70 Years of Song

You may recall that the church building in which we still worship was built in two stages: the first floor was completed and the cornerstone laid in 1947. The congregation worshipped in what is now the church hall for five years until the money could be raised and the work completed on the second level, which is now our sanctuary, in 1952.

Elsewhere in this Blog, I shared a letter from Rev. John C. Downing to the congregation on the occasion of the dedication of the “superstructure” of Crawford Park United Church in 1952, which happens to be 70 years ago.

Several services and events marked that proud event, and the bulletin reproduced below shows the order of service for the Friday evening service, on November 7th, and the Sunday morning Remembrance service on November 9th, 1952, both of which Rev. Downing referred to in his aforementioned letter. (Text continues below)

Rev. Downing led worship on the Sunday morning, but the Friday service was led by Rev. H.B. Campbell, D.D. The internet tells me that Rev. Harvey Binkley Campbell was at that time the Minister at Westmount Park-Emmanuel church. Perhaps he was at Crawford Park representing Presbytery for this service of Dedication.

H.B Campbell was born in 1891 in Wentworth County north of Hamilton Ontario, and served as a Gunner in the First World War. He met Grace MacLennan Grant when they were classmates at Queen’s University in Kingston. They married in 1919 and Grace Campbell went on to become a distinguished Canadian author. Rev. Campbell earned his Doctor of Divinty from the United Theological College in Montreal. The couple had three sons, two of whom were killed in action in World War II. Over the course of his career, Rev. Campbell served congregations in Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec. He passed away in 1976.

If you look at the hymns chosen for the services in the bulletin above, you will notice they have mysterious names like “Morecombe” and “Maryton”. As I understand it, these names are a way of identifying tunes which may be used for several different texts. They are still indexed at the back of our current hymnbook. We are lucky enough to still have a copy of the 1930 United Church Hymnary which I believe is the book being referenced in the bulletin.
Hymn number 157, or “Morecombe” in the old hymnal, is titled The Holy Spirit, but it is essentially the hymn we call Spirit of God, Descend Upon my Heart (VU 378). The Processional Hymn is an oldie! It is based on the Scottish Psalter of 1650, and begins,

Ye gates, lift up your heads on high;
Ye doors that last for aye,
Be lifted up that so the King of Glory enter may.

With a bit of sleuthing, we could reconstruct a good part of those services, though I guess the sermons are lost to the sands of time.

Amy