William Walsham How chose the slums of East London over the prestigious posts offered him in Manchester and Durham, and refused a bishop’s private carriage in favor of the public omnibus. His people called him the poor man’s bishop, the children’s bishop, and the omnibus bishop. He wrote this hymn in a farming village on the Welsh border, and a colleague described how it came: “the great host of God’s serving, struggling, martyred, yet triumphant children passed before his view... the Alleluia of the redeemed rang in his ears.” It ran to eleven stanzas and began “For all Thy saints”; the line we sing dates from his 1871 revision. How rarely spoke of his own writing, but in June 1893, at sixty-nine, on the morning a family member died, he wrote to his brother: “We went to our morning prayer in the chapel just after reading the letters, and sang as our Saint’s-day hymn, ‘For all Thy saints who from their labours rest.’ So much of it came home to me with new meaning to-day.” The tune Vaughan Williams wrote for it in 1906 he named Sine Nomine, “without a name” — perhaps for the unnamed saints this day honors, perhaps a joke at the convention of naming tunes after places. It was so fine that when another poet wrote a text for it in 1938, the copyright holder refused: the tune was for this hymn and no other.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025