John Bacchus Dykes

Biography

John Bacchus Dykes was born in Hull, England, the fifth child and third son of William Hey Dikes (sic), a ship builder, later banker, and Elizabeth, daughter of Bacchus Huntington, a Leeds surgeon, and granddaughter of the Rev. William Huntington, Vicar of Kirk Ella. His paternal grandparents were the Rev. Thomas Dikes LL.B and Mary, daughter of William Hey. He was also a cousin of the Rev. George Huntington. (J.T. Fowler, editor of the 1897 biography written by Dykes's sisters, Fanny and Lucy, explains how and why the original spelling of the family name – Dykes – came to be changed to Dikes and then back to Dykes. John Bacchus, his father and grandfather were all registered at birth as Dikes, with the grandfather only reverting to the 'y' variant by virtue of the plaque affixed, at his earlier insistence, to his coffin. John Bacchus matriculated as Dikes but graduated as Dykes. Contemporary documents treat the variant spellings carelessly: see, for instance, the biography of the Rev. Thomas Dikes. It should be remarked that Fowler's biography tends towards the hagiographical and is not entirely accurate. This has had adverse consequences for subsequent biographical sketches of Dykes, almost all of which have used Fowler as their primary source.) Dykes was a younger brother of the poet and hymnist Eliza Alderson, for at least four of whose hymns – And now, belovèd Lord, Thy Soul resigning; Infant of days; Jesus Christ, the glorious captain; and Lord of glory, who has brought us – he wrote the tunes (respectively COMMENDATIO; IN TERRA PAX; SOLDIERS OF THE CROSS; and CHARITAS).

By the age of 10, he was de facto assistant organist – there is no record of any formal appointment – at St John's Church in Myton, Hull, where his paternal grandfather (who had built the church) was vicar and his uncle (also Thomas) was organist. He also played the violin and the piano. Studying first at Kingston College, Hull and then at the West Riding Proprietary School at Wakefield, he matriculated, as the second 'Dikes Scholar' (the second beneficiary after his elder brother, Thomas, of an endowment established in 1840 in honour of his grandfather) at Katharine Hall (later St. Catharine's College, Cambridge). Here, as an extra-curricular subject, he studied music under Thomas Attwood Walmisley, whose madrigal society he joined. He also joined the Peterhouse Musical Society [later renamed the http://www.cums.org.uk/ Cambridge University Musical Society], becoming its forth President, immediately following his friend, the physicist William Thomson (later to become the 1st Baron Kelvin). Although we know, from his diaries and correspondence, from Fowler, and from reports in the Press, that a number of his part-songs were performed by the CUMS, these are currently lost. Graduating in 1847 as a Senior Optime, he was appointed to the curacy of Malton, North Yorkshire in 1847. Ordained Deacon at York Minster in January 1848, in the following year he was appointed a minor canon of Durham Cathedral (an appointment he held until his death), and shortly thereafter to the office of precentor. In 1862 he relinquished the precentorship (to the dismay of Sir Frederick A Gore Ouseley) on his appointment to the living of St. Oswald's, Durham, situated almost in the shadow of the Cathedral, where he remained until his death in 1876.

