About
English organist, choral trainer, and composer affectionately nicknamed Doc H by his choristers and best remembered today for his Anglican church music.
Before Fame
He became a chorister at Holy Trinity, Tulse Hill. At the age of 14, he took up a "flexible" position as assistant organist at St David's Cathedral in Wales under Herbert Morris, followed at 16 by a scholarship to the Royal College of Music.
Trivia
His most famous works are two anthems for unaccompanied double choir, 1925's "Faire is the heaven," a setting of Edmund Spenser's poem "An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie," and 1959's "Bring us, O Lord God," a setting of a poem by John Donne.
Family Life
He was born in Fulham, London and became a chorister at Holy Trinity, Tulse Hill. He married Kathleen Doris Carter in 1913 and they had two daughters. She had suffered from deafness since 1925, but in the early 1960s her hearing was partially restored. She died in 1968. Harris died at the age of 90 five years later.
Associated With
He was involved in the musical education of the teenage Princesses Elizabeth II and Margaret Rose, who spent the wartime period at Windsor Castle. Every Monday he would direct madrigal practice in the Red Drawing Room at Windsor, where the two Princesses sang alongside four of the senior choristers.
