Episode 30. Martin Shaw: ‘Morning Has Broken’

SYNOPSIS

The theatrical and choral composer, Martin Shaw is remembered today for introducing Morning Has Broken to generations of British schoolchildren after asking the children’s writer Eleanor Farjeon to add new words to the Scottish folk melody, ‘Bunessan’, for a revised edition of the hymnbook, Songs of Praise in 1931. The hymn was popularized by Cat Stevens in 1971, demonstrating how hymns that had been sung in schools in the fifties could influence the sixties generation of pop artists,

Yet the often self-effacing Shaw was a key member of the artistic and creative sets of Edwardian England, pioneering the rediscovery of Henry Purcell, mixing with artistic types in bohemian Chelsea and Hampstead, collaborating with the innovative director, Edward Gordon Craig, and conducting the orchestra on European tours for Isadora Duncan. And Shaw was the go-to organist and choirmaster for progressive Christian Socialists from Percy Dearmer at St Mary’s, Primrose Hill to Dick Sheppard at St Martin-in-the Fields and Maude Royden at The Guildhouse Fellowship. Educated amongst a gifted cohort of composers, including Vaughan Williams, Holst and Ireland, at the Royal College of Music, and widely respected by his peers, Shaw was the only composer to collaborate with the poet and dramatist, T. S. Eliot, on the pageant, The Rock.

GUEST

The poet and writer Isobel Montgomery Campbell is the grand daughter of Martin Shaw, and with Stephen Connock, the co-editor of ‘The Greater Life: A Compendium of the Life and Works of Martin Shaw, published by Albion Music in 2018. Having only a limited understanding of the range of her grandfather’s work before receiving his archive in a series of boxes, Isobel has been instrumental in an act of rediscovery, and the memoir, recollections and evaluations and selected correspondence in ‘The Greater Life’ form the background to the interview. As the cover illustrates, Martin Shaw was only ever photographed in profile, because of an extensive birthmark which disfigured one side of his face. The interview teases out the psychology of this composer, who used charm and courtesy to carve out a vital role behind the scenes of hymnody and church music in the first half of the twentieth century.

Isobel’s interview with Simon Machin was recorded online on 10 July 2023.