Harold Watkins Shaw, O.B.E., M.A., D.Litt., F.R.C.M.

Harold Shaw was born in Bradford on 3 April 1911, the only child of nonconformist parents. He attended Grange Road School, where his father taught geography, and in 1929 was awarded a scholarship to read history at Wadham College, Oxford. His love of music was developed through singing in chapel choirs and after graduating in 1932 he spent a year at the Royal College of Music, where he was encouraged to combine historical and musical studies. Thus was the future musicologist born, but years of routine teaching and educational administration lay ahead before he could devote more than his spare his time to academic work, though his qualities as a devoted and patient teacher should not be undervalued. After teaching in London he was for three years musical adviser to Hertfordshire County Council before moving Worcester College of Education as a lecturer. In 1948 he was appointed honorary librarian of Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley's choral foundation at St Michael's College, Tenbury, a post he held until the college closed and one which proved exceptionally rewarding. Shaw set to work to study the manuscripts under his care, one of which was Handel's conducting score for the first performance of Messiah in Dublin. He embarked on intensive research into the oratorio and its sources and in 1959 published his famous edition of the score, which is now in universal use. This was followed in 1965 by Textual and Historical Companion to Handel's Messiah, not only a superb work of scholarship but, gracefully written, a very good read for the knowledgeable layman. During his librarianship Shaw published editions of several other Handel works, notably the oratorio Theodora, which was used in the stage production at Glyndebourne in 1996. When the college was closed in 1985 Shaw, in his capacity as a governor, undertook complex negotiations with the Charity Commissioners to ensure that Ousley's generous endowment (the Ousley Trust) was made available `for the purposes of promoting and maintaining to a high standard the choral services of the Church of England'. (Mindful of his nonconformist upbringing, Shaw always said that he "crept under the umbrella of Anglicanism".) It was also largely through Shaw's tenacious negotiations with the executors of Ouseley's two conflicting wills that all the manuscripts in this magnificent collection were transferred to the Bodleian. His long preoccupation with Ouseley was recorded in Sir Frederick Ouseley: A Chapter in the History of English Church Music and Ecclesiology, published in 1988. Most of Shaw's extensive editions of church music were published under the auspices of the Church Music Society, of which he was its first honorary general editor from 1956-70 and its chairman from 1979-87. While at Worcester, Shaw was closely associated with the Three Choirs Festival and published its history in 1954. After retirement from his lectureship at Worcester he became Keeper of the Parry Room of the Royal College of Music, substantially reorganizing the collection and establishing the Room as a research centre. Retirement from this post in 1981 enabled him to complete the magnum opus which had occupied him intermittently for many years and The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of England and Wales from c.1538, came out in 1991, when Shaw was eighty. His editions of music by Tallis, Blow, Purcell, Byrd and Tomkins laid the textual foundations on which the now flourishing Early Music movement was built, though they did not always receive critical acceptance. Shaw was a staunch supporter of the projected Handel House Museum in Brook Street, to which he donated his facsimile of Messiah and which, at the time of his death on 8 October 1996, seemed to be within sight of realization.