David Baker describes how music at Halifax Parish Church had been in decline until twenty-seven-year-old John Varley Roberts (1841–1920) was appointed in late 1868, and transformed the choir at Halifax from a small, mixed group of voices up in the west gallery with an outmoded organ to a choral establishment of some seventy male singers, robed and sitting in chancel stalls, capable of performing full choral services better than most cathedral foundations, and accompanied by a grand four-manual instrument.

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