reproduced from the ‘Staffordshire Archaeological and Historical Society Transactions’ Volume XXI 1978-1980,
pp25-33.
John Alcock (1715-1806),
Vicar Choral and
Organist and Lichfield Cathedral:
A Frustrated Reformer
by Peter Marr
During the 18th century, there were at Lichfield many
talented and colourful personalities. Not least amongst them was John Alcock,
lay vicar and organist of the cathedral, a man whose perversity in personal
relationships and talent for upsetting the status
quo have left a tale well-worth relating, a host of facts for the historian
of church music and a few moral cautions on the way.
Alcock was born on 11 April 1715 in Crane Court, St Peter’s
Hill, London,’
and in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral. Baptized at St Benet’s, Paul’s Wharf,
he was the third of eight children of Daniel and Mary Alcock, a family of whose
background little is known save that Daniel Alcock’s connections with that part
of the City went back a couple of generations.
John Alcock entered the choir of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1722
and was put under Charles King, Almoner and Master of the Boys. King, a former
pupil of John Blow and Jeremiah Clarke, was in his younger years an able mentor
and, after seven years under him, the young Alcock had acquitted himself
sufficiently well to become amanuensis to the talented young organist, John
Stanley, by then almost blind after a childhood accident. In due course, Alcock
was apprenticed to him.
Exactly how precocious Alcock himself was remains a mystery.
Many years later, he claimed that during his pupilage he had composed a considerable
quantity of music,
but an examination of it (or as much as has survived) suggests that, unless he
was a youth of rare talent, the bulk of it was subsequently extensively
revised. Alcock deputized for Stanley at St Andrew’s, Holborn, (and, from 1734,
at the Temple Church, which post Stanley held in plurality) but, after the
statutory seven years, then searched for a position himself. Unsuccessful
attempts in the City
were followed by his marriage on 20 May 1737 at All Hallows’, London Wall, to
Margaret Beaumont of Brompton, Kent,
and by his appointment as organist of St Andrew’s, Plymouth, soon after. Here,
the Rev Zachariah Mudge, a conscientious pastor, friend of Dr Samuel Johnson
and no mean scholar, was rector. Up to this time, Alcock had composed plenty of
music but only a few separate songs had appeared in print; indeed, the first of
these was written when he was 13 and published in 1730 by the pirate-printer,
Daniel Wright, junior. Whilst he was at Plymouth, Alcock published his Six Suites of Lessons (1741) for
harpsichord but, the next year, moved to Reading where, at a newly-built organ
at St Laurence’s Church, he presided for seven years.
During his stay there, the highly successful collection, Twelve English Songs (1743), enhanced
his reputation and he followed it by a selection of metrical psalm texts, Fifty Select Portions (1748) and a book
of metrical psalm-tunes, Psalmody (?1749).
Revision of his six fine concerti grossi
for strings with flutes, oboes and bassoons, written nearly twenty years
previously, occupied his last months in the town but publication was delayed
until the end of 1750, by which time he had taken the last step on his career
ladder, his appointment as vicar choral and organist of Lichfield Cathedral.
The previous organist, George Lamb, had been organist for
many years but commanded little respect from the other vicars; eventually he
became an alcoholic. Alcock’s
appointment, it seems, was planned before Lamb’s death for it was finalized
within three days of Lamb’s burial;
with high hopes for the future, the Alcock family arrived in the city towards
the end of January 1750. There is no doubt that musical standards were far from
satisfactory when Alcock arrived to work at the cathedral. Performances needed
to be improved and this the 35-year-old organist had every intention of doing.
Once installed as a Vicar Choral, and
subsequently organist (at a miserly £4 per annum extra)
with the additional post of Master of the Boys (another £10), he had, in
theory, some control over the situation but his intentions were frustrated by
the unruly choristers and gross absences by the self-interested vicars. The publication
of fifty new chants
with a none-too-complimentary preface about standards of psalm-chanting, was
among the first results of his early years at the cathedral but, by 1753,
friction between him and the other vicars had grown sufficiently for it to be
mentioned in the cathedral records.
