When responsible for the regular orchestral concerts at the Crystal Palace, he wrote a series of programme notes from which eventually grew his musical dictionary.

He recruited leading musicians including Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford as members of the College faculty and established a close working relationship with London's older conservatoire, the Royal Academy of Music.

He contributed to the English literature on the subject, including a concordance in 1854 and about a thousand pages of Sir William Smith's 1863 Bible Dictionary.

[2] He went to a preparatory school, on Clapham Common, where one of his schoolfellows was George Granville Bradley, later Dean of Westminster, whose sister Grove subsequently married.

[3] He next entered Stockwell (later known as Clapham) Grammar School, run by Charles Pritchard, the astronomer, who was inspired by the progressive principles of King's College, London.

By the age of sixteen, he was competent in classics and mathematics; he left the school in 1836 and was apprenticed to Alexander Gordon, a well-known civil engineer in Westminster.

[4] After this he joined the staff of the Chester and Holyhead Railway and then became assistant to Edwin Clark, working on the Britannia Bridge across the Menai Strait.

After the Great Exhibition closed in 1852, its principal building, known as "the Crystal Palace", was dismantled and rebuilt in the south London suburb of Sydenham as a centre for education, the arts and leisure.

With programmes chosen by Grove and Manns, the Crystal Palace concerts became a central feature of London's musical scene and remained so until the end of the century.

They were particularly excited about their final discovery, which Grove described thus: "I found, at the bottom of the cupboard, and in its farthest corner, a bundle of music-books two feet high, carefully tied round, and black with the undisturbed dust of nearly half-a-century.

Dr. Schneider [Schubert's nephew] must have been amused at our excitement; but let us hope that he recollected his own days of rapture; at any rate, he kindly overlooked it, and gave us permission to take away with us and copy what we wanted.

"[8] After nearly twenty years of service at the Crystal Palace, Grove resigned the secretaryship at the end of 1873 and accepted an offer from the publishers Macmillan and Co. to join their staff and become a director of the firm.

He stated, in the prospectus of the dictionary, in March 1874, that "The want of English works on the history, theory, or practice of Music, or the biographies of musicians accessible to the non-professional reader, has long been a subject of remark."

[7] The Musical Times wrote of the work, "His masterly biographies of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schubert are models of biographical literature, and are written in a most fascinating style.

[7] There was a proposal to merge the two bodies to create a single effective conservatoire, but the Royal Academy insisted on retaining its independence and later revitalised itself under the leadership of Alexander Mackenzie.

The teaching staff, whom he appointed, were led by Parry and Stanford, and, as a biographer of Grove says, "carried the college with distinction into the twentieth century."

He was determined to raise the general standard of orchestral playing by replacing the existing ad hoc methods of apprentice-based training, private lessons, or study abroad.

The income helped both institutions to keep their own student fees at an affordable level, which enabled the college to make a full three-year course of study its basic standard.

[10] The historian David Wright says of Grove's legacy: "The founding of the RCM in 1883 clearly represents the major turning point for musical training in Britain.