Centenary Service
8 May 1968, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London
This web page preserves a record (and the recording) of the Centenary celebration of Monkton Combe School in 1968. Your recorder (Mike Cowlishaw ») sang as a lead treble that day; some personal notes are below, at the bottom of the page.
Here are the transcribed sleeve notes (see below for an image). ‘The Choir’ comprised members of the Monkton Combe School and Junior School choirs.
| MONKTON COMBE SCHOOL
The Centenary Service of Thanksgiving and Dedication St. Paul’s Cathedral 8th May 1968 | |
| Side I
THE WELCOME
PSALM 150
LESSON
PRAYERS OF THANKSGIVING
HYMN
— —
PRAYERS OF DEDICATION
HYMN
— —
THE BLESSING
— —
| EXCEPT for the Te Deum, which, for technical reasons, was re-recorded in
the School Chapel, the whole of this recording was made during the
Service at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The Choir is conducted by James Peschek, and the Organist is Christopher Herrick, Assistant Organist of St. Paul’s. The Choir of Monkton Combe Junior School was trained by David Date, and the Organist in the Te Deum is Ashleigh Tobin.
The Te Deum and the Anthem (the words of which were chosen
by the Head Master, Derek Wigram, and are based on the School Motto)
were especially commissioned by the Governors for the Service. Kenneth
Leighton, who has also written settings of the Venite and Jubilate
in the commission, has recently been appointed a Lecturer in Music
at Oxford University, and Alan Gibbs is Director of Music at Archbishop
Tenison’s Grammar School, London. Olivier Messiaen is Organist of
the Sainte-Trinité Church in Paris, and Professor of Composition
at the Paris Conservatoire, and is perhaps the most important of
contemporary French composers. This work, one of four Symphonic
Meditations, was written in 1932. It comments on verses from St.
Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians: “Let us give thanks to God the
Father which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance
of the saints in light ... and hath raised us up together, and made
us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”
The discs were manufactured by Sound News Productions, London, from recordings made and edited by Julian Bewick. Sleeve notes by Ashleigh Tobin. Line drawing by Stephen Ashton. Printed by Dawson and Goodall Ltd., Bath |
Here are the audio files, digitised from the original vinyl record. For each side (1 or 2) there is an MP3 (compressed audio) file and a WAV file (uncompressed audio).
The MP3 files are recommended for most listeners; they have been lightly edited (using Audacity) to remove clicks and pops. The WAV files are the original digitisations; they are much larger and are included so they can be re-processed as required.
| Type | Audio file | Size (MBytes) |
|---|---|---|
| MP3 | MCS-Centenary_1.mp3 | 23.8 |
| MCS-Centenary_2.mp3 | 23.6 | |
| WAV | MCS-Centenary_1.wav | 242.5 |
| MCS-Centenary_2.wav | 243.4 |
Here are photographs of the record sleeve (front and back) and the
disc labels (front and back).
Click on any thumbnail for a full-resolution image. The MCS-Centenary-disc-Images PDF includes all four images.
 MCS Centenary disc – sleeve front |  MCS Centenary disc – sleeve back |
 MCS Centenary disc – front label |  MCS Centenary disc – back label |
Here are the documents given to all at the Centenary service; both are PDFs:
- Order of Service – detailed order of service with full words of all the hymns, prayers, anthem, etc.
- The Address (sermon).
Memories
I was a little under 15 years old at the time (56 years ago as of this writing), but the Service is still a vivid memory – along with the hours of rehearsals, viewing St. Paul’s, and the re-recording of the Te Deum later. It was also the only time that I sang ‘high C’ in public, at the end of the Anthem. My voice broke two months later, so that Summer Term was also the last time that I sang in a choir.
Listening to the recording now (2024) it sounds over-ritualistic, but at the time it seemed normal and was quite uplifting – at least to that sceptical teenage fifth-form chorister. And, of course, with hindsight I now understand and can appreciate just how much time must have been put in by the members of staff, parents, and many others, to make it all happen.
I particularly remember James Peschek, the School’s Head of Music, who taught me to sing properly; W. B. B. Cliffe (the other lead treble to sing that high C, and by far the better musician) whose perfect pitch kept me and the rest of the treble section on track; The Rev. Salmon, who took many of us caving that year – which became my lifelong leisure pursuit; and, finally, Julian Bewick who not only created the recording of the Service but later that year introduced me to computing – which became my enduring passion and career.
Mike Cowlishaw », December 2024.
Digitisation/quality
The original vinyl record (see details above) was digitised using a Technics SL–J2 Direct Drive turntable, Edirol AudioCapture UA-1X (Audio ↔ USB interface), and Audacity software. This combination gives excellent results on test records.
The MCS Centenary audio files linked above are, however, of variable quality – this is possibly due to the analogue tape recorders used and local variations in temperature, etc.
Website files
This web page (and its linked data) is entirely static, with no embedded programming language code, so is ‘archival’. The files are plain text (with HTML markup), simple documented PDF, and JPEG images.
Copyright
The recording itself, being more than 50 years old, is out of copyright. All other text, music, and images, remain copyright of their respective authors.