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6. Frederick Ouseley and St Michael’s College, Tenbury

The name of the Revd Sir Frederick Ouseley, Bart., means nothing to the overwhelming majority of churchgoers, though some may perhaps recall that from time to time their choir has sung his short and simple anthems ‘From the rising of the sun’ and ‘How goodly are thy tents’. His masterpiece, the short unaccompanied eight-part ‘O Saviour of the world’, retains a prominent place in the cathedral repertoire. Members of some choirs will be aware that he composed a few single chants for psalms which are still in use. Of his hymn tunes only ‘Contemplation’, set to Joseph Addison’s great hymn ‘When all thy mercies O my God’, is still widely used, though even this has been excluded from many modern hymn books. This is a meagre legacy from a man who composed about 75 anthems and 13 service settings and was considered to be one of the leading church musicians of the mid-Victorian era, but this was a point at which the standard of church music was, with notable exceptions, very low.

Ouseley is, however, to be remembered for the pioneering choir school he founded at Tenbury in Worcestershire and for a remarkable music library which included many important manuscripts. The choir school survived, often against formidable odds, until 1985 when financial problems caused closure. The library was then transferred to the Bodleian in Oxford and the chapel remains the parish church. The existence of the school and the library owed everything to his considerable personal wealth and to his lifelong commitment to raising the standard of music in parish churches and cathedrals.

Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley was born in Grosvenor Square, London, in 1825. His father, the first baronet, was a distinguished Oriental scholar and served as ambassador successively to Russia and Persia. The Duke of York, the Duke of Wellington and the Marchioness of Salisbury were godparents at the baptism.

From the age of three he displayed extraordinary musical gifts and it was said that he could play before he could talk. By the age of five he was composing waltzes and marches and once cried, ‘Only think, papa blows his nose in G’. At six he played a duet with Mendelssohn and, although he had no formal training, composed an opera when only eight. He was privately educated by the Vicar of Dorking and went in 1843 to Christ Church, Oxford. In his final year there the cathedral organist resigned and he offered his services as honorary organist until a replacement could be found. This took several months and during this time Ouseley was solely responsible for all the cathedral’s music.

He had inherited the baronetcy in 1843 and, although it was at the time unusual for anyone of his social standing to seek Holy Orders, he nonetheless prepared for ordination in order ‘to do something to revive the music of the sanctuary’. In 1849 he became a curate at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge in London – a church markedly influenced by the Oxford Movement. He arrived in the parish when a new St Barnabas district church was about to be consecrated in Pimlico and lived in the nearby clergy house with three other curates. This enterprise in a slum area was seen as providing an opportunity for initiating the most advanced form of Catholic-style worship and, almost immediately, it attracted an extreme Protestant faction which, under the banner ‘No Popery’, began demonstrations that led to riots and the desecration of the new building.

After about 18 months of this, and with no support being offered by the Bishop of London or other senior diocesan church officials, the Vicar of St Paul’s and his curates resigned. Ouseley was still in deacon’s orders but during his brief time in Pimlico he had been responsible for the choir and was concerned that the crisis at St Barnabas would leave the boys stranded. He therefore purchased a large house near Windsor, took the boys into residence, engaged one of his fellow curates as master of the school, created a private chapel and started twice-daily cathedral-style services. Men of the choirs of Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s who lived within reach came to lend a hand.

Having got his project under way, he went on a tour of Europe visiting cathedrals and other major churches, meeting church musicians and collecting rare church music. He had by this time taken an Oxford BMus with a cantata The Lord is the True God, which was deemed good enough to be performed at the Three Choirs Festival at Hereford in 1858. On his return from Europe in 1852 he began making plans for what would become St Michael’s College, Tenbury. At the same time he decided that his vocation was also to be a country priest and, with the ready co-operation of the Bishop of Hereford, R. D. Hampden, the laying of the foundation stone of St Michael’s College in 1854 was followed, a year later, by his ordination to the priesthood.

In the same year his achievement in publishing two volumes of anthems – the first comprising his own works and the second those of the English masters of the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – led to his appointment as Professor of Music at Oxford. The new college was erected on a large estate which Ouseley had bought some two miles from Tenbury and the bishop agreed to the creation of a new parish with a church, designed on cathedral lines with a fine Henry Willis organ; the church would also become the college chapel, a vicarage and a school – all paid for by Ouseley along with an endowment. He became the first vicar and warden when the church and college were dedicated in honour of St Michael and All Angels on 29 September 1856. The college foundation consisted of a warden and precentor, 20 honorary fellows, a headmaster, an assistant master, an organist and music master, a librarian, a sacristan, and five lay clerks. Eight choristers and eight probationers – all educated without charge – were admitted to share in the general education provided by the college, and after a few years there was a steady flow of boys to the leading public schools. After Oxford or Cambridge many of them were ordained. In term, Mattins was sung daily at 9 a.m. and Evensong at 6 p.m.

Twelve months before the dedication of the church and college the bishop appointed Ouseley to be also precentor of Hereford Cathedral. This ancient office, with a seat on the chapter, was worth £500 a year (a considerable sum at that time) but for more than 100 years none of its holders had discharged any of its duties, or even been qualified to do so. Ouseley was both eminently qualified and enthusiastic, and although the reforming Ecclesiastical Commission took the opportunity to disendow the stall, his own private income enabled him to accept the responsibilities. These were supervisory and did not require his daily attendance, though he was in Hereford frequently and towards the end of his life became a canon residentiary.

At Oxford he instituted a course of lectures in music – something unknown for 100 years or more – and revised the standard of the degrees. Candidates for the DMus were required not only to submit a substantial composition of their own, but also face a public examination on historical and critical aspects of music, and even an examination on the rudiments of the classics. In the first year of the new regime 50 per cent of the candidates failed and Ouseley was confronted in the streets of Oxford by angry, and sometimes tearful, failures. He met all the costs of the new arrangements which included additional courses of lectures.

Some of his time at Tenbury, which extended until his death while in residence at Hereford in 1889, was devoted to the accumulation of antiquarian music books and manuscripts for his personal library. These included a copy of the Messiah partly in the handwriting of Handel and used by him as a conducting score for its first performance in Dublin in 1742, Thomas Tomkins’s Musica Deo Sacra (1668), the huge organ book that bears the name of Adrian Batten (1591–1637) and much music of the Palestrina school; many manuscripts of operas from the Palais Royal Library in Paris were also acquired. The college had its own general library, which was said to equal that of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges. The most notable, and perhaps the most unlikely, alumnus of the college is Jonathan Harvey, whose late twentieth-century atonal music, employing electronic sound, would undoubtedly have astonished its founder.