He was educated at the Oratory, Birmingham, and studied in London with Berthold Tours and Edouard Marlois, two organist-composers with a French background.
Some of his larger works were written for and performed at major British music festivals at Cardiff, Norwich and Brighton.
His wife Clare (née Harrison, widowed Webster) occasionally contributed the words to some of his songs and the libretto to his second opera Ilona (1914).
[3] Since 1959, the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in London is awarding an annual Arthur Hervey Prize in the form of a scholarship for an outstanding young composer, which was initiated in memory of Hervey by bequest of his step-daughter, Nancy Webster.
[4] Despite his substantial musical oeuvre Hervey remained mainly known for his writings, which include biographical studies of composers, most of which being devoted to French contemporaries like Saint-Saëns and Bruneau.