It's hard to better traditional hymns when it comes to remembering the dead

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/17/should-atheist-funerals-avoid-hymns

Version 0 of 1.

More foreign tourists visit London than any other city in the world – 16.8 million last year – though according to the young barman in the Old Bell Tavern, not many of them get as far as the bottom end of Fleet Street. "It's a shame," he said. "There's so much history in this part of town, but they never get east of Covent Garden other than on a bus to St Paul's." It was certainly very quiet in the Old Bell, but that was to be expected at 11am on a Monday. I was the only customer. I ordered a coffee in the hesitant way that comes from not quite believing pubs actually serve it.

"Busy day ahead?" asked the barman. "Not really," I said and explained about the memorial service at St Bride's, the so-called journalists' church that lies a few yards up the lane from the Old Bell's back door. "No newspapers in Fleet Street now," said the barman, and we agreed that this was a pity, though he didn't look old enough to remember a time when things were otherwise; when, for example, subeditors drank beer and smoked pipes and came flooding into pubs such as the Bell every night after the first edition had gone to press, to talk amiably until last orders or, if on the late shift, return upstairs earlier to prepare editions two, three and four; each and every subeditor knowing how many points made a pica and that to decimate means to kill one in 10. I didn't say any of this to the barman – who wants to be the pointing old sailor in the Boyhood of Raleigh? – and in any case my friend soon arrived and we withdrew into a separate conversation, wondering who would turn up to Ron's memorial service and which hymns would be sung.

The steeple at St Bride's is 226ft high – the tallest steeple Christopher Wren ever built. If, at this point last Monday morning, an observer had climbed to the top with a spyglass, he would have seen individuals making their way through the little maze of alleys below until they at last converged in the church's courtyard, where to judge from their movements – the handshaking and the cheek-kissing – they seemed affected and sometimes surprised to see each other. We were mostly aged between 60 and 80. Beyond age, what we had in common was the experience (the luck, many would have said) of working for the Sunday Times between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, in the pre-Murdoch days when its vans still carried the slogan "One of the world's best newspapers" and its executives included Ron Hall, who co-founded the Insight team with Clive Irving and introduced investigative journalism to the serious press, freeing it from the popular tradition of headlines such as VICAR DENIES WEEKEND IN CARAVAN.

We sat in our pews to remember him. The vicar blessed, the choir sang Fauré and Mozart beautifully and helped us through the hymns. The actual remembering was more problematic: by turning himself into a legend of Yorkshire gruffness, Ron had left behind few endearing personal details other than the surprise (if you got to know him a little better) that he was not quite as gruff as his verdict on your copy, usually "Beta-minus", would suggest. It was easier to recall his considerable gifts and achievements as an editor. Ron did write – The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, written with Nick Tomalin, is a permanent addition to the list of the great sea stories. But getting the best out of other people's writing was his true forte. As Harry Evans, the paper's then editor, wrote in a message read out at the service, much of his work remained invisible: "Only a handful of people in the trade could know how often his intellect and his dexterity could turn straw into gold. He would edit out unsupported assertions, impose structure, clarify tendentious writing."

His demand for clarity and comprehension had enhanced many of the pieces that established the paper's reputation for inquiry and campaigns – Rachman, Philby, the Crossman Diaries, thalidomide.

After listening to this and feeling, I suppose, in some way pleased to have been part of it, we went for the wine and sandwiches that had been laid on at the branch of El Vino near Blackfriars station. It was a reunion: a reunion that would be of an increasingly regular kind, but delightful in spite of its omens. In the course of a working life, one workplace is usually remembered more than the rest as the one that changed and shaped you, and where the friendships formed have lasted. Stories began to be told, some faintly macabre. A woman I hadn't seen for 20 years revealed she'd been educated at a boarding school for the children of missionaries, known as "the Cannibals' Larder". Ron's niece, who, like Ron, was from Sheffield, told me that his first father-in-law was a buffer, meaning that he buffed silver plate until it shined, for companies such as Mappin & Webb. His lungs had filled with silver dust. "We used to tell him, eh you, you're worth more dead than alive." I could hear her uncle in that stubborn humour. And so, death in the midst of life, our gathering ended.

One of the hymns at Monday's service was Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, and I've found myself singing it at odd moments ever since. "Dear lord and father of mankind/Forgive our foolish ways/ la la la la la la [for many lines]/ Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire/O still, small voice of calm." The stirring tune is by Hubert Parry and the words by the American poet, Quaker and essayist John Greenleaf Whittier, who was one of slavery's leading abolitionists. But he didn't write the verses as a hymn. They have their origins as the last six stanzas of an 18-stanza poem that Whittier composed under the title The Brewing of Soma, which even by the standards of high-minded 19th-century America has a strange target: an intoxicant, Soma, that oriental scholars believed was consumed in Vedic (ie long ago) India. Whittier paints an attractive picture of dissolution, including storms of "drunken joy" with drinkers high on "haschish". These are the specific "foolish ways" we need God's forgiveness, though Whittier suggests that Soma in one way or another is always with us. (More literally, Aldous Huxley made it the drug of choice in his Brave New World.)

An American Congregationalist made the poem fit for religious worship by simply lopping off all the wanton behaviour so thrillingly described at such length at the start. Not a single line has been changed of what's left. A brilliant piece of editing; a hymn fit for an editor.

The next day I went to a funeral in a crematorium set in the middle of a rambling and nicely unmanicured cemetery in West Norwood, south London. Nothing could have been more different: no Wren architecture, no choir, no hymns. Our friend Diana Garland had chosen some Ravi Shankar to open and some Spanish guitars to close, and in between readings from Herbert Read, William Blake and Fleur Adcock, who read her own poem. This might sound pretentious, but Diana was the least pretentious person you could ever meet. (In any case, she would have replied to the charge, "If you can't be pretentious when you're dead, darling, when can you be?") Her children, grandchildren and stepchildren spoke eloquently and insightfully about her life, and the entire congregation went back to her flat for food and drink.

It was a perfect send-off, and unlike Ron's, went untouched by any compromise with the Christian religion; I find it hard to believe he was a believer. But I missed the hymns and their opportunity for what you might describe as relatively unselfconscious participation. When all is told, hymns may be the Reformation's most lasting comfort to the secular world – not so much in what they say (see above), but in allowing us to help create their lovely music.