Rise and hear, the Lord is speaking 

Howard Charles Adie Gaunt (1902-1983) wrote this hymn.  It was published in A&M New Standard in 1983.  Gaunt,  educated at Tonbridge School in Kent and at King’s College, Cambridge (B.A. 1925, M.A. 1927), was a well-known cricketer as a young man. [I am unable to understand this sentence about him: “in 1921 he scored 177 in Tonbridge's second innings out of 274 made while he was at the wicket.”]  At King’s he played both hockey and tennis for the University.  For most of his adult life Gaunt was a schoolmaster, first at King Edward's School, Birmingham and at Rugby School, and in 1937 as Headmaster at Malvern College.  Gaunt studied theology at Cuddesdon College in the Diocese of Oxford.  In 1953 he left Malvern to move to Winchester College; the next year he was ordained a deacon and in 1955 a priest.  He left Winchester College in 1963 to become Sacristan of Winchester Cathedral, where he was appointed Precentor in 1967 and made a Canon of the Cathedral in 1966.

Gaunt wrote Two Exiles (1946), a memoir of Malvern College in the second world war when it was taken over by the British government for radar research.  He oversaw the move, first to Blenheim Palace, and then to Harrow School, and finally, in 1946, back to Malvern.  He wrote hymns throughout his career, publishing some in the Rugby School Hymn Book in 1932 and later contributing to both 100 Hymns for Today (1969) and More Hymns for Today (1980); he was thus part of the “hymn explosion”  of the mid- and late-20th century, along with Fred Pratt Green, Timothy Dudley-Smith and others.

The tune “Sussex” is one of the many hymn tunes based on folksongs that Ralph Vaughan Williams included in the English Hymnal.  The folk tune was sung to words called “The Royal George,” about the sinking of the ship of the line, the Royal George, in 1782.  (Not to be confused with the 20-gun sloop of the same name built at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Kingston in 1809.)  Anchored off Portsmouth, she was intentionally rolled so maintenance could be performed on the hull, but the roll became unstable and out of control; the ship took on water and sank. More than 800 people died.  RVW first heard this song from a fisherman, Robert Hurr, in Suffolk in 1910, but a version he heard later from Peter Verrall in Monk’s Gate, Sussex, is closer to the hymn tune.

Vaughan Williams collected 800 folk songs in the years 1903-1913; he and the collector Cecil Sharp both joined the Folk Song Society, and it was Sharp who suggested to Percy Dearmer that Vaughan Williams should be asked to be the musical editor of the projected new English Hymnal.   Approximately forty of the hymn tunes in the book are adapted from folk songs.  The tune “Sussex” was first composed for the text “Father hear the prayer we offer” by Love Maria Willis, a Boston Unitarian.