In 1941, when Howells was acting organist at St John’s College, Cambridge, he attended a tea party hosted by Eric Milner-White, the Dean of King’s College (and the founder of the famous Christmas Festival of Lessons and Carols). It was there he encountered Boris Ord (Director of Music at King’s College) and Patrick Hadley (organist of Gonville and Caius College). In a moment of convivial challenge, the three men bet Howells a guinea that he could not compose a suitable canticle setting for the King’s College Choir.
Howells rose to the occasion with remarkable success, producing a setting of the Te Deum. He later wryly remarked that it was ‘the only Te Deum to be born of a decanal bet.’ Encouraged by this triumph, Howells continued to create other settings: the Jubilate for Mattins in 1944 and the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis for Choral Evensong in 1945. In 1956, he revisited these works for his setting of the Office of the Holy Communion, known as the Collegium Regale (Latin for King’s College).
Paul Spicer, a distinguished former pupil of Howells, extolled the Collegium Regale settings, observing that ‘one guinea kickstarted music for the Anglican Church into a whole new phase of existence.’ Upon their debut, the Collegium Regale Te Deum and Collegium Regale Jubilate were highly