William Henry Draper

William Henry Draper was born at Kenilworth, Warwickshire, on December 19, 1855. Educated at Cheltenham College and Keble College, Oxford, he earned his M.A. and was ordained in the Church of England in 1880. His ministry included a curacy at St Mary's, Shrewsbury; incumbencies at Alfreton and Shrewsbury Abbey; and two decades as rector of Adel, near Leeds, from 1899 to 1919. He then served as Master of the Temple in London from 1919 to 1930.

Draper wrote and translated hymns, poetry, historical works, and religious studies. While at Adel he prepared a free English versification of Francis of Assisi's Canticle of the Creatures for a children's Whitsuntide procession. Draper later remembered only that he had written it between 1906 and its first publication in The Public School Hymn Book in 1919. His version reshaped the medieval canticle for English congregational singing rather than translating it literally, and it added an explicitly Trinitarian doxology.

Among Draper's other hymn texts are “In Our Day of Thanksgiving” and “We Love God's Acre Round the Church.” He died at Clifton, Bristol, on August 9, 1933. His enduring place in hymnody rests chiefly on the paraphrase that became “All Creatures of Our God and King.”