G. W. Briggs
Royal Navy chaplain and Anglican clergyman
George Wallace Briggs (14 December 1875 – 30 December 1959) was an English hymn writer and Anglican clergyman.
Career
Briggs was born on 14 December 1875, in Nottingham, to George Briggs and Betsy Ann Hardstaff, and educated at Loughborough Grammar School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He served as a padre in the Royal Navy from January 1902, before becoming Vicar of St Andrew's Church, Norwich, in 1909. In 1918, he became Rector of All Saints Church, Loughborough. Between 1927 and 1934, he was Canon of Leicester Cathedral and from 1934 until his retirement in 1956 he served as Canon of Worcester Cathedral.
His most famous hymn is "God Has Spoken by His Prophets" as set to the tune written for Ode to Joy by Beethoven. He also wrote Loughborough Grammar School's school hymn "Our Father by whose servant(s)", which has also been adopted as a school hymn by other schools. The servant in LGS's case was Thomas Burton, and the "Five Hundred Years Enduring" verse 2 (originally "Four Hundred Years Enduring") is unique to the Loughborough Schools Foundation. He also wrote the college hymn for Loughborough College of Technology, which would later become Loughborough University. He died on 30 December 1959, aged 84.
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This entry incorporates text from “G. W. Briggs” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.