Leonard Nowell Fowles was an English organist and choirmaster, classical music composer, arranger, teacher, adjudicator and conductor, best remembered for his hymn tunes "Golders Green" and "Phoenix".
Background
Fowles was born on 6 October 1870, at Portsea Island near Southsea, Hampshire, to Helen Nowell and Albert Godwin Fowles. His father, a native of the Isle of Wight, was a highly regarded professor of music and a free church organist. His mother was born on Jersey, the Channel Islands.
Education
University of Oxford. Royal College of Music.
Career
His was a musical family. Fowles was raised in comfortable circumstances. Having mastered the keyboard and the violin, at the age of fourteen Fowles went to study at the Brussels Conservatory.
In 1887, he was awarded the Whitcomb Scholarship for solo violin at the Royal College of Music.
He studied at Oxford in the years 1896-1899. In November 1899 Fowles became the youngest Doctor of Music in the United Kingdom.
Fowles served as president of the Free Church Musician"s Union in 1917, and as an examiner in the London College of Music from 1908 through 1920. In September 1899, Fowles was married to the former Ethel Hattie Phillips.
He died on 18 January 1939 and was buried 24 January 1939, in Twickenham Cemetery, Richmond, London, Section, G. Grave, 151 fourth row.
The epitaph on his gravestone states, "Music was his life".
Views
Quotations:
"A Short Litany of Intercession for our Soldiers and Sailors".