His mother, Edith Jane, was the daughter of the Revd Robert Foster, chaplain to the Royal Hibernian Military School in Dublin.
[1] Patrick attended St Ronan's Preparatory School (in Worthing, Sussex) and Winchester College (in Hampshire).
He managed to survive unscathed until the last weeks of the war, when he received an injury necessitating the below-knee amputation of his right leg.
This profoundly damaged his confidence and also caused him to perhaps drink more than was wise; he was in constant pain, for which alcohol provided some relief.
[2] Patrick's elder brother Peyton Sheldon Hadley, a former pupil of Charterhouse School, who served in the infantry, was also wounded in the closing months of the War.
Eric Weatherell notes[4] that Hadley's contemporaries at the RCM included Constant Lambert and Gordon Jacob.
He became acquainted with Frederick Delius (Eric Fenby describes the role played by Hadley in recovering the long-lost score of Delius's early opera Koanga), Ernest John Moeran, Sir Arnold Bax, William Walton, Alan Rawsthorne, and Herbert Howells.
At Rootham's request, Hadley also completed the orchestration of the final movement after the composer's death in March 1938.
[5] In 1938 Hadley was elected to a Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge and appointed as a lecturer in the music faculty.
Most people think of Hadley as composer of one or two church anthems: I Sing of a Maiden and the mildly exotic My Beloved spake.
[10] While Ephemera remained unpublished, another song of farewell scored for similar ensemble, Scene from The Woodlanders (1925, a setting of Thomas Hardy) is more assured and was accepted for publication by Hubert Foss at the Oxford University Press in 1926.
[12] One of Hadley's undoubted masterpieces is his Symphonic Ballad: The Trees So High, completed in 1931, and first performed in Cambridge the following year.
The Hills has strong autobiographical links, dealing with the meeting, courtship and marriage of his parents, introduced retrospectively by the narrator (bass soloist) as he returns after his mother's death to the landscape where these events once took place.
At the first performance of the expanded version in 1956 one of the soloists was Fred Calvert, the King's Lynn Superintendent of Police who had directed the emergency operations during the floods.
[7] Perhaps the gentlest introduction to Hadley is his short orchestral work One Morning in Spring, which was composed to celebrate Ralph Vaughan Williams' seventieth birthday in 1942.
The early (1923) orchestral sketch Kinder Scout, a musical evocation of the distinctive Derbyshire peak, remained in manuscript and was only recorded for the first time in September 2019 by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Rumon Gamba.
Many of the shorter works in the composer's output, such as anthems for liturgical use, were connected with the choir of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.