusiasm!’ This account is the fullest of all those provided by Michael Baughen for his tunes in Praise! The arrangement here is by David Iliff, as published in HTC and elsewhere; one by Christopher Norton is also in print.

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.