IN 1969, Michael Stancliffe arrived from St Margaret’s, Westminster as the new Dean of Winchester. Three years later, he invited his former organist from St Margaret’s, Martin Neary, to join him. By the end of 1975, with the arrival of John V. Taylor as Bishop of Winchester, a remarkable triumvirate was complete.
Just months later, in 1976, I became a Winchester chorister. Between those three men, I would witness an ongoing energy and creativity which both inspired me and nurtured my faith. Their collaboration created a culture of creativity and devotion that was to shape my lifelong understanding of music as a form of worship.
EVERY summer, Taylor and his wife, Peggy, would host us choristers for strawberries on the lawn of the Bishop’s residence, Wolvesey Palace. He would speak to us with warmth and humour: although we knew he was a great man, there was nothing distant about him. Only later did I understand that he was one of the leading Evangelical thinkers of his generation, the author of an early environ-mentalist text (Enough is Enough, 1975), and a man of great artistic sensitivity and deep knowledge of the arts.
At Christmas, Stancliffe and his wife, Barbara, invited the choirmen and choristers for a feast at their home in the Cathedral Close. The Dean seemed sterner than the Bishop, but we all knew his kindness. We would eat turkey, play games, and sing Charles Wood’s Oculi Omnium as a grace before the meal. I vividly recall one of his sermons (a rare thing for a chorister to do), which was preached after we had sung Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia. He said that sermons were all very well, but singing and music were the ultimate celebration of God in our lives. It was a moment of revelation: that our singing was not mere adornment, but itself a form of prayer.
As Director of Music, Neary’s partnership with the Dean and Bishop was evident. I recall vividly the visual sign of their connection in the theatre of cathedral ritual. Before every concert, as the audience stood in silence, the Dean and Director of Music would be verged to the front. The Dean would lead prayers from the pulpit and then sit listening in the front row while Neary took his place at the rostrum. It was a perfect embodiment of worship and art in harmony.
Winchester choristers with Canon Anthony Caesar (the author wearing glasses)
TWO other remarkable musicians joined the community. In 1975, Neary appointed James Lancelot, fresh from King’s College, Cambridge, as Sub-Organist. I remember his kindness and firmness in keyboard lessons, but especially his encouragement when he allowed me to play the cathedral organ late at night — loudly. I was in heaven, sitting there, aged 12, causing mayhem, but James was very good at seeing off the noise complaints from people living in the Close. He knew that he was passing on the special spirit of musical creativity.
The Precentor, Canon Anthony Caesar, completed the constellation. He did not own a tuning fork because his pitch was perfect. He was an accomplished composer and an editor of The New English Hymnal. At one Advent carol service, James was, unusually, away, so Caesar, an FRCO, ascended to the loft and played the organ for the service. We choristers were mightily impressed.
We were taught that the unending daily discipline of excellence within the regular offices powered and grounded everything else. Even as children, we understood both the artistic and spiritual responsibilities, and their indivisibility, because it was modelled by the transparently dynamic collaboration between Taylor, Stancliffe, and Neary.
ALL this artistry culminated in 1979 in “Winchester 900”, celebrating the 900th anniversary of the founding of the Norman cathedral. The year was filled with services and concerts of astonishing ambition. With the London Sinfonietta, the choir performed Bruckner’s E-Minor Mass, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, and a new work, Hymn, by Jonathan Harvey. All of this repertoire was seriously demanding, but with lay clerks such as Donald Sweeney, William Kendall, and Keith Ross, Neary had assembled a choir of rare brilliance.
One great concert at the west end remains etched in my memory: Neary conducting the LSO in Berlioz’s Te Deum, with Lancelot thundering on the organ from the opposite end of the building. The orchestral piece was Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum. The Messiaen sound-world seemed like a great gift that this distinctive cathedral spirituality had bestowed on us through its musical richness. To a small boy, in the thick of the orchestra, it felt as though everything had led to this moment. Et exspecto was mesmerising, terrifying and spiritually uplifting, all at once.
IN THAT same year, 1979, came our most extraordinary adventure: the choir’s tour to Canada and the United States. An NBC documentary, Winchester Sings (available on YouTube), records some of it, including our concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where we sang Howells’s Take Him, Earth, for Cherishing, dedicated to JFK. Travelling with us were the Dean and Bishop and their wives, the organists, the Precentor, the matron, and the lay clerks. The sense of an adult community, embodying collaboration, protecting us and nurturing our calling, was palpable: all of them modelled the unity of purpose that inspired us.
I remember vividly, an hour before our Carnegie Hall concert, finding Neary backstage, uncharacteristically downcast and red-eyed. The organ was broken, he said. I blurted out that we would all “sing with everything we had”. He smiled — and of course we gave our all in the concert. Music that did not require the organ was fetched by taxi from where we were staying, and what might have been a disaster became a triumph. It was a night that none of us would ever forget: the first and (so far) last time an English cathedral choir sang at Carnegie Hall.
LOOKING back, I see that the miracle of that period lay not only in individual talent, but in the collaboration of leaders who embodied a shared vision of faith and art. Stancliffe’s intellect and dignity, Taylor’s humanity and imagination, and Martin Neary’s creative brilliance formed a partnership that inspired all around them. Within this world, Neary was more than a towering inspiration for me. Steadily, painstakingly, he taught me the art and the duties of that art which have sustained me throughout my own life and work. But he taught it within this spiritual community. His genius and generosity are inseparable from it.
I remember Taylor once telling us about a little bridge from his garden that allowed the Bishop to reach the cathedral and the Dean without having to go round by the road. His telling us was nothing to do with a lesson in efficient episcopal time management. Typically, Taylor conveyed his message through story. Leaders have a choice, he said. Such a gate can stay open, or be closed.
Stephen Layton is a conductor.