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Listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams 'Serenade to Music', first performed
in the 1930s as a tribute to the conductor Sir Henry Wood, I am again
struck by RVW's complete openness as a human being, and by his
generosity and humanity of spirit - to listen to his music is to listen
to the Earth turning.

It is also to listen to the man himself bestriding the landscape in giant musical steps as if some great static construction has freed itself and is on the move; just listen to his 3rd Symphony, the 'Pastoral' (1921) to hear what I mean. This symphony - which is as much an ironic statement about the First World War as it is a musical description of the English countryside - was a watershed in RVW's career, marking him out as a composer who was going to plough a very distinctive and idiosyncratic furrow, and by so doing create a body of

work that is always fresh to the ear and to the heart (a vital element), which renews itself and the listener each and every time.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, the second son and youngest child of Arthur Charles Vaughan Williams and Margaret Susan Wedgwood, was born on the 12th of October 1872 in Down Ambney, Gloucestershire, where his father was vicar.

But with Arthur's sudden death in 1875 Ralph's mother moved the family
back to her sister's home at Leith Hill Place in Surrey, which her
father, Josiah Wedgwood III, had bought in 1845, and where he
continued to live until his death in 1880.

And as the name Wedgwood suggests Ralph Vaughan Williams came from good patrician stock. On his father's side the family was of Welsh extraction, with John Williams, Ralph's great-grandfather, born in Job's Well, Carmarthenshire, in 1757. And as James Day writes, in his 1961 biography of Vaughan Williams, "John Williams, after leaving Carmarthen Grammar School went to Jesus College, Oxford, before becoming a scholar of Wadham in 1774 and a fellow in 1780. He enjoyed a distinguished career at the bar, notably as a 'special pleader'before becoming a Serjeant-at-law in 1794 and a King's Serjeant ten years later. As a legal scholar he was famous mainly for his edition of Blackstone's Commentaries and the Reports and Pleadings in the Court of King's Bench in the Reign of Charles II, [with] his highly valued, shrewd and lucid notes and references adding greatly to the appeal and
value of the latter book in particular."

John Williams had three sons and three daughters (one of whom, Mary,
married the sixth Earl of Buckingham), with Edward Vaughan Williams,
RVW's grandfather

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