Praying with USPG and the music of Vaughan Williams: Tuesday 30 August 2022

Magda’s Irish home … Dundarave House in Bushmills, Co Antrim, was the home of Magdalene (Fisher), Lady Macnaghten, for whom Vaughan Williams wrote the tune ‘Magda’

Patrick Comerford

Today the Calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship remembers John Bunyan, Spiritual Writer (1688), with a Lesser Festival in the Church of England.

Before today gets busy, I am taking some time this morning for reading, prayer and reflection.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose music is celebrated throughout this year’s Proms season. In my prayer diary for these weeks I am reflecting in these ways:

1, One of the readings for the morning;

2, Reflecting on a hymn or another piece of music by Vaughan Williams, often drawing, admittedly, on previous postings on the composer;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary, ‘Pray with the World Church.’

Newport Pagnell United Reformed Church can be seen through an arch on High Street … John Bunyan (1628-1688) was part of the Cromwellian garrison in Newport Pagnell (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

John Bunyan was born at Elstow in Bedfordshire in 1628. He was largely self-educated and used the Bible as his grammar. He read very few other books, and they were all piously Protestant in nature, yet he produced Pilgrim’s Progress, probably the most original text of spiritual genius that century, telling the story of the man Christian on his journey through life to God.

Pilgrim’s Progress was not written while John Bunyan was a prisoner in Bedford gaol, as often stated, but during a confinement some years later. History tells us little of the man but what is clear from his writings is that the salvation of the soul was what mattered most to him. He died on this day in 1688.

We sang his only hymn, ‘He who would valiant be,’ to the well-known tune by Vaughan Williams as the processional hymn at the Parish Eucharist in the Church of Saint Mary and Saint Giles in Stony Stratford on Sunday [28 August 2022].

Luke 21: 21, 34-36 (NRSVA):

[Jesus said:] 21 ‘Then those in Judea must flee to the mountains, and those inside the city must leave it, and those out in the country must not enter it …

34 ‘Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, 35like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. 36Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.’



Today’s reflection: ‘Saviour, again to thy dear name we raise’

For my reflections and devotions each day these few weeks, I am reflecting on and invite you to listen to a piece of music or a hymn set to a tune by the great English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

This morning [30 August 2022], I invite you to join me in listening to the hymn ‘Saviour, again to thy dear name we raise’ by Canon John Ellerton (1826-1893).

Vaughan Williams wrote the tune Magda with this hymn in mind, but also gave it some interesting Irish connections.

The tune was first published in 1925 in Songs of Praise, where it is chosen as the setting for this hymn.

Vaughan Williams named the tune Magda because he wrote it in preparation for the wedding of Magdalene Fisher (1903-2002), his niece by marriage, who was about to marry the future Sir Anthony Macnaghten (1899-1972) on 27 February 1926.

After World War II, the couple moved to his family home, Dundarave House in Bushmills, Co Antrim. In 1955, Sir Antony Macnaghten succeeded to the family title as tenth baronet and as Chief of the Macnachtan Clan. The first Macnaghten moved from Scotland to Ireland in the 16th century and served as secretary to the MacDonnells, Earls of Antrim. The lands they acquired included a large portion of the village of Bushmills, which the clan rebuilt in the late 1800s. The family motto is: ‘Be not wiser nor the Highest, I hope in God.’

When her husband died in 1972, Magda continued to live in Northern Ireland until her death in February 2002 at the age of 98.

One of the hymns sung at her funeral on 1 March 2002 in Dunluce, Parish Church was ‘For all the saints, who from the their labours rest.’ Her uncle Vaughan Williams had composed the tune Sine Nomine for that hymn by Bishop Walsham How (1823-1897).

The tune Magda is used for the hymn ‘Go forth for God; go forth for the world in peace’ by John Raphael Peacey (1869-1971) in both the New English Hymnal (No 321) and the Irish Church Hymnal (No 455), while Ellerton’s hymn ‘Saviour, again to thy dear name we raise’ is often set to the tune ‘Ellers’ by FJ Hopkins (1818-1901), re-harmonised by Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), with Vaughan Wlliams’s Magda as an alternative tune (see New English Hymnal, No 250) .

