Down Ampney to Westminster Abbey
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Ralph Vaughan Williams was born on 12 October 1872 at Down Ampney, Gloucestershire. His mother was a niece of Charles Darwin. He studied with Hubert Parry at the Royal College of Music and at Trinity College, Cambridge, then took lessons from Max Bruch in Berlin and Maurice Ravel in Paris. He started collecting English folk songs in 1903, and from 1904 to 1906 he was music editor of The English Hymnal. In the First World War he served as a stretcher bearer and later as an artillery officer, and the gunfire damaged his hearing. The nine symphonies run from A Sea Symphony in 1910 to the Ninth, premiered in April 1958. He died in London that August, aged 85. His ashes are in Westminster Abbey.
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