Valerie Ruddle

RUDDLE, Valerie (née Hill). b. Halstead, Essex, 15 October 1932. She was educated at Sittingbourne, Kent, and at the Royal Academy of Music (GRSM, 1953). She married Allan Ruddle in 1959, and has two children. She has taught music in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire; Stourbridge, Worcestershire; and in the West Indies (returning to England, 1973). She is an active member of the Methodist Church Music Society (now succeeded by ‘ArtServe’) and of the Hymn Society, and has written some 100 hymn tunes, 15 of which have been published. The best known are probably STEWARDSHIP, one of many requested from her by Fred Pratt Green* and written for ‘God in his love for us lent us this planet’*; FOYE, for...