For a man who claimed to be unable to sing or write music, Timothy Dudley-Smith, the former suffragan bishop of Thetford, who has died aged 97, has left a considerable legacy to Anglican churches in more than 450 hymns, composed over more than 60 years.
Not all of those in the pews may recognise his name – compared, say, to Charles Wesley, the 18th-century divine who bequeathed more than 4,000 – but they will certainly have sung his words.
Tell Out, My Soul the Greatness of the Lord, written in 1961, has been published more than 190 times, is present in at least 220 modern hymn books and is sung across the English-speaking Anglican and Episcopalian world. Lord for the Years Your Love Has Kept and Guided, composed in 1967, is regularly sung at celebrations and anniversaries, including Queen Elizabeth II’s golden jubilee.
Yet Dudley-Smith, who gave his career to the conservative evangelical wing of the Church of England, was modest about his gifts: “I am totally unmusical. I can’t sing in tune and often change key without knowing it,” he said. “Hymn writing has been a most enriching and entirely unexpected gift.”
What he did have, however, was a keen sense of poetry and, accordingly, an understanding of metre and rhythm, all underpinned by biblical study. This made his hymns both traditional sounding, even old-fashioned, and rousingly singable, so that they did not descend into the vacuous triteness of many “happy clappy” modern hymns.
The music his words are sung to comes from long established melodies: Tell Out, My Soul, based on a translation of the Magnificat, the words of the Virgin Mary in St Luke’s gospel, is sung to the tune Woodlands by the early 20th-century composer Walter Greatorex. The poet John Betjeman said it is “one of the very few new hymns really to establish themselves in recent years”.
Dudley-Smith was born in Manchester, the son of Arthur, a prep school teacher, and his wife, Phyllis. Arthur, who died when Timothy was 11, instilled in him early a love of English poetry, traditional poets such as AE Housman, Walter de la Mare and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, then TS Eliot and Philip Larkin and also, conversely, from praying for his father to get better, a desire to become a clergyman.
He was educated at Tonbridge public school, studied mathematics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and, inspired by the works of CS Lewis, he then trained for ordination at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. He was ordained in 1950 and joined the university’s mission – youth club – in Bermondsey, south-east London.
While there, he took boys from the mission to hear the American evangelist Billy Graham at his famously influential first visit to the UK in 1954; originally coming to London for a month, Graham filled the Harringay stadium for three months, and had a stirring effect on British evangelicals including Dudley-Smith. The following year he became editorial secretary of the Evangelical Alliance and then editor of its new magazine, Crusade. From there he worked for the Church Pastoral Aid Society as general secretary before becoming archdeacon of Norwich and then, for 10 years (1981-91), suffragan bishop of Thetford in the same diocese.
It was on family holidays to Cornwall each year that Dudley-Smith took the opportunity to write hymns, getting up early in the mornings and sometimes musing over his notes while sitting on the beach. He had originally started when a colleague working on a new hymn book asked whether he had written any verse that might work in song. Tell Out, My Soul was his first effort.
Dudley-Smith was a low church, old school evangelical – the Church Times reported that he once refused to stand when the General Synod gave an ovation to a visiting Roman Catholic cleric – and from Cambridge days he was a close friend of John Stott, the leading 20th-century English conservative evangelical, whose biography he eventually wrote in two volumes (published in 1995 and 1999). But Dudley-Smith himself avoided the hardline conservatism of some of his colleagues and was generally approachable and modest. Modern trends in churchmanship passed him by as he grew older, one reason why his hymns may sound old-fashioned – nevertheless he kept writing them every year, sending copies of his latest carols off to friends with his Christmas cards.
He was the author of several collections of hymns and his work featured in many others, some of his more popular works being translated into Korean and Chinese. His last book, A Functional Art (2017), was about writing hymns, the title illustrative of his decidedly down to earth approach. He received honorary degrees from Lambeth Palace and Durham University, and was an honorary vice-president of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and a fellow of the sister society in the US and Canada. In 2003 he was appointed OBE for services to hymn writing.
Dudley-Smith married June MacDonald in 1959. She died in 2007. He is survived by their children, James, Caroline and Sarah, and four grandchildren.
• Timothy Dudley-Smith, priest and hymn writer, born 26 December 1926; died 12 August 2024
