Henry James Ernest Holmes

HOLMES, Henry James Ernest. b. Burnley, Lancashire, 5 March 1852; d. Burnley, 7 October 1938. Holmes came from a legal family. Educated at Clitheroe Grammar School, he studied for the law and was admitted a solicitor of the High Court of Chancery in 1875. He practised as a solicitor in Burnley for over sixty years. An amateur musician who began writing music at the age of seventeen, he composed over 250 hymn tunes. The best known of them, PATER OMNIUM, was published in The Burnley Tune Book (1875), set to a hymn by William Whiting*, ‘Onward through life thy children stray’. The tune name comes from words to which it was originally set, beginning ‘Father of all…’ (Pater omnium). It was...