1. Percival Dearmer was an English Anglican priest and liturgist best known as the author of The Parson's Handbook, a liturgical manual for Anglican clergy, and as editor of The English Hymnal.
19 Facts About Percy Dearmer
1. 2.
Percy Dearmer was born on 27 February 1867 in Kilburn, Middlesex, to an artistic family; his father, Thomas Percy Dearmer, was an artist and drawing instructor.
3.
Percy Dearmer attended Streatham School and Westminster School in the early 1880s, before going to a boarding school in Switzerland.
4.
Percy Dearmer was associated with Pusey House and acted as secretary to its principal, Charles Gore.
5.
Percy Dearmer was made a deacon in 1891 and ordained to the priesthood in 1892 at Rochester Cathedral.
6.
Percy Dearmer died of typhus in 1915 while they were both serving with an ambulance unit in Serbia during the First World War.
7.
Percy Dearmer's views fell very much on the side of the latter.
8.
Active in the burgeoning Alcuin Club, Percy Dearmer became the spokesman for a movement with the publication of his most influential work, The Parson's Handbook.
9.
In 1901, after serving four curacies, Percy Dearmer was appointed the third vicar of London church St Mary-the-Virgin, Primrose Hill, where he remained until 1915.
10.
Percy Dearmer used the church as a sort of practical laboratory for the principles he had outlined, revising the book several times during his tenure.
11.
In 1912, Percy Dearmer was instrumental in founding the Warham Guild, a sort of practical expression of the concerns discussed in the Alcuin Club and reflected in The Parson's Handbook, to carry out "the making of all the 'Ornaments of the Church and of the Ministers thereof' according to the standard of the Ornaments Rubric, and under fair conditions of labour".
12.
Percy Dearmer served as lifelong head of the Warham Guild's advisory committee.
13.
Percy Dearmer again worked with Williams and Martin Shaw to produce Songs of Praise and the Oxford Book of Carols.
14.
In 1931 an enlarged edition of Songs of Praise was published, notable for the first publication of the hymn "Morning Has Broken", commissioned by Percy Dearmer from noted children's author Eleanor Farjeon.
15.
Percy Dearmer left St Mary's to serve as a chaplain to the British Red Cross ambulance unit in Serbia, where his wife died of typhus in 1915.
16.
For fifteen years Percy Dearmer served in no official ecclesiastical posts, preferring instead to focus on his writing, volunteerism and effecting social change.
17.
Politically, Percy Dearmer was an avowed socialist, serving as secretary of the Christian Social Union from 1891 to 1912.
18.
Percy Dearmer underscored these values by including a "Litany of Labour" in his 1930 manual for communicants, The Sanctuary.
19.
Percy Dearmer died of coronary thrombosis on 29 May 1936, aged sixty-nine, at his residence in Westminster.