Researching William Cole

Cole went to Saint Olave's Grammar School, where he in fact almost lost his scholarship there because 'his music was getting in the way of his studies'. He also studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he won the Stewart Macpherson Prize in 1933. His appointment in 1930 as organist at St Martin's Church, Dorking and music master at Dorking County School a year later, led to his conducting local choirs at the neighbouring Leith Hill Musical Festival, founded by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The two became close friends and Vaughan Williams played the organ at Cole's first marriage in 1933.

The war years were spent at the Air Ministry, though he continued his choral conducting in his spare time, and in 1945 he succeeded to the Chair of Harmony and Composition at the Royal Academy of Music where he remained until 1962. While there, he directed the People's Palace Choral Society from 1947–63 and succeeded Vaughan Williams as conductor of the Leith Hill Festival in 1954. By this time, Cole was an authority on the composer's music, having worked with him since pre-war days and been his assistant since 1947 - conducting the works that were not to Vaughan Williams' liking - and for the next twenty-three years the Festival went from strength to strength under Cole's leadership. He will, however, be best remembered in musical circles for his work as Master of the Music at the Queen's Chapel of the Savoy from 1954–94; during forty years of sustained work he trained the Savoy choir (the choirboys are also provided by Saint Olave's Grammar School) and composed many pieces for them - a Te Deum, Lord's Prayer and State Prayers (of which copies still exist in his handwriting), not to mention 'A Prelude on While Shepherd's Watched' for organ. He also gave an annual Bach organ recital, and this recital, along with two others, continues at the Savoy every summer.

Outside of music, Cole's main interest was stained glass, and largely as a result of his expertise in this field he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (FSA) in 1979. In 1993 he published a book entitled A Catalogue of Netherlandish and North European Roundels in Britain.

He published little, but left his manuscript volumes (over 100 of them) to the British Museum, where they have proved invaluable to people writing about the history of Cambridgeshire. He kept a diary between 1765 and 1770, and two volumes – one relating to a trip to France, and one to his time at Bletchley – were published in 1931.

A nineteenth-century biographer described Cole as "one of the most learned men of the eighteenth century in his particular line, and the most industrious antiquary that Cambridgeshire has ever had, or is likely to have", while the verdict of a contemporary, Professor Michael Lort, was "... with all his oddities, he was a worthy and valuable man".

Cole was born on November 20, 1919 to William Harrison Cole and Margaret O'Donovan-Rossa of Staten Island, New York. He was the younger brother of Rossa Willam Cole. His grandfather was the Irish Fenian leader Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa.

After military service in World War II, Cole took various jobs in the publishing industry, serving as publicity director at Alfred A. Knopf, publicity director and editor at Simon & Schuster, and publisher of William Cole Books at Viking Press. He was also a prolific writer and anthologist, editing and authoring over 75 books, as well as columns in Saturday Review. Many of his books were honoured by the American Library Association, including I Went to the Animal Fair: A Book of Animal Poems (named a notable book of 1958, and on the List of Notable Children's Books of 1940–1959), Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls: Poems (named a notable book of 1964), and The Birds and Beasts Were There: Animal Poems (honoured in 1965).

Cole's whimsical poetry often appeared in Light Quarterly and was widely anthologized, as in The Oxford Book of American Light Verse and various collections by Willard R. Espy.

Cole died in his Manhattan home, aged 80, in 2000. He was memorialized in a poem by Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Cole was born at Williamstown in the Barossa Valley, and was privately educated in Kapunda. He undertook his apprenticeship with the Kapunda Herald (alongside future parliamentary colleague William David Ponder) and The Register newspapers, before working as a printer in Adelaide. He was subsequently editor and proprietor of the Laura Standard for eighteen years from 1896. During his editorship of the Laura Standard, it became the first publication to publish verse by C. J. Dennis. Cole was Mayor of the Corporate Town of Laura from 1904 to 1910. He was also heavily involved in the Methodist church, serving as a lay preacher for 62 years and holding all possible offices in the church.

He was elected to the House of Assembly for the United Labor Party at the 1910 election, representing the electorate of Stanley. Following an electoral redistribution, he was elected unopposed in 1915 for the new seat of Port Pirie. He left the Labor Party for the new National Party in the 1917 Labor split over conscription. He was defeated by a Labor candidate when he ran for re-election at the 1918 election.

After leaving politics, he managed Ponders Advertising Agency in Adelaide until August 1937, when he retired due to failing health.

He was twice married: in 1887 to Alice Johnson (died 1914) and in 1920 to Eva A. Langsford.