John Jeffreys (04/12/1927 - 03/09/2010), an English composer, a multi-talented song composer whose sensitive, gentle settings of English poetry have recently found favour with distinguished singers including Ian Partridge, James Gilchrist and Jonathan Veira. The musical climate in the 1970s was not sympathetic to a composer of such traditional bent, and, disheartened, Jeffreys destroyed much of his work. However, in 1983 he chanced upon four reels of tape recordings made in 1966, and reconstructed most of the songs on them. Jeffreys was born in Thanet, Kent, the youngest of three sons with Welsh parents. His father was a Congregational minister. However, church music, despite a late-flowering interest in organ music, did not figure greatly in his output as a composer. His earliest literary inspiration came from the poetry in his father's library, and his early musical inspiration came from his mother, "who was blessed with a soprano voice capable of singing intensively quietly".