Soon, the incessant absence of singers and the clash of personality between
Alcock and the subchanter, John White, led to a breakdown of relationships
between Alcock and most of those with whom he worked. It came about as follows:
In each volume of the collection of chants just mentioned,
Alcock had included proposals to publish in quarterly instalments an historical
anthology of scores of cathedral music in an attempt to correct the
inaccuracies that had accumulated by copyists working from part-books a
project whose need had been pointed out by William Croft many years before.
Since his teens, Alcock had been a collector of manuscripts and a ceaseless
copyist; indeed, by this time, his own library seems to have been quite
extensive. However, Maurice Greene, organist of St Paul’s, had formulated a
similar scheme on rather more attractive financial terms and, in due course,
his accumulated material (including some of Alcock’s) passed to William Boyce
and was later published as Boyce’s Cathedral Music (1760-78).
Meanwhile, Alcock had been forced to withdraw his scheme but not before the
first service, “By Way of Specimen”, was already in the press. This was not an
old service but his own Morning and
Evening Service, originally composed in the 1730s and now finally appearing
in print in November 1753.
It was the only service-setting that appeared separately in print during the
century and the Dedication contained in it, a letter to Dean Addenbrooke,
attacks in the most vitriolic terms the musical arrangements at the cathedral:
...no Choir in the Kingdom is so much neglected by the Members thereof as
this; one of them attending no more than five Weeks in a Year, another five
Months, some seven, and few of them so often as they might do; sometimes only
one Priest-Vicar at Church, and at
other Times, but one Lay-Vicar, both on Sundays
as well as the Week-Days, tho’ there are Eleven of them, which has occasion’d
some People of the Town to write upon the Church
Doors, My House shall be called the House
of Prayer, but ye have made it a Den of Thieves …
There was, it must be admitted, an attempt to improve the
attendances of recalcitrant vicars later that year, but the irascible organist’s
round of copying and composition did not change; suffering from the same
recurring problems and living with his own intolerances, his worst enemy was
himself. Publication of The Pious Soul’s
Heavenly Exercise (1756), a set of ornately harmonized psalm-tunes
was not entirely boycotted by the other vicars but, by 1758, it seems that
relationships with them had become so strained that something had to give way.
Alcock ceased being Master of the Boys in August 1758
and was succeeded by a fellow singer, Francis Bird; together they ran the boys’
choir until Bird took complete charge. But, by and large, as Alcock observes,
the vicars ‘hanged together’,
becoming so exasperated with the ways of their young organist that they
petitioned the Dean and Chapter against him, saying that:
Whereas frequent Complaints have
been made to the Dean and Chapter, by the Subchanter and Vicars, of Mr John
Alcock, Organist and Vicar Choral of the said Church; whose Behaviour in Time
of Divine Service has given great and just Offence, not only to us, but to
those too who attend Divine Service in this Church, as well Strangers as
Neighbours; and whereas those complaints have not hitherto been attended with
the desir’d Reformation; so far from that, the said John Alcock is become more
and more scandalous and indecent in his Behaviour, to the great Grief and
Disturbance of the Congregation; We therefore the Subchanter and Vicars-Choral
whose Names are here unto Subscrib’d, make it our unanimous Request and
Petition, that the said John Alcock may be regularly and formally admonished in
Chapter, and the said Admonition be registered (in terrorem) to the Intent He
may not hereafter offend in a manner so audacious and irreverent. That if the
Subchanter shall think it his Duty to entreat him (as heretofore) to play
Slower or Faster, as Occasion may require, He may not show his Contempt or
Indignation by playing the Chants, Services, or Anthems so fast that the Choir
cannot sometimes articulate half the words; or else so slow that their Breath
will not serve to hold out the long, loitering, dragging Notes. That He may not
hereafter mock, and mimick with his Voice any of the Vicars, as He frequently
has done, in the Responses, and even in the Confession. That He may not show
his Splenetic Tricks upon the Organ to expose or confound the Performers, or
burlesque their manner of Singing. That He may not play Full where He ought
not; or so Loud (in the Verses especially) that the softer Voices cannot be
heard at all; no Voices distinctly. That He may have some Regard to the
Sacredness of the Place, and the Solemnity of the Worship; that we may perform
all things decently and in Order, and may attend on the Service of God without
Distraction.
Curiously, nothing came of this for a while. But in 1760,
Alcock was formally admonished and told to behave himself in future.