Like Vaughan Williams and Sir Anthony Macnaghten, Canon John Ellerton was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was an authority on hymns, wrote or translated over 80 hymns, and contributed to Hymns Ancient and Modern. His best-known hymn is, perhaps, ‘The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended.’ He is said to have written that hymn in 1870 as he made his nightly walk to teach at a Mechanics’ Institute. It was published that year in 1870 for A Liturgy for Missionary Meetings.

He was born in Clerkenwell into an evangelical family, and was educated at King William’s College on the Isle of Man, and Trinity College, Cambridge (BA 1849; MA 1854), where he came under the influence of Frederick D Maurice.

He was ordained deacon in 1850 and priest in 1851 by the Bishop of Chichester, and at first was curate of Eastbourne, Sussex, and then Curate of Brighton Lecturer of Saint Peter’s, Brighton.

In 1860, he became chaplain to Lord Crewe and Vicar of Crewe Green in Cheshire. There he chaired the education committee at the Mechanics’ Institute for the local Railway Company. Reorganising the Institute, he made it one of the most successful in England. He taught classes in English and Bible History, and organised one of the first Choral Associations in the Midlands.

While he was Vicar of Crewe Green, he wrote this hymn in 1866 for the Malpas, Middlewich and Nantwich Choral Association in Cheshire.

He was co-editor with Bishop William Walsham How (1823-1897) and others of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) Church Hymns (1871).

In 1872, he became Rector of Saint Oswald’s, Hinstock, Shropshire, in the Diocese of Lichfield. In 1876, he moved to Barnes, then in Surrey, a west London suburb. There he became very involved in the work of SPCK. However, the work among a large population broke him down and he had to go abroad for a year, serving as Chaplain at Pegli in Italy (1884-1885). He returned to England and the small Essex parish in White Roding was his last.

During his final illness, he was made an honorary canon of St Alban’s Cathedral in 1892, but was never installed. It is said that as he lay dying hymns flowed from his lips in unceasing praise to God. He died in Torquay in Devon on 15 June 1893, aged 66.

Ellerton refused to register a copyright on any of his hymns, claiming that if they ‘counted worthy to contribute to Christ’s praise in the congregation, one ought to feel very thankful and humble.’ To hear them offered in worship was reward enough for him.

Saviour, again to thy dear name we raise
With one accord our parting hymn of praise.
Guard thou the lips from sin, the hearts from shame,
That in this house have called upon thy name.

Grant us thy peace, Lord, through the coming night;
Turn thou for us its darkness into light;
From harm and danger keep thy children free,
For dark and light are both alike to thee.

Grant us thy peace throughout our earthly life;
Peace to thy Church from error and from strife;
Peace to our land, the fruit of truth and love;
Peace in each heart, thy Spirit from above.

Thy peace in life, the balm of every pain;
Thy peace in death, the hope to rise again;
Then, when thy voice shall bid our conflict cease,
Call us, O Lord, to thine eternal peace.

Dunluce Castle near Bushmills, Co Antrim … Vaughan Williams wrote the tune ‘Magda’ for the wedding of his niece by marriage Magdalene Fisher and the future Sir Anthony Macnaghten (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Prayer, Tuesday 30 August 2022 (John Bunyan):

The Collect:

God of peace,
who called your servant John Bunyan to be valiant for truth:
grant that as strangers and pilgrims
we may at the last
rejoice with all Christian people in your heavenly city;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post Communion Prayer:

God of truth,
whose Wisdom set her table
and invited us to eat the bread and drink the wine
of the kingdom:
help us to lay aside all foolishness
and to live and walk in the way of insight,
that we may come with your servant John Bunyan
to the eternal feast of heaven;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The theme in the USPG prayer diary all this week is ‘A New Province,’ inspired by the work of the Igreja Anglicana de Mocambique e Angola (IAMA), made up of dioceses in Mozambique and Angola, the second and third largest Portuguese-speaking countries in the world.

The Right Revd Vicente Msosa, Bishop of the Diocese of Niassa in the Igreja Anglicana de Mocambique e Angola, shares his prayer requests in the USPG Prayer Diary throughout this week.

