19/08/2026
Today we hosted The Royal Society of Musicians' Flower-Laying Ceremony in Memory of Sir Henry Wood, CH, 3 March 1869 – 19 August 1944
https://hsl.church/our-history
Marking the 82nd anniversary of the death of Sir Henry Wood (1869–1944), the celebrated conductor and founder of the Promenade Concerts, and a generous benefactor of The Royal Society of Musicians. (RSM).
In 1953, Jessie Wood, Sir Henry’s companion in later life, wrote to RSM asking that flowers be placed annually, on the anniversary of Sir Henry’s death, above the resting place of his ashes in the Musicians’ Memorial Chapel. She added that ‘the more simple the tribute, the more in keeping it would be.
The Society and Holy Sepulchre are honoured to fulfil Jessie’s request and to continue a tradition revived last year after a lapse of many decades.
Sir Henry Wood holds a unique position in our musical world. His name is a household word. His influence on our music as a conductor has made itself felt for fully fifty years in a remarkable way and with beneficent results … No one has had greater influence on the music of his time and generation, nor given himself so unsparingly to its service.
He learned his job by actual experience and never took anything at second hand. He has some practical solution for every problem that presents itself. The effect of this is that everybody trusts him, for they know that he will always ‘deliver the goods’.
When he calls a rehearsal for ten o’clock you may set your watch by the first beat he makes at it. If a composer is promised that his work shall be rehearsed at 11.10 he will hear it rehearsed at that time.
This reliability, this immense range of experience - of musical sympathy, this power of administration - these unique gifts of musicianship and of leadership are factors in the hold he possesses on the goodwill and imagination of us all. As an almost exact contemporary, I well remember standing, at the age of thirteen, beside a newly built organ in the Fisheries Exhibition while a black-haired little fellow (whose name was Henry Wood) gave a recital. I was filled with an emotion which at the time I took to be envy, but which I now realise was suppressed admiration. So to speak, I took off my hat to that boy. And today, all these years afterwards, I raise my hat again to Henry Wood in the spirit of gratitude and of affection.
