Harry Bramma built the Southwark Cathedral choir into a nationally broadcast ensemble within two years of his appointment, spent nine years running the Royal School of Church Music, and published his memoir the year before he died. The memoir was called Not Half Bad. He died on 23 August 2026 in Chislehurst, England, at the age of 89.
Harry Wakefield Bramma was born on 11 November 1936 in Shipley, West Yorkshire, a mill town north of Bradford. He studied theology and music at Oxford University, including at Pembroke College, and came out of that training with the combination of liturgical knowledge and practical musicianship that the Church of England’s musical life required. He began his professional career as assistant organist at Worcester Cathedral in 1963, also teaching at the King’s School Worcester, the independent school attached to the cathedral close.
In 1978 he was appointed Organist and Director of Music at Southwark Cathedral, a post he held for eleven years. Southwark stands on the south bank of the Thames in Bankside, a short walk from London Bridge. As the mother church of the Diocese of Southwark, it carried significant civic and ecclesiastical weight in south London and beyond. When Bramma arrived, the cathedral’s musical programme needed development. He rebuilt the choir systematically, auditioned and trained singers with the rigour he had absorbed at Worcester and Oxford, and within two years the choir was broadcasting on BBC radio. That timeline was fast by the standards of cathedral music, where building a choir of concert quality typically takes much longer.
Southwark’s formal tribute after his death noted that he had been instrumental in raising the cathedral choir’s national profile, a recognition that looked back at what the choir had been when he arrived and what it had become by the time he left. His approach combined musical ambition with an understanding of the liturgy the choir was there to serve, and the combination proved effective.
In 1989 he was appointed Director of the Royal School of Church Music, the organisation that trains and supports church musicians across the Anglican Communion and in churches of other traditions worldwide. He held the post until 1998, concurrently serving as Director of Music at All Saints, Margaret Street, the Anglo-Catholic church in central London whose musical standards had been high since the Victorian era. Managing two demanding roles at once required the kind of organisational precision that his years at Southwark had developed.
He was a composer as well as an organist and director. His choral works were recorded and received favourable reviews in the specialist press. His arrangement of the Kontakion of the Departed, the Eastern Orthodox funeral hymn that has been adopted in various forms across Western church traditions, became one of his most widely performed works; the arrangement found its way into the repertoire of choirs well outside the tradition for which it was written. He retired from the RSCM in 1998 and continued composing and writing in the decades that followed. His memoir, Not Half Bad: A Lifetime of Musical Development and Other Stories, was published by the RSCM in 2025, a year before his death. He was 89.