Although his paternal grandfather and his father had been firmly of an evangelical persuasion, Dykes migrated to the Anglo-Catholic, ritualist, wing of the Church of England during his Cambridge years. Although never a member of the Cambridge Camden Society, his later life showed him to be clearly in sympathy with its central tenets, as he was with those of the Oxford Movement. He was a member of the Society of the Holy Cross. At this time, antagonism between the evangelical and Anglo-Catholic wings of the Church of England was heated and sometimes violent. The seminal case concerned the Brighton-based Rev. John Purchas (1823-1872) who, as a consequence of a Privy Council judgment which bore his name, was compelled to desist from such practices as facing east during the celebration of Holy Communion, using wafer bread and wearing vestments other than cassock and surplice. Another clergyman, the London-based Alexander Mackonochie (whose worship style Lord Shaftesbury had characterised as being ‘in outward form and ritual…the worship of Jupiter or Juno’ was pursued through the courts until the pressure proved too much and he resigned his living in 1882. (In perhaps the ultimate indignity, Mackonochie’s untimely death in 1887 was recorded by the celebrated ‘Poet and Tragedian of Dundee’, William McGonagall.). Although Dykes’s treatment at the hands of the evangelical party, which included his own Bishop, Charles Baring, was largely played out locally, Baring’s refusal to licence a curate to help the overworked Dykes in his ever-expanding parish, led the latter to seek from the Court of Queen’s Bench a writ of mandamus, requiring the Bishop to do so. Against the expectations of many senior legal figures, including the Attorney General, Dr. A.J. Stephens QC, whose services Dykes had retained, the Court, led by puisne judge Sir Colin Blackburn QC, refused to interfere in what they saw to be a matter of the Bishop’s sole discretion. Dykes’s defeat was followed by a gradual deterioration in his physical and mental health, necessitating absence (which was to prove permanent) from St. Oswald’s from March 1875. Rest and the bracing Swiss air proving unavailing, Dykes eventually went to recover on the south coast of England where, on 22 January 1876, he died aged 52. However, Fowler’s assertion that he died at St. Leonard’s on Sea is false: he died in the asylum at Ticehurst, some 18 miles distant. More significantly, his assertion that Dykes’s ill-health was a consequence of overwork, exacerbated by his clash with Bishop Baring, has recently been questioned; one scholar suggests that the medical evidence points to his having succumbed to tertiary syphilis, and speculates that Dykes may have contracted the disease during his undergraduate years. He is buried in the ‘overflow’ churchyard of St. Oswald’s, a piece of land for whose acquisition and consecration he had been responsible a few years earlier. Touchingly, he shares a grave with his youngest daughter, Mabel, who died, aged 10, of scarlet fever in 1870. Dykes’s grave is now the only marked grave in what, in recent years, has been transformed into a children’s playground.

Works and influence

Dykes published numerous sermons, book reviews and articles on theology and church music, many of them in the Ecclesiastic and Theologian. These display considerable erudition and wit (not to mention a penchant for damnation by faint praise and a fondness for litotes and gentle sarcasm), especially on the topics of the Apocalypse, the Psalms, Biblical numerology and, unsurprisingly, the function of music and ritual in the service of the church. However, he is best known for over 300 hymn tunes he composed. Although Dykes reveals that he composed a number of tunes specially for use in Durham Cathedral’s Galilee Chapel, the first of his tunes to have been published appeared in The Hon. and Rev. John Grey’s Manual of Psalm and Hymn Tunes (Cleaver: London, 1857). But this was essentially a hymnal with a local circulation and would have done little to establish Dykes as a composer. Of far greater significance was his speculative submission in 1860 of six tunes to the music editor (W.H. Monk) of a new venture: Hymns Ancient & Modern. The six were: his first (of three) tunes entitled DIES IRAE (set to the words Day of wrath O day of mourning, now almost certainly never sung); HOLLINGSIDE (Jesu, lover of my soul); HORBURY (Nearer, my God, to Thee); MELITA, (Eternal Father, strong to save, used at the funerals of J F Kennedy and Sir Winston Churchill); NICAEA (Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!, a tune which bears striking similarities to John Hopkins’ TRINITY, set in 1850 to the same words ); ST. CROSS (O come and mourn with me awhile); and ST. CUTHBERT (Our blest Redeemer, ere He breathed). He also submitted a harmonisation of the tune STOCKTON. Other, later, tunes which achieved acclaim include GERONTIUS (Praise to the Holiest in the height, taken from Cardinal Newman's poem The Dream of Gerontius, and sung at the funeral of William Gladstone ); LUX BENIGNA (set to Newman's poem Lead, Kindly Light); STRENGTH AND STAY (O strength and stay, upholding all creation. The author of the hymn O perfect love, all human thoughts transcending was inspired to write it by Dykes’s tune; and DOMINUS REGIT ME (The King of Love my shepherd is, the words written by his friend and editor of the first two editions of Hymns Ancient & Modern, the Rev. Sir Henry Williams Baker Bt.). His many harmonisations include WIR PFLÜGEN (We plough the fields, and scatter), MILES LANE (All hail the power of Jesu’s name) and O QUANTA QUALIA (O, what their joy and their glory must be). He also wrote two major anthems — These are they that came out of great tribulation and The Lord is my shepherd — numerous small scale anthems and motets; Communion, Morning and Evening Services; and a setting of the words of the Burial Service. These have all fallen into disuse in recent years, some deservedly so, although the large scale anthems display a fair imitation of Mendelssohnian counterpoint and pre-echoes of Edwardian grandeur, and the Burial Service is a minor gem. He also wrote a single piece — Andantino — for organ solo.

