1823–1876 · United Kingdom · Romantic
John Bacchus Dykes (1823–1876) was an English priest and author of church hymns. He served at Durham Cathedral and in the parish of St Oswald in Durham. He is known for more than 300 hymn tunes, including Melita and Nicaea; the site offers choir sheet music for both.
John Bacchus Dykes was born on 10 March 1823 in Hull, England. He was the fifth child and third son of the shipbuilder William Hey Dykes (the surname also appears as Dikes) and Elizabeth, the daughter of Bacchus Huntington, a surgeon from Sculcoates in Yorkshire. His grandfather on his father's side, the Reverend Thomas Dykes, also lived in Hull.
His elder sister Eliza Alderson wrote poetry and church hymns. John composed melodies for at least four of her hymns.
When he was not yet eleven the boy was playing the organ in Hull, at St John's Church in Myton. The church had been built by his father's father, who was its vicar; the organist was John's uncle, another Thomas. John's teacher was the Hull organist George Skelton. Besides the organ, he played the violin and the piano. He began his studies at Kingston College in Hull.
His father managed a branch of the Yorkshire Bank that opened in Hull in 1834, and later worked as a banker in Wakefield. The family settled there towards the close of 1841. Contemporary mentions describe John as organist of the church where his grandfather served. In Wakefield he attended the West Riding Proprietary School until 1843.
In 1843 Dykes entered St Catharine's College in Cambridge; in the records of that time his surname appears as Dikes. He became the second Dykes Scholar, the name given to holders of a scholarship founded in honour of his grandfather; the first was his elder brother Thomas. He took up music as an additional subject under Thomas Attwood Walmisley and joined Walmisley's madrigal society.
He joined the Peterhouse Musical Society too (it became the Cambridge University Musical Society) and served as its fourth president, right after his friend William Thomson. His diaries, letters and newspaper accounts record that the society sang several of his part-songs. He took his bachelor's degree in 1847 and his master's in 1851.
In 1847 Dykes received a post as a curate in Malton, North Yorkshire. In January 1848 he was ordained a deacon at York Minster, and in 1849 Cambridge awarded him a doctorate in music.
In 1849 Dykes became a minor canon at Durham Cathedral and kept the post for the rest of his life. Soon afterwards he was made precentor as well. From 1850 to 1852 he lived at Hollingside House, which is now the official residence of the Vice-Chancellor of Durham University.
In 1862 he gave up the post of precentor and took over the parish of St Oswald's in Durham, almost in the cathedral's shadow; Sir Frederick Ouseley was dismayed by this. Dykes remained in the parish until his death in 1876.
On 25 July 1850 Dykes married Susannah, the daughter of George Kingston. They had three sons and five daughters.
Dykes's children were Ernest Huntington (1851–1924), Mary Evelyn (1852–1921), Gertrude Kingston (1854–1942), Caroline Sybil (1856–1943), George Lionel Andrew (1857–1858), Ethel Susan (1859–1936), Mabel Hey (1860–1870) and John Arthur St. Oswald (1863–1948).
Dykes grew up in an evangelical family. During his years at Cambridge he moved to an Anglo-Catholic position within the Church of England, and in time became a ritualist. He sympathised with the Oxford Movement and belonged to the Society of the Holy Cross.
In those years the evangelical and Anglo-Catholic camps of the Anglican church stood sharply at odds. The treatment Dykes received from the evangelical party, which counted Bishop Charles Baring among its members, was mostly a local matter.
For his growing parish Dykes wanted to take on George Peake, an Oxford graduate who had been ordained priest in 1872, as an assistant. Baring refused to license Peake. St Oswald's needed two assistants, but the bishop demanded a pledge that they would not use ritualist practices.
Dykes took the case to the Queen's Bench, seeking an order that would force the bishop to issue the licence. Judge Sir Colin Blackburn would not step in, seeing the question as one for the bishop alone to decide. In 1874 Dykes issued an open letter criticising Baring's campaign against ritualist practices.
His failure to change Baring's position was followed by a gradual decline in his physical and mental health. From March 1875 he stopped appearing at St Oswald's, and the absence proved permanent. Rest and Swiss air did not help, and Dykes went to the south coast of England to recover.
Dykes was admitted to the Ticehurst House asylum in East Sussex; he died on 22 January 1876, aged 52.
He was buried in the additional churchyard of St Oswald's, a plot that he himself had been in charge of buying and having consecrated a few years before. His youngest daughter Mabel, who died of scarlet fever in 1870 at the age of ten, shares the grave. It is now the single marked grave on a site that has become a children's play area.
The main work of Dykes's life was service as a parish priest in the tradition of the Oxford (Tractarian) movement rather than music. Even so, he is best known as the author of more than 300 hymn tunes, and many of them were commissioned from him. The first of his tunes to be printed came out in 1857 in a hymnal by John Grey titled Manual of Psalm and Hymn Tunes, which circulated only locally.
A more important step came in 1860, when Dykes sent a set of his tunes on his own initiative to William Henry Monk, the music editor of a new collection, Hymns Ancient and Modern. They included Hollingside, Melita, Nicaea, St. Cross, St. Cuthbert and the first of his three tunes named Dies Irae.
Melita was written for the words Eternal Father, strong to save by William Whiting, and it is noted as a tune played at the funerals of high-ranking figures and when ships are launched. Nicaea is the tune of Reginald Heber's hymn Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty, while Hollingside goes with Charles Wesley's words Jesu, lover of my soul.
Several of his other tunes also won recognition. Gerontius is the tune for Newman's Praise to the Holiest in the height, a text from his poem The Dream of Gerontius, and it was sung at Gladstone's funeral. Lux Benigna was created for the poem Lead, Kindly Light; it was published in 1867 and is also known as St Oswald. Dominus Regit Me carries the verses of his friend Henry Williams Baker, The King of Love my shepherd is.
Dykes harmonised a great many tunes that already existed, including Stockton by Thomas Wright, Wir Pflügen, Miles Lane by William Shrubsole and O Quanta Qualia. Besides his own tunes he composed two substantial anthems, plenty of shorter anthems and motets, Communion, Morning and Evening settings and music for the burial service text; his only solo organ piece is the Andantino. These pieces are seldom performed now.
Later, Dykes's music was criticised for alleged over-chromaticism and for sentimentality, although about 92% of his hymn tunes are wholly or almost wholly diatonic. The scholar Jeremy Dibble, by contrast, observes that Dykes knew well the harmonic language of the early Wagner, Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Spohr, Weber, Mendelssohn and Schubert, and drew on it freely in his tunes.
The site offers three Dykes tunes for mixed choir (SATB) at the Beginner+ level: St. Agnes, Nicaea and Melita (the titles on the site carry the label hymntune). Any of them is a good way to begin getting to know his music.