The USPG Prayer Diary invites us to pray today in these words:

Let us pray for terrorism to cease as many innocent souls continue to be killed every day in Cabo Delgado.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

The architecture of Williams-Ellis links Cushendun and Portmeirion

The houses on Cushendun Square were designed for Lord Cushendun by Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Patrick Comerford

Earlier this year, I spent a Sunday afternoon in Portmeirion, the village built by the Welsh architect, Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis (1883-1978) in 1925-1975 on the estate he inherited in Snowdonia.

Portmeirion is both his masterpiece and an Italianate fantasy at one, but is also famed as the location for the television cult drama series The Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan, which was filmed there in 1967.

But Clough Williams-Ellis also designed several buildings in Co Antrim for Ronald McNeill, later Lord Cushendun in 1927, and for the Macnaghten family of Dunderave, and I managed to see some of these on Saturday afternoon [12 November 2016] during a visit to Co Antrim that included the Dark Hedges, Gracehill House, Dunluce Castle, Bushmills, the Giant’s Causeway, the Rope Bridge at Carrick-a-Rede, near Ballintoy, and the coastal village of Cushendun.

Clough Williams-Ellis was born on 28 May 1883 at Gayton in Northamptonshire, where his father, a former don at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, was the vicar.

After attending Trinity College, Cambridge, he spent only a few months in formal architectural training before opening his own architectural practice in London at the age of 22.

He first came to Ireland in 1912, when he was invited by Ronald McNeill (1861-1934), the local landlord, to design a number of buildings that would lead to redesigning the heart of the village of Cushenden.

McNeill was educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, and while he was still at Oxford he married Elizabeth Maud Bolitho in 1884; He was called to the bar in 1888, but before entering on his political career, he worked as a journalist, including as editor of The St James’s Gazette (1900-1904) and assistant editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1906-1910).

In 1911, McNeill was elected MP for the St Augustine’s division of Kent in 1911, and later he was MP for Canterbury. He was Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Financial Secretary to the Treasury and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. In 1927, he became Baron Cushendun, of Cushendun in Co Antrim, taking his title from the village he had designed for him by Clough Williams-Ellis.

He was the Acting Foreign Secretary in 1928 and he served twice as the chief British representative to the League of Nations, when Lord Cushendun signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

Standing 6' 6" tall, he claimed he was the tallest barrister of his day. He was known to his political opponents as Lord Crush-em-down, and it is said he once threw a book at Winston Churchill in the House of Commons during a debate on the Home Rule Bill.

Incidentally, McNeill and Churchill were neighbours. After the death of Lord Herbert Lionel Henry Vane-Tempest (1862-1921), a younger son of the Marquess of Londonderry, his estates, including the Londonderry Arms Hotel in the neighbouring village of Carnlough, were inherited by his second cousin, Sir Winston Churchill. In 1934, Churchill sold the hotel to the Lyons family.

Elizabeth Maud Bolitho died in 1925, and she was buried in the Church of Ireland churchyard in Cushendun, where her gravestone reads: ‘A Cornishwoman who knew The Glens and their people.’

In 1930, Lord Cushendun married his second wife, Catherine Sydney Louisa Margesson. He died in Cushenden in 1934, and his second wife died in 1939. He is buried in the Church of Ireland graveyard near his nationalist cousin Ada or Ide McNeill, Sir Roger Casement’s friend and admirer, who died in 1959.

Glenmona House, Cushendun was designed for Ronald McNeill, Lord Cushendun, by Sir Bertram Clough Williams Ellis (Photograph © Copyright Eric Jones and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence)

McNeill first brought Clough Williams-Ellis to Cushendun in 1912 to design a hall and club. The hall and club were never built, but in 1912-1913, Williams-Ellis designed a lodge for McNeill at Glenmona House and some houses in Cushendun.

Cushendun Square consists of seven two-storeyed terraces with mansard roofs and Georgian-style windows. The terraces are linked at the corners by twin arches and were planned symmetrically around three sides of a courtyard or common enclosed garden that is entered through the impressive gate piers.

The houses, set firmly in the Arts and Crafts Movement, were designed to look like Cornish fishing cottages to please of McNeill’s wife, Maud Bolitho, who was born in Penzance in Cornwall.

The houses on Cushendun Square have mansard roofs and Georgian-style windows (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

At this time, Williams-Ellis was also invited to neighbouring Bushmills, where he was commissioned by Sir Edward Charles Macnaghten and his sisters Beatrice and Helen to design the Macnaghten Memorial Hall and Schools in memory of their father Sir Edward Macnaghten (1830-1913). The hall and school opened on 4 August 1915.

