biography

I was born in Jersey, Channel Islands, in 1940 and so spent four years under German occupation. Most of my schooling was at Elizabeth College, Guernsey. I played clarinet, piano and organ.

At St. David’s College, Lampeter (BA), I held an organ exhibition. At Ripon Hall, Oxford, I prepared for ordination in the Church of England and served my curacy at St. John-at-Hackney, East London.  

There I founded a youth drama group, assisted by Geoff and Chris Coward, with whom I wrote five plays which incorporated ‘folk’ music, dance and film slides. We performed in many London venues, including the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southwark Cathedral, St Martin-in-the-Fields, and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and took one production to the Edinburgh Festival and one to Taizé. 

I organised the first Caribbean arts festival in East London in 1964.  

In the folk group Common Round I played the double bass. We made three LPs and undertook residencies at a number of London clubs. I took a PGCE in RE and music at the Institute of Education. In 1968 I worked for a trust attached to Crown Woods school in Eltham and was responsible for setting up a residential centre on Loch Awe, West Scotland, for school leavers unlikely to get a place on the usual field study trips. 

At the same time I edited Sing True, a song book for school assemblies, that was to pay my salary for three years. After a short period as Peace Officer of the Martin Luther King Foundation I was appointed the first Director of Christian Action, a charity founded by Canon L. John Collins, who was also the founder of the International Defence and Aid Fund (an antiapartheid organization) and Chairman of CND. Our main activities were in the fields of single homelessness, nonviolence and prison reform. With Nick Beacock (originator of ‘Crisis at Christmas’) and David Brandon I set up a halfway house for alcoholic women in Stepney and a hostel in Soho.

Satish Kumar and I founded the London School of Nonviolence, which met in the crypt of St. Martin-in-the Fields where I was an honorary curate. I founded Tent City, at Wormwood Scrubs, and Hackney Camping to provide cheap accommodation for young overseas visitors. I was eased out of Christian Action after Canon Collins gave up the chairmanship and was replaced by Canon Eric James (not his fault!). The organization ceased to be ‘action’ and became ‘words’. Fortunately most of the activities became independent organizations. We continued to run Tent City and Hackney Camping, for instance, for another fifteen years.  

A short period as a member of the collective running the Student Christian Movement at Wick Court near Bristol was followed by the chaplain/wardency of the Othona Community’s centre at Bradwell-on-Sea. A core group of staff lived in wooden huts on the edge of the Essex marshes, keeping animals, planting trees, growing vegetables, welcoming visitors - up to 100 residents a week in the summer - and worshipping twice daily in the wonderfully simple chapel built by St. Cedd in AD 654. There was a lot of music. I wrote the Othona Psalms, fifty psalms and a number of canticles from Christian and other sources, which the community published.  

After a few months out to write Exploring Worship for Mowbrays, I was invited by Save the Children to run their resettlement programme for Vietnamese Refugees. It was then that I met my wife Julia, and we have worked together ever since. We established a network of fourteen reception centres from Montrose in Aberdeenshire to Hothfield in Kent and a residential school at Bingley, Yorks. We had three main aims: to keep our reception centres small, average 80 residents with a staff of five; to get the buildings for nothing; to train Vietnamese staff to take over the programme. After 18 months, with the blessing of SCF and the Home Office, we set up Refugee Action in which Julia and I are still involved. 

In 1983 I was invited by Satish Kumar, now editor of Resurgence and living in the North Devon village of Hartland, to run an alternative secondary school. I was headteacher of the Small School for eleven years and wrote an account of the first five in Inventing a School. Naturally arts and crafts played a large part in the curriculum. Julia became the school's Maths teacher and was involved in pilotting SNP maths.

At the same time Julia and I bought a derelict barn and cowshed with two acres of land. We have been working on it ever since.  

During a sabbatical I lectured on education for a month in Japan and was invited to take the school there. As a consequence of performing three of the Chester cycle of Mystery Plays on that visit, a tour was organized for a production of The Tempest performed by former pupils and their university friends. Adrian Noble became patron of the Small School Youth Theatre.  

