Through all our days, we'll sing the praise

Michael Saward’s hymn, firmly dependent on its tune, was written at Shaw St, Liverpool, in May 1967, for a Southern TV competition ‘A Hymn for Britain’. It won 1st prize and was published in Youth Praise 2 in 1969. Rather than moving from suffering to triumph, as many hymns do, it remarkably combines both elements in each of the 4 stzs, leading into the clinching phrase in each 8th line, ‘our … King and Saviour’. Here it is the author who has revised his own words, partly in 1981 for HTC and partly since, in 1993. The lines affected are 1.7, 2.3, 3.6 and 4.4.

Until the appearance of this text, the tune GREENSLEEVES was associated most in hymn books with W C Dix’s What child is this who, laid to rest. Written c1871 and known as ‘The Manger Throne’, this appeared in Bramley and Stainer’s Christmas Carols New and Old in that year, and has enjoyed a late 20th-c popularity in many more carol books, carol sheets and hymnals. The first known reference to the old English love-song (‘to my Lady Greene Sleeves’) is in 1580, by which time it seems already to have been popular. It is mentioned twice in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (c1600; 2.1 and 5.5), and c1642 appears as a New Year Carol, The old year now away is fled. Some arrangements turn the original C natural in lines 1 and 3 into a sharp, as in David G Wilson’s arrangement when first published with this text. Our diatonic key system was at the time of composition relatively unformed, so the last 4 notes of the scale (wherever they come in the tune) vary in other versions of the tune.

b Blackheath, SE London 1932; d Switzerland 2015. Eltham Coll; Bristol Univ and Tyndale Hall Bristol (BA); ordained 1956. He ministered in Croydon, Edgware and Liverpool before becoming the C of E’s Radio and TV Officer 1967–72. From 1972 to 1991 he served W London incumbencies in Fulham and Ealing; during the latter he barely survived a vicious attack on himself and his family at the vicarage, by intruders high on drugs. He then became Canon Treasurer of St Paul’s Cathedral from 1991, providing one of the two evangelical voices heard throughout the decade from the cathedral pulpit; some sermons were published in 1997 as These are the Facts (a title from hymn 629). He retired to Wapping, E London, in 2000. He was a Church Commissioner and General Synod member; a prolific writer, speaker and broadcaster on the local and national church, doctrine, mission, liturgy, sexual ethics, baptism and hymnody. His book Signed, Sealed, Delivered: finding the key to the Bible (2004) explores the concept of ‘covenant’ as that key.

From early 1962 onwards he wrote over 100 hymn texts, his first ones including ‘Christ triumphant’ were published in Youth Praise (1966, 1969), followed by several in Psalm Praise (1973) and Hymns for Today’s Church (1982) of which he was words editor. He was a founding Director and later Chairman of Jubilate Hymns, with a leading role in other Jubilate collections including Sing Glory (1999) which features 23 of his hymns. 75 of them were published in 2006, with an introduction and brief notes, in Christ Triumphant and other hymns. In 2009 he initiated and edited Come Celebrate, a unique collection of 291 lesser-known hymn-texts by 20 living authors, 14 of whom are represented in Praise! He said of himself, ‘My style is deliberately punchy and I love to use strong, graphic illustration’. Nos.119D, 162, 166, 249, 291, 446, 525, 592, 629, 635, 656, 849, 865*.