Caleb Simper

His straightforward, sometimes simplistic and over sentimental style was written with amateur performance in mind, and can be compared to that of his close contemporary, John Henry Maunder.

He moved in the 1890s to Barnstaple where he spent the remainder of his active life working as a composer, and as choirmaster and organist at St Mary Magdalene's Church.

He produced a prodigious amount of Anglican church music and organ pieces, written in an unsophisticated, popular style and aimed at small parish choirs and unskilled organists.

[1] Over five million copies had been sold by the 1920s and a few works remain in print today, though Simper's musical style has long since fallen from fashion.

In his A Short History of English Church Music, Erik Routley traced John Stainer's The Crucifixion (1887) as the archetypal work that others imitated, and often diluted.

"Much of the rest of [Stainer's] music and the whole of [his] libretto where it is not quoting scripture, is a caricature of the sensational triviality which, no matter how great the efforts of their latter day defenders, we are bound to attribute to the Victorians.