Mervyn Horder, alias the Second Baron of Ashford, was born in 1910, the son of a doctor who was to be ennobled for ministrations to a series of British monarchs. As a schoolboy at Winchester he was taught by the composer George Dyson. After studying Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, he went on to war service in India and the Far East. From 1946 to 1970 he was chairman of the Gerald Duckworth publishing house. A Who’s Who entry lists recreations as ‘music, idling’, but the musical interest has never, it appears, been exactly idle. Horder has edited carol books and composed numerous songs to words by the likes of Betjeman, Shakespeare, W H Auden, Dorothy Parker and Robert Herrick.

from notes by Andrew Green © 1995