Vaughan Williams named his tune Magda because he wrote it in preparation for the wedding of Magdalene Fisher (1903-2002), his niece by marriage, who was about to marry the future Sir Anthony Macnaghten (1899-1972), a grandson of Sir Edward Macnaghten, on 27 February 1926.

Williams-Ellis designed Cushendun Square in the style of Cornish fishing cottages (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Meanwhile, however, World War I had already broken out, and from 1915 to 1918, Clough Williams-Ellis was in France and Flanders in the Welsh Guards and the Royal Tank Corps, and was awarded the Military Cross. On his return, along with other works, he produced designs for war memorials and at the same time the Bushmills Memorial School.

Williams-Ellis also returned to Cushendun in 1923 to rebuild Glenmona House for McNeill after the house was burned down by the IRA in 1922. He designed Glenmona House in a neo-Georgian style, with all the mock pomposity of 18th century architecture.

Glenmona House is of two storeys in front and three at the rear.The principal front has two, three-sided bows joined by an arcade on Tuscan columns. The roof is high with a solid parapet; external shutters to the windows.

Williams-Ellis designed Maud’s Cottages, a row of quaint, white-washed cottages on the seafront (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

After Maud died in 1925, Williams-Ellis was also commissioned to design Maud’s Cottages, a row of quaint, white-washed cottages on the seafront, in her memory. This is a terrace of four two-storey houses with slate-hung upper storeys.

This second group of houses were designed in the Arts and Crafts manner in the office of Wiliams-Ellis by his Dublin-born assistant, Frederick MacManus (1903-1985). MacManus was born in Dublin on 20 January 1903 and brought up in Dun Laoghaire. He was articled to Vincent Kelly for four years from 1919 while also attending evening classes given by Richard Caulfield Orpen at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art.

On completing his articles, he worked for a short time in the office of Beckett & Harrington. In 1924, he left Ireland to study at the Architectural Association schools in London, passing the RIBA final examination in 1926. In 1925-1926, he was an assistant to Clough Williams-Ellis. He then spent a year travelling in the US and Europe, during which he worked briefly in the office of the American architect WL Stoddart in New York.

In 1927 he returned to London and entered the office of Sir John Burnet, Tait & Lorne, and he remained as Tait’s assistant until he joined the Ministry of Works in 1940. During World War II, he became secretary to the Committee on Building Materials and Standardisation. In 1949, he formed a partnership with Edward Armstrong with an office in Gloucester Place, London. He died on 7 May 1985.

In 1932, Williams-Ellis also designed a shop in Cushendun for Mr A McAlister, a tenant of Lord Cushendun. In 1923-1937, Williams-Ellis also designed the First Church of Christ Scientist on University Avenue, Belfast. Work on this complex began in 1922, and the project included a school built in 1923, a house built in 1928, and the church built in 1936-1937.

Clough Williams-Ellis was a life-long advocate and protector for the environment which led to a knighthood in 1971 for his services ‘to architecture and the environment.’ He died in 1978.

The poet Moira O’Neill also lived in Cushendun and was inspired by the landscapes and the settings. She was the mother of the noted writer Molly Keane. The English poet John Masefield and his wife, Constance, a younger daughter of Nicolas Crommelin of nearby Rockport, spent many holidays in Cushendun.

Cushendun stands at the mouth of the River Dun and Glendun, one of the nine Glens of Antrim (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Cushendun stands on an elevated beach on the Co Antrim coast at the outflow of the Glendun and Glencorp valleys, off the A2 coast road between Cushendall and Ballycastle. It has a sheltered harbour and lies at the mouth of the River Dun and Glendun, one of the nine Glens of Antrim.

The Mull of Kintyre in Scotland is only about 15 miles away across the North Channel and could be seen clearly from the beach and the harbour last Saturday afternoon.

Since 1954, most of the village and the parkland around Glenmona to the north has been owned by the National Trust. Cushendun’s picturesque coastal setting in the heart of the Antrim Coast and Glens Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, together with its unique architectural inheritance, resulted in its designation as a Conservation area in 1980.