But he was no fool; his resignation from the post of Master of the Boys caused
little more than temporary inconvenience and his trump card was yet to be
played. By resigning his post as organist,
with the consequent loss of only a year, he could still have a house and income
as Vicar Choral, and this for life. Until another vicar died, the Dean and
Chapter had to find another organist from amongst the vicars. This they did in
the person of Thomas Edmonds who played until Thomas Wood died in October 1764,
and William Brown of Worcester was then appointed Vicar Choral and organist.
That the Dean and Chapter found themselves in this dilemma on Alcock’s
resignation is indicated by their making Brown sign a special £500 bond that he
would not resign his place as organist without that of Vicar.
In spite of this breakdown of relationships, Alcock had
gained his BMus degree at Oxford in 1755 with a setting (and performance) of
Addison’s words, ‘Attend, harmonious saint’.
Meanwhile, at Lichfield, instead of seeking the company of his fellows, he
chose to remain aloof and eventually alienated himself from them, as we have
seen from the tenor of the petition. But this, and his eventual resignation as
organist, was not the end of the story by any means. For some years he had been
working on a story for the amusement (and moral instruction) of his children;
by the time the disagreements had come to a head, he had expanded it to include
a series of accounts of various cathedrals, their music and historical
associations, together with a hundred-page section on Lichfield itself. This
work he entitled The Life of Miss Fanny
Brown; it has been mentioned frequently in accounts of Alcock’s life but
only recently has it been possible to identify the author as Alcock, who wrote
it under the pseudonym, John Piper.
Alcock’s prose is turgid at the best of times and the
four-hundred page novel, with expansive footnotes, is difficult to summarize.
Fanny, an orphan from Lancashire and the youngest daughter of an unbeneficed
clergyman, is apprenticed to a milliner, Mrs Lawn, in Paternoster Row. She
falls in love with Andrew Shoot, wealthy son of Captain Shoot, who consents to
their marriage. Fanny’s three brothers, John, Henry and Thomas, come to visit
her in London and to attend the wedding; during their journey, John and Henry’s
experiences and the letters of the Oxford-bred Thomas tell us of musical and
other happenings in London and the south-west of England. Accounts of parochial
music and of various cathedrals provide a great deal of information and, in
some cases, misinformation. The descriptions move round to a city that clearly
may be recognized as Lichfield and Alcock’s bitter experiences are related
through letters from Thomas to his mother. Few names are mentioned but we can
infer that Alcock’s nickname was ‘Mr Study-Page’,
that he was falsely accused of the most outrageous behaviour in church,
and that the rest of the vicars lived a life of irresponsible insobriety. This
long digression is set in the middle of Fanny’s preparations for her wedding,
shortly before which she is waylaid by a bawd (Mrs Mar-Maid) and conveniently
rescued by her brothers. Her advantageous marriage to Andrew finally takes
place in St Paul’s Cathedral and, with the death of Captain Shoot, it devolves
upon them to run the family estate in Devonshire. This they do with exemplary
kindness to their tenants. After 18 years of marriage, Andrew dies and later,
Fanny too (‘within these last few Months’), leaving their family well provided
for.
The results of the publication of Fanny Brown were awaited
by its author with characteristic stoicism:
if it does no Good, it can do no Harm . . . (and) amongst the Prejudic’d, Ignorant, and Malicious,
their Censure will give me no Concern in the least [p.xix].
Alcock’s stubborness over political matters is also
reflected in the novel; although
he states that the other vicars voted differently from himself (if we may read
his comments in Fanny Brown aright),
an examination of the voting lists for elections held at Lichfield while he was
organist there are revealing. They show that Francis Bird, who succeeded Alcock
as Master of the Boys, and Henry Wood, another fellow vicar, were, like Alcock,
Tory supporters;
the rest of the vicars were Whigs as were so many other inhabitants of the
Close. The Tory gentry in the surrounding parts of southern Staffordshire did
not succumb to the intrigues of the electoral corruption mounted by the
combined families of Gower and Anson and which controlled the political
fortunes of the city virtually until the Reform Bill of 1832.
But it was a common political colour that must have determined Alcock’s
appointment as organist to the Earl of Donegall about 1760. The composition of
a wedding ode and the arrangement of a couple of anthems seem to have been the
only musical outcome and the connection fades later in the decade about the
time the family seat, Fisherwick Hall, was rebuilt.
