In Christ there is no East or West

This hymn was written for the theatrical production “Pageant of Darkness and Light” mounted in 1908 by the London Missionary Society as part of its celebration of “Orient in London.”  The pageant was co-designed by William Arthur Dunkerley using his pseudonym John Oxenham; he wrote the hymn as the conclusion of a presentation about India.

Dunkerley (1852-1941) was born in Manchester and educated there at Old Trafford school and Victoria University (now the University of Manchester).  He entered his family’s wholesale grocery business but soon turned to writing as a full-time employment.  Adopting the pseudonym John Oxenham (the name of a character in Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho) Dunkerley wrote verse and prose fiction (including several mystery novels).  He co-founded, and wrote for, The Idler, a general interest magazine, of which Jerome K. Jerome was an early editor.  He used a different pen name, Julian Ross, for some journalism, and he also wrote under his own name.  During the First World War Oxenham wrote several volumes of patriotic and morale-raising verse.  (The memorial verse at the entrance to Beaumont-Hamel Cemetery in France, “Tread softly here!  Go reverently and slow,” is by him.)  Dunkerley was a deacon and teacher in the Congregational Church.  Some of his other hymns are published in hymnals of non-liturgical churches.

“In Christ there is no East or West” first appeared in Bees in Amber: A Little Book of Thoughtful Verse, which Dunkerley self-published in 1913.  The hymn may have been prompted partly by the opening line of Tennyson’s Ballad of East and West (1889): “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”  But it is based on two of Paul’s letters: to the Christians in Galatia (3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”) and to those in Colossae (3:11 “Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.")  The hymn appeared in H. Augustine Smith’s Hymns of the Living Age (1925) with Alexander Reinagle’s tune “St Peter” and then in Percy Dearmer’s Songs of Praise (enlarged edition, 1931) without music

The tune "McKee" was published in a four-part arrangement for these words in 1939 by the African American baritone and composer Henry T. Burleigh, a lifelong advocate of black spirituals.  Burleigh’s adult musical training was in the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, where he was supported by the Director, Antonin Dvořák (who is said to have used some of the spirituals Burleigh sang for him in his “New World Symphony” and elsewhere).  The tune is named for Elmore M. McKee, the Rector of St George’s Episcopal Church in New York City where Burleigh was the soloist for 52 years.  Burleigh knew the tune from the spiritual “The angels changed my name,” a song from the repertoire of the Jubilee Singers published by J.B.T. Marsh in the previous century.  (He may also have known it in Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s piano arrangement in Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, published in Boston in 1905.)  According to C.V. Stanford the tune was an Irish one.