The organ was virtually in the family because my father, the contact lens specialist Frank Dickinson, had been a church organist from well before I came on the scene. I went to The Leys School, Cambridge, on a music scholarship, and the Director of Music, Hugh Davis, thought it would be a good idea if I learnt the organ. Then I was able to play for chapel and after that I followed in his footsteps as Organ Scholar of Queens’ College, Cambridge. Playing the organ works of Bach was a revelation. When I was a school prefect, with more freedom, I sometimes went to play the chapel organ during the night in my dressing-gown. I also started to compose. There was nothing worth preserving so I later burnt everything – unwisely as it turned out – but I did use what I remembered of a fanfare opening an Introduction and Fugue for organ, written at school, in my orchestral piece Merseyside Echoes (1988), commissioned by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. This commemoration of 1960s Beatles songs (not quoted of course but in imitation) was a strange final destination for part of an organ work.

One of the first pieces I wrote after becoming Organ Scholar at Queens’ was A Cambridge Postlude (1953). It now seems close to the English cathedral tradition apart from a bluesy syncopated figure in the pedal part (Ex. 18).

The Postlude on Adeste Fideles (1954) is a toccata with the tune of ‘O come all ye faithful’ in the manuals and also in long notes in the pedal. It has been in print since 1964 and is quite often played at Christmas services.

Three Preludes on Songs 46, 20 and 34 by Orlando Gibbons (1954/5) are in a different category since they have never been published and cannot have been performed for fifty years. I showed them to Jennifer Bate when she was planning her recording, and she wanted to include them. They stem from the start of the early music revival at Cambridge and from my admiration for Gibbons.