By then, as an organist, Alcock had extended his activities
to Sutton Coldfield (where he was organist from 1761 to 1786) and Tamworth at
whose organ he presided from 1766 until 1790. Both of these churches installed
new organs on his appointment to them and this fact, together with the extra
income, provided the incentive to make the weekly journey to one or both
places. Little has survived to document Alcock’s work at Sutton except a long
letter to the Rev R Bisse Riland complaining about discrepancies in his salary
and detailing his own misfortunes and unfair treatment from all and sundry.
At Tamworth, the Commissioners, who were trustees for the organ and responsible
for the appointment (and dismissal) of the organist
seem to have suffered him gladly and, in turn, entertained him each week to
Sunday dinner
Here at Tamworth his duties were, on occasion, performed by
two of his sons and perhaps it is a convenient moment to look briefly at the
younger members of his large family. By Margaret Alcock, John had twelve
children although there is detailed evidence of only eleven. Three were born at
Plymouth: Anna-Maria (born and died in 1738), John (baptized 28 January 1740)
and Jinny (born 1741)
five were born at Reading: Peggy (1742 and dying the following year), Daniel
(i) (1743-4), Mary (born 1745), Sarah (born 1747) and Daniel (ii) (born and
died in 1749).
His time at Lichfield saw the birth of three more: Margaret (born 1751),
Theresa (born 1753) and William (baptized on 6 December 1756).
One of the girls remained at Lichfield and later kept a boarding school in the
Close and two of the others went to London, one marrying H Cooper, an attorney,
of Castle Street, Holborn.
The younger John Alcock became a chorister at Lichfield Cathedral
soon after the family’s arrival but in December 1755
he was dismissed by Thomas Smalbroke, the Precentor, partly, it would seem,
because he deputized for his father when he was absent teaching or when it was
his turn as vicar to read the lessons and take part in services in choir.
At the tender age of 17, he was appointed organist of Newark-on-Trent and was
soon married. By 1768 when he left, he had obtained the Oxford BMus degree and,
about 1773 moved to Walsall where, at St Matthew’s, his father had opened the
new organ.
Apparently widowed, he married again but died shortly afterwards in 1791.
His music reflects a later generation than that of his father and, by and
large, is of little interest. Inheriting a literary bent, he published in 1779
a motley collection of anecdotes entitled The
Entertaining and Instructive Companion.
The Alcocks’ youngest son, William, deputized for his father
at Sutton Coldfield and finally became organist of Newcastle-under-Lyme where
he stayed until the early 1800s. Nothing is heard of him for a few years
although he may have moved to Derby, the home of his second wife, for like his
brother, he married twice. By the 1830s he had gone to Liverpool, dying in
1833, ‘the last son of the celebrated Dr Alcock of Lichfield’.
John Alcock’s doctorate was gained at Oxford in 1766, almost
certainly through the good offices of William Hayes whom he had known for many
years. In the summer of 1766 we have the unusual situation of the two John
Alcocks setting off from Lichfield for Oxford degrees in music, the father for
his DMus, the son for his BMus. The
music of the elder Alcock’s exercise has not survived but it was probably a
setting of An Ode in Praise of
Church-Musick, with words by Dr John Merrick.
The irascibility of Alcock, as pertinently noticed by John
Bumpus,
had not waned by the late 1760x and neither had his energies been sapped.
Nevertheless, perhaps feeling the onset of middle age, he assembled his
cathedral anthems (a collection dating back to his apprenticeship days) and
published a selection of them under the title, Six and Twenty Select Anthems (1771). It is a revealing musical
biography but perhaps better known for its preface, informative as to the
contents of the volume and full of bitter comments on his lot, particularly
during his time as organist of the cathedral. The volume was designed
originally as Twenty Select Anthems,
and at first advertised as such, but miscalculations over its length, disputes
with the engraver and a few revisions caused him to recast the last few items,
finally including some chants, a setting of the Burial Service and some
newly-composed anthems. Among omitted material was a setting of the Miserere, a fine piece which he
published separately about the same time.
