He is probably best remembered for his hymn tune Woodlands which has been used with hymns such as Henry Montagu Butler's Lift Up Your Hearts!, Far round the world thy children sing their song[1][2] by Basil Joseph Mathews and Timothy Dudley-Smith's Tell Out, My Soul.
Born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, the son of a bank manager, from 1888 to 1893 Greatorex was a boy chorister at King's College, Cambridge.
Greatorex was known at Gresham's as 'Gog' or 'Greatoxe', and among those he taught at the school were Benjamin Britten (a boarder from 1928 to 1930), Sir Lennox Berkeley and W. H. Auden.
[citation needed] In July 1949, Greatorex retired to Bournemouth, where he lived in an hotel for a few months until his death in December of the same year.
[citation needed] The cold open of BBC television's Silent Witness episode Suffer the Children uses Far round the world with tune Woodlands, first sung solo by boy treble Billy (Jack Finerty), who is then joined by the catholic school choir which mixes to a young gospel choir to provide the only link between the two otherwise separate stories interwoven in this episode.