Lord Guard And Guide The Men Who Fly: A Song History

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"Lord Guard And Guide The Men Who Fly" is a prayer for airmen that Mary C. D. Hamilton wrote in 1915, during the First World War.[1] Hubert Parry set her words for voice and piano as "A Hymn for Aviators," published in London by Boosey & Co. in 1915; according to IMSLP, Clara Butt gave the first performance at the Royal Albert Hall in May of that year.[2] In 1917 the poem was reprinted in W. Reginald Wheeler's anthology A Book of Verse of the Great War (Yale University Press), whose acknowledgments credit The Times of London and mention Parry's setting.[3]

Lithograph of a worker at machinery among angular beams in an aircraft factory

Christopher Nevinson, Building Aircraft: Making the Engine, lithograph, 1917. Aircraft-engine building during the First World War, the years the hymn was written; it has no connection to the hymn.

By 1918 the text was in a hymnal, War-Time Hymns, sung to Henry K. Oliver's long-meter tune FEDERAL STREET.[4] Hymnary.org indexes it in fewer than two dozen hymnals and reproduces a U.S. Air Force Band note that calls it the "United States Air Force Hymn."[1] Among the tunes Hymnary.org pairs with the words is Henry Baker's QUEBEC, also called HESPERUS.[1] Baker (1835–1910), an English civil engineer who earned a music degree at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1867, composed the tune in 1854 while a student there, and John Grey's hymnal printed it in 1866.[5]

Hamilton's prayer also touched the Navy Hymn, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save": the Naval History and Heritage Command says a stanza for airmen that appeared in a 1943 Presbyterian worship book for the armed forces most likely came from her first verse and the closing lines of her fourth, and a Navy adaptation of that stanza is sung especially in naval aviation.[6] In February 1944 the chaplain's column in the Cloudbuster, the weekly paper of the U.S. Navy Pre-Flight School at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, attributed that airmen's stanza to Hamilton and dated it to 1915.[7] Shelley Stevens arranges it in DAD tuning, with no capo needed, as one of the 15 service songs and patriotic numbers in Baker's Dozen #13: Patriotic Tunes, a mountain dulcimer book published by Fingers Of Steel.[8]

Our book that contains the song "Lord Guard And Guide The Men Who Fly"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Lord, guard and guide the men who fly".
  2. IMSLP: "A Hymn for Aviators (Parry, Charles Hubert Hastings)".
  3. Internet Archive: "A Book of Verse of the Great War" (W. Reginald Wheeler, ed., Yale University Press, 1917).
  4. Hymnary.org: "War-Time Hymns, no. 9: Lord, guard and guide the men who fly".
  5. Hymnary.org: "QUEBEC (Baker)".
  6. Naval History and Heritage Command: "The Navy Hymn".
  7. DigitalNC: "Cloudbuster, February 26, 1944, page 2".
  8. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Baker's Dozen #13: Patriotic Tunes".
  9. Image: Christopher Nevinson, Building Aircraft: Making the Engine, lithograph, 1917. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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