Meanwhile, Alcock had been busy in another area of musical
composition, orchestrally-accompanied anthems designed for special occasions
rather than for regular use in cathedral services. Among these lengthy
compositions, We Will Rejoice,
an adaptation of Laudate Dominum
(1754) was performed at the meeting of the Three Choirs at Worcester in 1773.
But, with one exception, Alcock’s days as a composer were as good as over. His
collection of Ten Voluntaries for Organ
or Harpsichord was published in 1774 but most of these bear the stamp of
former years; his songs, anthems e.g. those in Six New Anthems (c. 1790) and metrical psalm-tunes written between
the late 1770s and his death reflect industry rather than inventiveness. It was
the annual competitions of the Noblemen and Gentlemen’s Catch Club in London
that gave him the impetus to turn away from church music towards convivial
pieces, with the chance and hope of winning one of the four annual prizes of a
gold medal worth £10. Thus he submitted a catch, a canon and a couple of glees
each year from 1769 until 1782, and continued to enter canons until 1786. He
was successful in winning a medal for glees in 1770 and 1774 and for canons in
1772 and 1778. Acquiring a moderate reputation for such music, he published by
subscription a selection in Harmonia
Festi (1791), although omitting some of his settings of risque texts. The
bulk of his convivial music remains in manuscript in the collection of the
Catch Club but, as with his songs, a number of his compositions appeared in the
popular anthologies of the day. It is in Harmonia
Festi that we find his own epitaph to himself, in the form of a catch:
Here lies Old John, honest, most
thought, tho’ others oft cry’d sad on’ yet a good bargain he ne’er bought or ever
sold a bad one.
Although his wife died the next year,
the gout-ridden widower lived another fifteen years after the publication of
this all-too-true likeness. Perhaps his most important work during the 1790s
was in assisting Samuel Arnold in the preparation of his collection, Cathedral
Music (1790); in addition, visits to London during the winter (made excusable
by the closure of Lichfield Cathedral during its restoration) allowed him to
press his own compositions upon old friends. But, at Lichfield, the cathedral
authorities found him an increasing embarrassment, not least because of his
gout which, by this time, was considerably more severe. Nevertheless, he kept
an active interest in the treasures of English church music and was annotating
his copy of Byrd and Tallis’ Cantiones
Sacrae as late as 1801. His
library had been built up over a period of seventy years and consisted not only
of his own transcriptions of cathedral music, with which his name is so often
linked, but also much Italian vocal music of the 17th century and a few gems
such as the ‘Sambroke Manuscript’.
Nor should it be forgotten that Alcock published an edition of Byrd’s Diliges Dominum in 1770—a pioneering
venture for those years but one that, nevertheless, reflects the growing antiquarian
interest during the century.
John Alcock died on Sunday evening, 23 February 1806.
Aged nearly 91 and with few friends of his own generation, his memory and his
music soon passed into oblivion. What of his extensive collection of books and
manuscripts? Its immediate fate is unknown, but not so long after his death,
the library passed into the possession of the Rev John Parker, a London rector,
Lichfield Prebendary and ardent antiquarian. It is through the catalogue of the
sale of Parker’s library that the extent of Alcock’s collection becomes
clearer,
and his standing as a musical antiquary thus clarified.
Alcock’s frustrations were, of course, to a great extent
self-generated. But his attempts to improve musical matters at Lichfield
Cathedral cannot go unnoticed, neither can his thwarted plan to publish
cathedral music. That he lent some of this material to Greene, organist of St
Paul’s Cathedral, indicates that he did not bear him malice. Even after the
commercial failure of Boyce’s Cathedral
Music, he was only too eager to help Arnold in a similar undertaking, a
project that he must have realised would be unlikely to be successful. But
Alcock possessed much tenacity of purpose (Fanny
Brown alone shows that) and, had he been born a century later, he would
have made his influence felt to much greater effect. Although he probably would
not have had it otherwise, his strongly held convictions cost him his
happiness; we know him to have been a man of asthenic build and, significantly,
born under the sign of Aries. The
resulting approach to reform brought its own reward.
Staffordshire
Record Office, D.661/19/4/1(1747), D.593/F/3/12/3/1(1753/5), and
D.593/F/3/12/3/2(1761); also Birmingham Public Library, MS.379751(1755).
