Forever a chorister

The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death

- Sarah Sands

The vocation of a chorister, although of course inferior to that of a priest in ministerial power, is yet higher than that of a priest, so far as the odour of sanctity peculiar to childhood imparts a glory to the office which appertains to no other," wrote a fellow of Magdalen College Oxford in an 1848 manual called The Devout Chorister.

My early childhood was bookmarked by cathedral-choir services because my older brother, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, was a senior chorister at Canterbury Cathedral. My sister and I sat through the solemnity of it and then watched him play hopscotch on the flagstones in the cloisters. I still have a recording of Kit, aged nine, singing the page's verse in Good King Wenceslas.

When he died, aged 65, in February 2023, his fellow choristers sent their recollections. These included an account of Kit's extreme tidiness and care of his cassock. The image of angelic order was disturbed when they met many years later in the Bacchanalian haze of the Piers Gaveston Society. Most readers of COUNTRY LIFE will remember Kit as an exuberant, satirical cabaret singer, but, at heart and in his soul, he remained a chorister.

When I went to visit the composer and conductor Sir John Rutter, who had taught Kit at Cambridge, he told me, unexpectedly, that Kit was one of his most serious students, bright and sensitive. He gave an example of his acute study of sacred music. Sir John had playfully passed off one of his own pieces as a newly unearthed composition by Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924), the choral composer. The only person not fooled was Kit.

"You see," said Sir John, his eyes pools of light, "there is no such thing as an ex-chorister."

Former choristers would always wince if they saw a picture slightly askew-they understood the need for precision, for diction.