When the English hymnbook Congregational Praise, 1953, was in preparation, this poem was submitted to the committee and include in that book. This is the first appearance of this hymn in America. Born October 11, 1893, in Adlington, Lancashire, England, Norman Elliot received his Congregational ministry. After a time as chaplain under the United Army and Navy Board, he pastored churches in Liverpool, Marple Bridge in Derbyshire, and beginning in 1947 was pastor David Thomas Memorial Church in Bristol. He died there on June 13, 1973. CRANHAM was probably named after the composer’s birthplace, Cranham Woods, a beautiful spot near Cheltenham, England. Holst wrote the tune especially for Christiana Rossetti’s poem “In the Bleak Midwinter” (SDAH 126), and it first appeared in the English Hymnal, 1906. SDAH has made some slight changes in the note values to make the tune fit this regular meter text. Erik Routley calls this a “pure folk song.”

Born September 21, 1874, at Cheltenham, Gustavus Theodore Holst’s was English, his Father Swedish. He studied music at the Royal College of Music, at first heading for a career as a pianist, but he changed and at age 17 became organist at Wyck Rissington in Gloucestershire. For five years he played trombone on the Scottish orchestra and in the Carl Rosa Opera Company, gaining valuable experience that helped him later in composed for orchestra. In 1903 he began teaching music in girls’ school in Reading and London, then in 1919 at the Royal College of Music. As an organizer of music, he worked for the YMCA in Salonica, Constantinople, and Asia Minor.

 He visited America twice, in 1923 to conduct at the Ann Arbor, Michigan, Festival, and to give lectures at Harvard in 1932. He died at Ealing, Middlesex, May 25, 1934, but his ashes lie in Chichester Cathedral. His compositions include a large sacred work, Hymn of Jesus; Ode to Death (Walt Whitman’s text); an Ave Maria for women’s voice; Hymn to the Unknown, the orchestral suite mentioned above; The Planets; five operas; song; and hymn tunes. His tunes THAXTED is at SDAH 648.

-from Companion to the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal by Wayne Hooper and Edward E. White