BIOS Reporter – Volume 20, No.1 – January 1996

For the editors, the January edition of this journal is a preoccupation at the time of year which reminds one that the significance of Henry John Gauntlett (1805-1876) is twofold. His tune for Mrs. Alexander’s ‘Once in royal David’s city’ seems to underline that what is most durable is not necessarily what is most elaborate or complex. There are lessons here, and not only for composers. Gauntlett called his tune ‘Irby’, and one assumes that that is a place-name. There is an Irby in Lincolnshire (Irby in the Marsh) and another in what is now Humberside (Irby on Humber) but only one without a suffix: the Irby in the part of Cheshire now known as ‘Merseyside’. But if that is the one that Gauntlett had in mind, it is difficult to think why. Pevsner does not help, having found there nothing worth comment except the seventeenth-century Irby Hall; nor does the August 1995 edition of the National Pipe Organ Register (the one distributed at the Exeter conference). Perhaps someone can enlighten us…