The Rt Revd Stephen Platten writes:

GORDON KNIGHTS, chief executive of Hymns Ancient & Modern from 1980 until 2004, was perhaps the most unsung hero of religious publishing. Gordon was a Suffolk lad, born in Woodbridge, then attending school in Bishop’s Stortford, before moving to Beccles, where he attended the grammar school. Beccles and thereabouts became his base for most of the rest of his life.

Born in 1937, he was still of an age for National Service, and he served for two years as a coder in the Royal Navy. His university place at Bristol was deferred, but with his father’s death his university education was further interrupted. Gordon went back to Bristol, but decided ultimately to return to Suffolk, where he began in 1960 with the well-known printers William Clowes, by then part of McCorquodales. Clowes’s staple diet included the printing of Hymns Ancient and Modern. This had effectively been the earliest Church of England hymnary, born of a conversation in a railway carriage between two clergymen in 1861.

The rights belonged to a holding company and bore fruit in numerous editions and eventually the very popular Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised, first published in 1950. Gordon worked for Clowes from 1960 to 1980 — part of that time in London — where he met Jackie, his future wife, who also went on to work for Hymns Ancient & Modern. Later, in 1975, he gave birth to his first significant brainchild, having reflected on the oddness of this 100-year-old holding company, which had built up substantial reserves through the sale of hymn books.

With the assistance of its financial proprietor, Edgar Bishop, he decided that the company should be more than a sleeping entity. Why not use the reserves and transform the holding company into an active publishing enterprise? Thus was born what we still know as Hymns Ancient & Modern: the focus of a group of publishing concerns.

In 1980, Gordon left Clowes to run Hymns A&M. It was a creative act of genius, and, while continuing to publish editions of and supplements to Hymns Ancient and Modern — prodigious and regular earners — he founded the Canterbury Press in 1986, initially to publish The New English Hymnal. Its list later expanded to include spirituality and liturgy.

This was but the beginning, as Gordon began to take over other enterprises. He became something of a mogul, but the most unlikely mogul imaginable: mild, gentle, and modest in manner, but remarkably resourceful.

By 1989, the board comprised names such as those of Professor Henry Chadwick; Dr Lionel Dakers, Director of the Royal School of Church Music; and Dr Allan Wicks, Organist of Canterbury Cathedral (later in the 1990s to be joined by Sir Richard O’Brien, whose signature was on the German surrender documents in 1945). And so, that year, when Dr Bernard Palmer, proprietor and editor of the Church Times, decided that it was time to sell, he chose Hymns Ancient & Modern over other suitors, encouraged by assurances about the future employment of some of his former staff and a continuation of the paper’s broad outlook with the appointment to the editor’s chair of a CT leader writer, the distinguished journalist John Whale.

It was an bold undertaking and formidable logistical exercise, involving a swift move of operations from 7 Portugal Street to 33 Upper Street, the upheaval of changing from hot-metal to out-of-house computer typesetting, and the new editor’s ambition to follow the models of Harold Evans’s Sunday Times and Andreas Whittam Smith’s Independent. Gordon accepted the Thomson creed on editorial independence: John simply said that he felt free to spend until he was told to stop. On his retirement, five years later, he was succeeded by his news editor, Paul Handley, whose potential had been spotted by both, and the paper was permitted to expand significantly and move into colour printing and online.

Recruiting a new editor for the Canterbury Press, Gordon lured Christine Smith from HarperCollins. An outstanding editor, she positioned this relatively young imprint at the forefront of religious publishing, both popular and religious. Together, Gordon and Christine also scooped a significant chunk of the market provoked by the publication of Common Worship. Christine remembers his gentle humour and lack of anxiety on delayed publication dates. One title, Eternity Now, fell well behind schedule, and Gordon commented: “Ah well, it’ll be Eternity Later!”

Another prize came when John Bowden, the esteemed vintage managing director of SCM Press, realised that SCM needed recapitalising, and so sent one of the directors to sue for a merger. This brought the name of the most prestigious British publisher of theology into the family, and one of its directors joined the main board. When Gordon re-founded A&M, there were three employees; when he retired, they numbered 50.

Gordon and Jackie’s three children included a younger son who did work experience for the company, joining the staff briefly thereafter. In 2002, Gordon was awarded a Lambeth MA, giving him the degree of which circumstances had deprived him. Later, his achievements were honoured with a lay canonry at Norwich Cathedral. To describe it theologically, Gordon in effect created Hymns A&M ex nihilo.