Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones, Oh Boy!

by Bob Millard

The Nashville Songwriters Association International has a motto: “It all begins with a song.” They are wrong. It all begins with a composer, lyricist, arranger or translator; creator before creation. For this column, John Athelstan Laurie Riley is “it.”

John Athelstan Laurie Riley was born in 1858 in Bayswater, London, England. He was of the successful entrepreneurial class, educated at Eton and graduated from Pembroke College, Oxford. His father was a noted London barrister. His grandfather founded the Union Bank.

Scholar, musician, and poet, Riley was ‘not called upon to put his hand to the plough.’ Not to say he was dilettante, but he was able to concern himself with only what interested him. He was much interested in Anglo-Catholicism, Near-Eastern travel, music, art, and architecture.

We remember him as a hymnist.

“Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones” (Hymn 451, Presbyterian Hymnal) is one of a small batch created or translated by John Athelstan Laurie Riley as one of the compilers in 1906 of The English Hymnal. It addresses the eternal choir of angels, and the “cloud of witnesses” that have gone before.

Ye watchers and ye holy ones,
Bright seraphs, cherubim,
Raise their glad strain,
Al-le-lu-ia!

Another hymn significant to this article is “O Food to Pilgrims Given,” a communion song whose text he wrote to the tune of Lasst Uns Erfreuen (All Creatures Of God And King), harmonized by J.S. Bach and found in the seminal hymnal, Geistliche Kirchengesäng (1623).

However much we like to hang events on a neat, straight timeline, there is nothing linear about history. Not even the lives and times of ancient hymns. Occasionally there is great fun in following the unexpected ricochets of hymns and hymnists through history into unlikely places.

The Devil is in the details. So is humor; dry humor here in keeping with the Britishness of the subject. Allow me to frame the digressive gallivanting of this essay.

Riley’s brief résumé of hymnody harkens back to a 17th century German collection of hymns in original Greek and Latin, and the music of pre-Roman Catholic Celtic Christians. It splashes through one of the great British religious controversies of the late 19th early 20th century, connects with King George III a few times, winds into the story of the worst movie ever made, and ends on a small island in the English Channel, the only part of England taken during the war.

I kid you not.

Mind: I only was able to undertake the necessary research because I had little other work this summer. If justice be served one of our fine Presbyterian colleges or seminaries will take me on next summer as a Visiting Fellow in Excursionary Exigetical Eclectics. I could guide leading theologians in a series of ecumenical pub crawls.

Or not, but I digress, again.

At 25, one of London’s most eligible bachelors, Riley commissioned a million-dollar town house at No. 2 Kensington Court. Today from No. 2 you could throw a paparazzi and hit Kensington Palace, where Princess Diana made her home, and the princes William and Harry, today’s most-eligible English bachelors, still reside.

Such facts are like those that President Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, while President Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. They suggest that history is part engine of sober purpose, part Mexican jumping bean of titillating coincidence.

Riley married Miss Andalusia Moleworthy. With a Moleworthy in the woodpile, Riley secured for his own children pedigree and patent of peerage he lacked. His in-laws traced back to the Family of Pollock of Newry, Ireland. These Irish Pollocks were close kin to the English Pollocks, descending through one David Pollock, saddler to poor old King George III. Lord Pollock kept George III in the stirrups while he slowly lost his mind and the American colonies.

Returning to J.A.L. Riley, his expertise, particularly in Celtic church music, brought him together with Ralph Vaughan Williams, Britain’s greatest living composer of his time, and the 1906 English Hymnal project the latter edited. These are the only hymns Riley ever produced, as best I could find. His crowning contribution to hymnody was the scholarly tome Concerning Hymn Tunes and Sequences, 1915.

For much of his life Riley was a member of the House of Laity for the Province of Canterbury, and for many years served as advocate for religious education on the London School Board. He published a revision of the Episcopal Prayer Book in 1911.

That same year he published The Religious in Public Education, thereby wading knee-deep into a great controversy between Nonconformers and the Established Church that rolled on for decades, having begun at the height of the Victorian Period. The political row over whose prayer was to be said in schools only dissipated when protracted trench warfare of WWI wiped out almost a whole generation of young men, mooting the point entirely.

A lover of unique architecture, at some point he acquired Manoir de la Trinité, a very old island landhold established by favor of King George III –– him again –– for French Protestant adventurer Phillipe de Cartaret in 1733. Thus did Riley become Seigneur of the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel. Riley was on the island when the Germans occupied it in World War II, and so there he lived the rest of his life.

Some odd things happened to one of his hymns after he died. “Ye Watchers…” and “O Food…” remain staples of mainline Protestant and Reformed church hymnals, but “O Food…” is available in the post-WWII created language of world peace, Esperanto, which practically no one understands.

In 1994 Johnny Depp (Capt. Jack Sparrow) starred in a black comedy biopic about Ed Wood, legendary maker of Plan 9 From Outer Space and other astoundingly bad films. “O Food…” made the soundtrack for Ed Wood.

Is it just me, or is “O Food…” starting to sound like a culinary expletive?

Far from forgotten (at least once a year) John Athelstan Laurie Riley comes up in the official Church of England calendar of commemorations, amongst such luminaries of the faith as St. Augustine, and Hildelitha, Widow, Abbess of Barking.

As the man said, truth is stranger than publicity.