“My father had small Latin and still smaller Greek, but he was one of the best English Grammarians I ever knew,” wrote Mark Antony Lower, looking back on his childhood. “Every local event was chronicled by him in rhyme and printed in local newspapers.”

“Under the guidance of this good father, I learned the rudiments of useful knowledge, and was soon adept in most things that a young boy is capable of. Among the ‘accomplishments’, I learnt music and drawing so early that I cannot remember my first lessons in either science. I have not the slightest recollections of the hours when I learned my gamut and a certain facility in sketching from nature. This is I recollect, that I was a tolerable proficient on the flute and a sketcher before I was seven years old.”

“The singing of sacred music was also one of our family amusements and recreations and we frequently sang hymns set to music by my father himself. These summer evenings that we spent in the garden with our family, assisted by some musical neighbours and a few of the pupils, are a thing not easily disremembered.[4]  A crowd of rustic neighbours behind the garden wall formed a well-pleased audience and there we remained until the dews of nightfall warned us to retire to our family prayers and to our peaceful couches – each and all as tranquil and happy and as unmindful of tomorrow’s trials as ever the household of the Vicar of Wakefield could be.”

Who were the neighbours, who joined in making music on fine summer’s evenings or loitered behind the garden wall to listen? It is not possible to specify precisely which particular Chiddinglyers they were, but thanks to Richard Lower we can list, in considerable detail, every single one of his fellow parishioners in the year 1821. Included in that list must be those who were drawn by music to the Muddles Green School.