An innovation was to use a biwa player/narrator to introduce the two halves of the play in Japanese and to play the storm. (The biwa is a sort of Japanese banjo/lute.) We developed this in a production of the The Winter’s Tale that toured Japan the following year. At high points in the drama we froze the action for Katayama-san to explain and comment on it. This worked remarkably well as, in Japanese theatre, the action slows down at emotional climaxes to enable the audience to savor the moment. The third year we toured the West Country with a sparkling production of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, for which I wrote the music. The youth theatre was forced to fold because financial pressure on students prevented them from giving up five weeks of the summer to rehearse and perform a play. Cultural exchanges between Hartland and Japan have taken place regularly since.  

A change in my life came when I attended a course on Performance run by Anthony Rooley, Emma Kirkby, Evelyn Tubb and Michael Fields at Schumacher College. I performed some of my own compositions. Tony took me to one side and told me quite forcefully that I had to give my music greater priority. Evelyn offered to record some of my Othona Psalms. Back in Hartland I joined the newly-formed Hartland Chamber Orchestra, became its conductor and started making arrangements and writing music for it. A performance of my Shaker Mass at the Beaford Centre led to an invitation from its Director, Bob Butler, to write a full-scale work that would reflect the varied musical life of North Devon to celebrate the centre’s thirtieth anniversary. I chose to set nine of Ted Hughes’ Season Songs, performed twice at The Plough by Evelyn Tubb, the Winkleigh Singers, and an assortment of instrumentalists. As a result of its success I began to write more, learning as I went.  

Meanwhile, I resigned from the school and joined Human Scale Education to establish the Third Sector Schools Alliance to campaign on behalf of small schools, Moslem, Jewish, new Christian and Steiner schools for state funding. Then I went back to the Small School to teach English and arrange opera and theatre trips. Finally, I got to write music full-time in 1999. A holiday in Japan, a visit to Sado Island, a late night sake session with a puppeteer, and a collaboration was proposed. The result, The She-Fox of Shinoda, an opera for Japanese puppets, that took up a lot of 1999/2001. A Year of the Artist grant enabled us to take it on a tour of both the West Country and Japan. 

There was a slight hiatus in my life of full-time composition. The new Head walked out of the Small School in November 2000 and I stepped in to run the school until August 2002. I continued to compose, setting all of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. The first version had piano accompaniment. I would have liked to see them staged with some action and projections developed from his illustrations and with a chamber group accompanying them. The instrumental version was written. A set of slides arrived from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, but the first performance was a concert version. 

From June 2003 to July 2007 I was Vicar of Hartland. Apart from a bit of tinkering with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs this left little time for music. On the other hand, it has allowed me to do a lot more thinking about spirituality and the nature of Christianity. Although my contract ended in June 2006 I continued to help in the parish on a part-time voluntary basis. At the same time I converted the barn to a holiday let. We had to empty it of three skiploads of rubbish.

In August 2007 Julia and I embarked on a seven-month journey, mostly by train, to Mongolia, China, TIbet, Nepal, India, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, China, Russia and Estonia.

On our return I organized the summer festival. In October my sister, Vivien died unexpectedly and I prepared a performance of my setting of words by Julian of Norwich for soprano and orchestra, a thirty-minute work, in her memory.  We included it in the 2009 Hartland festival with Angela Henckel as the soloist.

Poor leadership at the Small School prompted me to join the trustees, and I am now their chair. To support the new head, Maya, I am teaching three mornings a week.

I have ideas for a Nativity set in a circus - realised Chagall - and an opera on Francis of Assisi that would reflect his commitment to simplicity and poverty. The growth of anti-Islamic feeling convinces me that the encounter between Francis and the Sultan offers and opportunity to explore a dialogue between the best of both. 

I am a member of the PRS, COMA and the society for the promotion of new music.