New College Organists

New College Organists

Organists at New College

1597-1610            William Wigthorpe

1611-1637            William Meredith (buried in cloisters)

1637-1640            --- Pink

1640-1649            Simon Coleman (expelled June 1649)

1650-1657            --- Miles

1657-1660            --- Crouch

1660-1662            William Flexney: choral services resumed

1662-1664            Robert Pickhaver

1664-1680            William King (son of organist of Winchester Cathedral. Buried in cloisters)

c1683-1692          Richard Goodson (Heather Professor of Music 1682. Died in 1718 and is buried in NC cloisters)

1694                     --- Read (young hothead, committed suicide)

1694-1702            John Weldon (pupil of Henry Purcell)

1702-1732            Simon Child

1732-1776            Richard Church

1776-1797            Philip Hayes (the gourmand ‘Fill Chaise’) (established the designated Song Room in NC. Installed there a Bernard Smith organ (dating from c.1670) for teaching choristers; it was removed in 1841 and sold in 1845 after being found in the college brewhouse ‘full of hops’)

1797-1799            Isaac Pring (ex-St Paul’s Cathedral, and had been Hayes’s assistant since 1794. Buried in NC cloisters)

1799-1825            William Woodcock

1825-1830            Alfred Bennett (author of Instructions for the Spanish Guitar. Matriculated and took his BMus 1825, aged 20. Died in a coaching accident in 1830, and is buried in NC cloisters)

1830-1860            Stephen Elvey (matriculated 1831, aged 25. Instituted the short-lived NC Choral Scholarships, 1858-1864)

c1861-1865           George Arnold

1865-1900            James Taylor (memorial tablet in cloisters)

1901-1919            Hugh Percy Allen (Heather Professor of Music at Oxford from 1918, Director of Royal College of Music from 1919) (memorial tablet in cloisters)

1919                     John Francis Shaw

1920-1929            William Harris

1929-1933            John Dykes Bower

1933-1938            Sydney Watson

1938-1956            Herbert Kennedy Andrews (died at the keyboard in Trinity College Oxford in 1965)

1956                     Henry Lee (interim organist Apr to Jun)

1956-1958            Albert Meredith Davies

1958-1976            David Lumsden (masterminded the purchase of the Grant Degens Bradbeer organ in 1968, died 2023, memorial tablet in the cloisters)

1976-2014            Edward Higginbottom (established the Novum label for NC Choir recordings)

2014 -                   Robert Qinney (ex-Peterborough Cathedral)

Information primarily from Paul Hales’s essay in Buxton & Williams, New College Oxford 1379-1979, pp.267-292), Bursars accounts and Chapel archives, OU Calendars.