Talk about bleak midwinter. Apart from the words of Christina Rosetti’s carol ringing in my head — as they must be for many people this week — I found myself in the middle of the real thing, in the form of snow on the Cotswold hills along the Oxfordshire/ Gloucesteshire border, when I set off to buy my Christmas goose from a farm near my home in Milton-under-Wychwood.

As inveterate church crawlers, my wife Anne and I combined the journey with a quick visit to the lovely church of St Lawrence at Wyck Rissington where, with the carol still singing away to itself in the back of my mind (as carols will do), we came across the plaque on the organ informing us that Gustav Holst, composer of the tune for In the Bleak Midwinter, had been organist at the church in 1892-3.

He was choirmaster there, too, though still only 18. It was his first paid job and it kindled his interest in the English choral music tradition which, ever since the Reformation, had remained far stronger in this country than on the continent. He was born not far away in Cheltenham, where there is a large bronze statue of him; and his birthplace at 4 Pittville Road (now renamed Clarence Road) has, since 1974, been a museum dedicated to his life and times.

His father Adolph von Holst was organist and choirmaster at All Saints Church in the northern Cheltenham parish of Pittville, a job he combined with that of music teacher. He married one of his piano students, Gustav Holst’s mother Clara, who died when Gustav was only eight.

The hills seemed alive with church music as we drove through the wintry landscape. Primitive Methodist chapels, many now private homes (similar to the one in which we live, as it happens) served to change the record on the brain for they reminded us that Hark the Herald Angels Sing was composed by Charles Wesley (1707-1788), who founded Methodism while an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford.

After the felling of Wychwood Forest in 1855-6, Methodists saw this area as fertile ground for missionary work among those inhabitants of the former forest who felt disaffected, but had nevertheless decided not to emigrate (as many did).

It is extraordinary how rich in English music and composers this area is, and the imaginary church music (luckily not sung out loud, as both of us have horrible voices) soon changed again: this time to Come Down, O Love Divine. Hopelessly lost in the Cotswold lanes we at last came across a signpost to Down Ampney, where Holst’s lifelong friend Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was born — and is buried — and after which he named the tune to that hymn. He was the son of the Vicar of Down Ampney. Exactly 100 years ago, in 1911, the Oxford Bach Choir, which has given so many Oxford people their first taste of choral music, gave the first performance of Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony. In his declining years, Vaughan Williams also composed his Oxford Elegy, based on texts from Matthew Arnold. Both Vaughan Williams and Holst were taught at the Royal College of Music (RCM) by Hubert Parry (1848-1918), who was Professor of Music at Oxford from 1900-1908. He composed the music for Jerusalem (words by Blake, of course) and Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. Personally, I could not help thinking of the line “Forgive our foolish ways” as we became more and more lost in the lanes. Any farther and we would have been in Elgar country beyond Broadway.

But back to Holst. After leaving Cheltenham Grammar School for Boys he failed to gain a scholarship to the RCM and found himself constantly short of money, bicycling around the villages near Cheltenham, often with his trombone strapped to his back.

The success of his operetta Lansdown Castle, performed at Cheltenham Corn Exchange, convinced his father that it was worth paying out good money for him to go to the RCM without a scholarship. He became director of Music at St Paul’s Girls’ School in 1907. A shy, retiring man, he was astonished at the success of the orchestral suite The Planets.

His great grandfather came to England from Riga, Latvia, in 1802, where he had been part of the large German-speaking population there. During the First World War he dropped the ‘von’ in his name by deed poll.

According to his daughter Imogen’s biography, he was asked to set the hymn I Vow to Thee My Country to music and was relieved to find that it fitted the Jupiter tune in The Planets.