Martin Neary obit

Martin Neary obituary: controversial musician

Organist at Princess Diana’s funeral who was sacked from his role at Westminster Abbey dies aged 85 

He was not on the list.

The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997, precipitated a highly charged funeral at Westminster Abbey. Martin Neary, the organist and director of music for almost a decade, was heavily involved in the planning. Many of his 24 choristers were the same age as Prince Harry and at their first rehearsal Neary told them to think how they would feel if their own mothers had died in the same circumstances.

The music included Libera Me from Verdi’s Requiem, John Tavener’s Song for Athene and the hymn I Vow to Thee, My Country. At the last minute Elton John’s arrangement of Candle in the Wind was included with Neary’s blessing. The high standard of music was, by common consent, a highlight of this emotionally charged occasion. “Martin Neary deserves greatest credit for the musical splendour of the service,” Anthony Payne, the composer, wrote in The Independent.

Neary, known in the bitchy world of choral music as Dreary Neary, was seen by some as an austere and strait-laced musician. “No prizes for boys without their hair combed,” was a typical opening gambit at the daily 8.30am choir practice. “And no prizes for boys who won’t look up.” Nevertheless, he set superlative standards as a choirmaster and an organist. A 1964 Times review described his “splendid performance” and “painstaking regard for textural clarity” in a recital at St Margaret’s, Westminster.

Possibly the music at Diana’s funeral was too successful. Six months and one royal honour later Neary and his wife, Penny, the abbey’s concerts secretary, were abruptly dismissed by Wesley Carr, the dean of Westminster Abbey, in a case that even Anthony Trollope would have struggled to satirise. The accusation was that they had been making “secret profits” and had failed to inform the abbey of their extracurricular activities.

The reality was that they had established a limited company to handle the business side of the music, including concerts, choir tours and recordings, an arrangement that had been accepted by the previous dean. They had also paid themselves a small “fixing fee” from the profits for the organisational work involved, standard practice in the music industry.

Poorly advised they may have been, but it was unclear how “secret” Neary Music Ltd was, given the many references to it in correspondence and the high profile of the choir’s external engagements, while the amounts involved were only a few thousand pounds. The couple’s friends rallied round. Cherie Booth QC gave legal advice; Frank Field, the MP for Birkenhead, raised the matter in parliament; and John Gummer, Neary’s old university friend, wrote newspaper articles. Parents, choristers and members of the public signed a petition calling for their reinstatement.

Penny later told how after Diana’s funeral she had noticed a “chilliness” towards her husband, while no one from the abbey congratulated him on his being appointed Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order, a personal honour from the Queen. “I suppose I should have seen the signs,” she said at the time. “There was definite jealousy because of the prominence of the music.”

The abbey’s status as a “royal peculiar” meant that Neary’s only recourse was an unprecedented appeal directly to Elizabeth II. She delegated the matter to the lord chancellor, who in turn appointed a retired law lord with the exquisitely Trollopian name Lord Jauncey of Tullichettle.

After a 12-day hearing and legal costs estimated at more than £600,000, Jauncey ruled that Carr’s actions were justified and that the Nearys’ actions had “fatally undermined” the relationship of trust with the abbey. However, he drew attention to the abbey’s hitherto “apparent lack of interest” in the arrangements and pointedly noted that its disciplinary procedures “must score gamma minus on the scale of natural justice”.

Neary was soon inundated with alternative musical offers, though he chose to spend several years in “what you might call agreeable exile”, largely in the US. He returned to Britain in a blaze of glory, playing Bach’s bone-shaking Toccata in D minor on the newly restored Royal Albert Hall organ at the First Night of the 2004 Proms. He was then joined by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin for an over-the-top arrangement of the Fugue in what one critic described as a “swaggering performance”.

Martin Gérard James Neary was born to a church-going family in Hackney, northeast London, during an air raid in 1940. He was the son of Leonard Neary, an accountant for Eagle Star Insurance and an amateur musician, and his French wife, Jeanne (née Thébault), and is survived by his younger sister, Denise. In summer 1944 he was evacuated to Leeswood, north Wales, where he started school.

