John Darwall

DARWALL, John. b. Haughton, near Stafford, 27 December 1731 (baptised 13 January 1732); d. Walsall, Staffordshire, 18 December 1789. The son of the rector of Haughton, Randle Darwall, he was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. He took Holy Orders (deacon 1756, priest 1757), becoming curate of Haughton, and then Bushbury, 1757, followed by Trysull, 1758. He moved to St Matthew’s, Walsall, in 1761, becoming vicar in 1769, and remaining there until his death. He composed tunes for all 150 metrical psalms during the 1760s. He is remembered for the magnificent DARWALL’S 148th, first published in Aaron Williams’s The New Universal Psalmodist (1770): This is one...