Whereas the proliferation of Dykes’s tunes in hymnals published throughout the nineteenth century, together with some surviving correspondence by hymnal compilers and by clergymen, in the UK and overseas (including the US and Nyasaland (now Malawi)), show that his compositions were highly regarded, the end of his century brought a widespread reaction against much of the Victorian aesthetic, and Dykes’s music did not escape a censure which was often vituperative. In particular, his music was condemned for its alleged over-chromaticism (even though some 92% of his hymn tunes are either entirely, or almost entirely diatonic) and for its imputed sentimentality. (Speaking of Victorian hymn-tunes generally, but evidently with Dykes in his sights Vaughan Williams wrote of ‘the miasma of the languishing and sentimental hymn tunes which so often disfigure our services’ ) Whereas it is indeed reasonable to characterise his music as often being sentimental, his critics never paused to explain why nineteenth century church services, which were replete with sentimental imagery, prose and choreography, should not be accompanied by music of a like kind. Nor did they explain why sentimentality per se is a bad thing, nor why music invariably improves in inverse proportion to its sentimental content. As one writer put it, in a wider consideration of the subject: “Something is wrong with sentimentality: the only question is, What is it?” As for Dykes’s harmonies generally (of which the twentieth century writers Erik Routley and Kenneth Long were outspoken in their disparagement), scholars in recent years have questioned the twentieth century orthodoxy which condemned Dykes’s music out of hand, with Professors Arthur Hutchings, Nicholas Temperley and (especially) Jeremy Dibble seeing the importance of Dykes’s pioneering work in moving hymn-tunes from the bland and four-square long metre tunes which had been the staple of Tate and Brady's New Version of the Psalms. “A…characteristic element of [Dykes’s] style is his use of imaginative diatonic and chromatic harmony. Dykes was thoroughly aware of the rich reservoir of continental harmonic innovation in the music of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Weber, Spohr, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt and early Wagner and he had absolutely no compunction in using this developed harmonic vocabulary in his tunes both as a colourful expressive tool and as a further means of musical integration.”. (When, in 1904, the Proprietors of Hymns Ancient & Modern sought to cleanse Dykes’s tunes of their chromatic excesses, one of their excisions was the harmony in the first three bars of PAX DEI, which were lifted from Mendelssohn’s ‘Sonntagsmorgen’ (Op. 77 No. 1)).

Whereas evolving tastes in music have seen an inexorable decline in the use of Victorian hymn tunes generally, including those by Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir John Stainer, Sir Joseph Barnby and Lowell Mason, some of Dykes’s tunes have proved remarkably resilient, with NICAEA, MELITA, DOMINUS REGIT ME and GERONTIUS continuing to find a place in twenty-first century hymnals.

In 2017 a plaque commemorating Dykes was installed in the antechapel of St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he had been an undergraduate in the 1840s.

Family

On 25 July 1850, Dykes married Susannah (1827–1902), daughter of George Kingston, by whom he had three sons and five daughters: Ernest Huntington (“Erny”), b.14/08/1851 d.11/10/1924; Mary Evelyn b.05/10/1852 d.??/??/1921; Gertrude Kingston (“Gertie”) b.??/??/1854 d.16/12/1942; Caroline Sybil (“Carrie”) b.25/02/1856 d.06/04/1943; George Lionel Andrew b.01/11/1857 d.??/02/1858; Ethel Susan b.??/??/1859 d.21/03/1936; Mabel Hey (“Mab”) b.14/05/1860 d.01/09/1870; and John Arthur St. Oswald b.27/10/1863 d.31/01/1948.