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Killing time in Beverley Minster the other day I caught sight of the list of past organists painted up on a board. Within the past 200 years this magnificent building, which has no choir-school of its own, has played host to John Camidge, A.H. Mann and H.K. Andrews. All three went from there to the very top of the cathedral organists’ ladder: Camidge to York Minster; Mann to King’s, Cambridge, where he presided over the first broadcast of Nine Lessons and Carols in the Twenties; and Andrews to New College, Oxford, where he pioneered the music of Byrd (and died a famous death while giving the inaugural recital on the new organ at Trinity).
Those names in such a place show again that the supply of musicians from our larger parish churches to the cathedrals is not now what it once was.
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