Back in London he became a chorister of the Chapels Royal, which involved singing at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, for the christening of Prince Charles in 1948, and at the ceremony in Westminster Hall to mark the beginning of the lying in state of George VI in 1952. The following year he sang at Elizabeth II’s coronation, an event he remembered as lengthy: “We were given glucose tablets to get us through.” The previous night the choristers were billeted in sleeping bags on the floor of the chapel at St James’s Palace. “I trust this was the first and last time that pillow fights were held in the chapel,” he wrote in a reminiscence for The Times 50 years later.

At City of London School he was a contemporary of Mike Brearley, the future England cricket captain, and by 1958 was organist of St Mary’s, Hornsey Rise. An organ scholarship took him to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read theology and music. He then took an unusual step for one so steeped in the Anglican choral tradition: a conducting scholarship in the US with Erich Leinsdorf at Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Back in Europe he had organ lessons with André Marchal in France and joined St Margaret’s, Westminster, from where the ten-strong Martin Neary Singers emerged, sometimes singing grace for Ted Heath’s dinner parties in Downing Street.

Neary met Penelope Warren, daughter of Dame Josephine Barnes, the pioneering obstetrician, while accompanying the Saltarello Choir, of which she was treasurer, at a concert in Godalming, Surrey. They were married at St Margaret’s in April 1967 and she later became an administrator with the Royal School of Church Music (RSCM). She survives him with their daughters, Nicola, a hospital consultant, and Alice, a cellist, and their son, Thomas, who is severely autistic and has lived in specialist care homes since the age of eight. “When we found out, John Taylor, the Bishop of Winchester, came to see us with his wife and said something I’ve never forgotten. He said that every opal has a flaw and it is its imperfection that gives it its beauty,” Neary said.

He had been appointed organist and master of the music at Winchester in 1972, when still 31. There was soon a buzz around the cathedral music thanks to his productive relationships with composers such as Tavener and Jonathan Harvey, whose first church opera, Passion and Resurrection, he commissioned and premiered in 1981. On six occasions he was director of the Southern Cathedrals Festival and in 1985 Andrew Lloyd Webber flew the cathedral choir to New York to take part in the premiere of his Requiem with the tenor Plácido Domingo.

Neary applied and was interviewed for the Westminster Abbey post in 1980, but lost out to Simon Preston (obituary, May 23, 2022). Preston quit after six years, telling friends that he found the atmosphere impossibly stifling, and this time Neary was successful. Things went well for the first decade, with successful recordings and recitals, plentiful work for the BBC and the 1995 Henry Purcell Tercentenary celebrations, a tribute to his illustrious predecessor. He was also twice president of the Royal College of Organists, though in 1992 he was criticised in an unsuccessful employment tribunal brought by a former tenor.

Things began to change after Carr’s appointment as dean in 1997. According to a friend of the Nearys, at their first meeting Carr told his director of music, “I sacked my last organist, you know?”, a reference to his role in the dismissal of the organist at Bristol Cathedral. The Nearys’ dismissal meant the loss of their beautiful grace-and-favour home in Little Cloister. They moved to a pretty Victorian house in Fulham, west London, which they had bought to provide an income for their retirement. “Even so, if it hadn’t been for the money our supporters gave so generously, we wouldn’t be living in this house,” Neary said of their near-ruinous legal bills.

He spent the following years largely in the US, including as conductor of the Roman Catholic Paulist Boys Choir in Los Angeles and director of music at the city’s First Congregational Church. Gradually he returned to England, deputising on Sunday mornings for parish churches, notably St Michael’s, Barnes, and accompanying Alice in her cello recitals. He remained a lifelong follower of cricket and named his recent memoir, published by the RSCM, Time to Declare: My Life in Church Music (2025). His 70th birthday was marked by a Times crossword with solutions that included his name, age and music connections.

As for his unpleasant departure from Westminster Abbey, Neary insisted that he bore no grudges. “What would be the point?” he said. “I’m only grateful that we found the strength to get on with our lives. And some of that strength came from having to deal with tougher challenges than the dean of Westminster.”

Martin Neary LVO, organist, was born on March 28, 1940. He died from complications of Parkinson’s disease on September 27, 2025, aged 85