3 days ago
Llywela Harris, music teacher who exerted a lasting influence over generations of girls
Llywela Harris, who has died aged 94, was a pint-sized music teacher who inspired generations of public schoolgirls to express themselves through song.
The diminutive Llywela Harris possessed a Welsh scepticism of rank: to her, it did not matter where her young wards came from or how rich their Midlands industrialist parents might be. It was a question of where they might go harmonically.
Her choir at Abbots Bromley school in Staffordshire dominated girls' music in the 1970s and 1980s, and later she was the warden of the Royal School of Church Music in London and administrator of the St Davids Cathedral Festival, Pembrokeshire. It was at St Davids that she spent her last 25 years, presiding over the tiny city's cultural life like a retired empress. Organists, conductors and visiting soloists were summoned to her cottage in Goat Street to have the rule run over them. Llywela Harris encouraged, cajoled and made things happen.
Sir John Rutter composed for her and she marched her girls behind the Iron Curtain for a singing tour of Hungary. Had she been born a generation later she would likely have become a cathedral director of music. Instead, it was at the school of St Mary and St Anne, Abbots Bromley, that her creative energies found an outlet and where she exerted a lasting influence over generations of girls.
She also became a mentor to Adrian Partington, now director of music at Gloucester Cathedral, and to Geraint Bowen, director of music at Hereford Cathedral, who received encouragement from Llywela Harris during his youthful posting at St Davids.
Abbots Bromley, founded in 1874 by the Rev Nathaniel Woodard, was one of the Woodard group of schools, intended to provide a Christian education for the middle classes. They were sometimes described as 'chapels with a few buildings attached', but in this instance the chapel came with a terrier-like choir mistress with an ear for a duff note and an unerring nose for slackers.
The school's motto, 'That our daughters may be as the polished corners of the temple' (Psalm 144), was never better exemplified than by Llywela Harris, who had herself been educated there. Abbots Bromley was her life, even after retirement. She was its Miss Chips.
Llywela Vernon Harris was born on April 11 1931 at Lampeter in Cardiganshire, the second daughter of the Rev William Henry Harris, precentor of St Davids Cathedral and Professor of Theology and Welsh at St David's College, Lampeter. He translated several hymns and the office of compline into Welsh. Llywela's mother, sometime mayor of Lampeter, was a fine organist.
Llywela and her sister Elizabeth spent their childhood walking the cliffs and bathing at Caerfai and Whitesands. She was sent to board at Abbots Bromley in 1940 and quickly distinguished herself as a pianist. In 1948 she began her studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London, under Douglas Hawkridge on the organ and Eric Thiman for composition.
After gaining her LRAM she took a brief post at Southmoor prep school in Berkshire before she returned to Abbots Bromley as Director of Chapel Music in 1953.
Apart from a stint at the Guildford girls' grammar school (1958-60) and a sabbatical at Stanford (1967), there she stayed.
Under Llywela Harris's direction a typical week's chapel stretched to more than 10 hours of morning assemblies, compline, evensong, choral society, choir rehearsals, organ recitals, Holy Communion and the occasional dawn mass. Requests for a less onerous routine were met with masterly incomprehension.
On Saturdays she took the entire school through the next week's choral music. She would sweep in to the assembly, all of 5ft 2in, and the silence was instant. Immaculately coiffeured and made-up, dressed in knee-length skirts, kitten heels and winged spectacles, she would play the opening chords of a hymn before patrolling the aisles, exhorting the girls – many towering over her – to sing. 'You are not singing to yourselves, ladies, and you are not singing to your mothers. You are singing to God, and He is a long way up.' Hundreds of youngsters bent to the will of a single, small Welsh woman.
Each pupil was armed with an English Hymnal and the Briggs and Frere Manual of Plainsong. When 100 Hymns for Today was added to the arsenal, Harris proved surprisingly open to new hymns such as God of concrete, God of steel. A singable tune was the benchmark. Some days the noise levels were worthy of Cardiff Arms Park.
Choir practices were more rigorous. Sins included inappropriate breath-taking, slouching, fidgeting and casual enunciation – 'Lord of hoSTS'.
On Speech Day the girls would process, veiled like nuns, to St Nicholas village church, walking in pairs arranged in height order and singing all 26 verses of Jerusalem, My Happy Home – a tradition known to all as 'Jerry Heights'. There they would launch into Harris's upper-part reduction of CV Stanford's Te Deum in B flat, which had been rehearsed for weeks ('Judge has SIX beats, ladies!').
EW Naylor's setting of the Benedicite was a fixture of Lent term. Such canticles had faded from most Anglican worship, yet at Abbots Bromley they endured.
Llywela Harris's teaching room, named Mozart, overlooked a dappled lawn where girls gathered for iced buns at break time. Many of her pupils became musicians for life.
Her choir often sang at Lichfield Cathedral. They performed for Songs of Praise and for Radio 3's Let the People Sing, and released two albums.
Llywela Harris marked her retirement from teaching in 1990 by riding away in a hot air balloon, serenaded by the girls singing the soul song Up, Up and Away.
Then, after a four-year stint at the RSCM at Addington Palace in Croydon, where she tightened the ropes as its warden, she returned to Goat Street and ran the annual St Davids Cathedral Festival.
In old age she spent afternoons listening to Radio 3's Choral Evensong, surrounded by her grandfather's watercolours of Oxford; beside her bed was a framed list of the school's choral society collaborations with Repton.
Despite more than one engagement, Llywela Harris never married.
Llywela Harris, born April 11 1931, died May 13 2025
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