Timothy Dudley-Smith – 1926-2024 – A tribute

August 23, 2024

Timothy Dudley-Smith – 1926-2024

A tribute

Portrait of Timothy Dudley-Smith It is with a mixture of sadness and thanksgiving that we record the passing to glory of Timothy Dudley-Smith. We are so thankful to God for the gift of hymn writing that he gave to Timothy, one of Britain’s most prolific hymn writers, a man whose kindness and godliness touched the lives of so many.

His first hymn is still the most famous, published in over 100 hymnbooks. He wrote Tell out my soul in Blackheath in May 1961, after reading the Magnificat in the New English Bible, the first line stimulating him to try writing a few lines. ‘I jotted down a series of verses’, he wrote later, ‘I saw in it the first line of a poem, and speedily wrote the rest’. Strangely, Scripture Union rejected it for their forthcoming Hymns of Faith! However, once wedded to the tune Woodlands, it went round the world. John Betjeman called it ‘one of the few modern hymns that will truly last.’ As Christopher Idle has noted, ‘It has proved more enduring than the now superseded (and generally unpoetic) NEB translation which gave it birth.’

Prof John Watson said ‘I suspect that in that [first] line Dudley-Smith provided the detonator for what has been called the ‘hymn explosion’ of the last forty years … It is possible … that if he had not realised the strength of these words as a hymn line…others would not have been inspired to write modern hymns.’ What followed was a movement of hymn writing, particularly among Anglican churches in the 1960s and 70s, of which Timothy was a central part.

In his lifetime he wrote over 400 hymns in a rich variety of genres, whether a hymn drawn from a psalm, exploring lament, repentance or jubilant praise, or the rich New Testament themes giving glory to Christ and exalting his name – a repeating theme in so many of his hymns. He also wrote hymns for special occasions. Lord for the years celebrated the centenary of what is now Scripture Union, while Here on the threshold of a new beginning was written for an ordination but came to be associated with the turn of the Millennium. His love for local churches, lived out in his years at CPAS and then as an archdeacon and later suffragan bishop of Thetford, are expressed in such classics as Lord of the Church, we pray for our renewing.

When we began compiling the original Praise Hymnbook back in the mid-1990s, he had already published a prolific collection of hymns. We included 53 of his works in our book, and have added a further 14 in our online collection published in this century. When we were compiling the psalm section of the book, we wanted to include at least one version for every psalm, which left many gaps to fill. Timothy willingly accepted the challenge, producing 9 new versions for our collection. His version of Psalm 72, A king on high is reigning, was posted to me within a week of my writing to him, and is an outstanding piece of poetry that captures the essence of the psalm. When we asked permission to include his version of psalm 136, O thank the Lord, for he is good, he refused! Uncharacteristically, that item had not used rhyme, and he told us he ‘disliked the somewhat facile use of assonance.’ Rhyme was important for memorising and for beauty. It deserves mention that his hymn The Lord made man includes a rare solution to the hymnwriter’s nightmare of finding anything that will rhyme with ‘Christ’:

Yet Adam’s children, born to pain,
by self enslaved, by sin enticed,
still may by grace be born again,
children of God, beloved in Christ.

He enjoyed many holidays in Cornwall, and before taking the family out surfing, he would sit and write hymns in the quiet of the morning. His son James (rector of St John’s Yeovil) remembers ‘Just occasionally my father would try out a line on my sisters and me, as we drove around. I remember him also being anxious about unconscious plagiarism, wondering if a good line he had written was actually somebody else’s.’

In such a large body of work, it is inevitable that some gems lay largely undiscovered. One of those is What blessings God bestows, from Psalm 73. The final verse is now his full experience.

God is my strength and guide
by his unchanging love:
whom have I, Lord, on earth beside,
nor yet in heaven above?
My flesh and heart may fail,
but God will constant be,
his grace and mercy still prevail
to all eternity.