Born on this day in 1892, Herbert Howells is something of a legend in the world of cathedral music today. However the majority of his most famous works were written after the Second World War, at a time when he shied away from self-promotion and his contemporaries perhaps rated him more for his teaching abilities.
Herbert Norman Howells CH CBE was an English composer, organist, and teacher, most famous for his large output of Anglican church music. The son of a bankrupt builder, with the community shame that carried leaving a deep mark on twelve year old Howells. The fear of penury was never far away in his mind and indeed he had to give up his job as sub-organist at Salisbury Cathedral after illness in 1917. This fear may have precipitated his desire to excel at teaching, rather than promote himself as a creative artist. Teaching paid the bills, he had precious little time for composition.
Howells was the youngest of six children with little hope of a formal education, yet his musical talent was recognised and nurtured by a member of the family of Charles Bathurst, 1st Viscount Bledisloe who had taken an interest in the budding musician. Howells began music lessons in 1905 with Herbert Brewer, the organist of Gloucester Cathedral, and at sixteen became his articled pupil at the Cathedral alongside Ivor Novello and Ivor Gurney. Howells turned out to be a musical genius; he went on to win a scholarship to study with Parry, Stanford and Wood at the Royal College of Music and picked up most of the RCM's’s glittering prizes along the way. By the 1920s he was seen as a promising young composer of chamber music, orchestral works and songs, of whom great things were expected. Tragically his son Michael tragically died of polio in 1935 and he never got over this loss.
