Rosamond Eleanor Herklots

Rosamond Eleanor Herklots (1905–1987) was a British hymn writer, poet, teacher, secretary, and churchwoman whose work belongs to the renewal of English-language hymnody in the mid-twentieth century. She was born at Masuri in northern India on June 22, 1905, into a British missionary family. Educated at Leeds Girls’ High School and the University of Leeds, where she studied French, she also completed teacher training and taught for a short period, including service in Palestine around 1930.

Herklots later trained as a secretary and worked for Unilever before and during the Second World War. During the London air raids she helped entertain children sheltering in Underground stations. After the war she spent many years as secretary to a physician specializing in spina bifida and later worked at the head office of the Association for Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus. She lived for decades in southeast London and belonged to St Mary’s Church, Plaistow, Bromley, a Church of England parish. She also sang contralto with the Alexandra Choir.

Her hymn writing began around 1940. She produced more than seventy hymns, although relatively few achieved wide publication. Her work is marked by biblical directness, attention to ordinary Christian life, and concern for the ethical consequences of prayer and discipleship. Representative texts include Forgive Our Sins as We Forgive, In Bethlehem a Newborn Boy, and Lord God, by Whose Creative Might. She also prepared a small collection titled Hymns of Hope and wrote devotional poetry and dramatic religious material.

In the 1968 Hymns for Britain competition, two of Herklots’s entries reached the finals and were sung on television. She remained associated with the wider British hymn-writing community and was remembered by the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland among those who helped sustain its work in the twentieth century. Herklots died in Greenwich, London, on July 21, 1987.