A great many people across the English-speaking world will have encountered the work of my friend Michael Shaw, who has died of cancer aged 62, though only vicariously, in their hymn books, hidden beneath the copyright declaration "Thomas More Music".
Thomas More Music, a publishing venture run out of St Thomas More church in Manor House, north London, was largely his doing. Michael's great achievement was to bring together a number of musicians to compose hymns and settings for the revised version of the Catholic mass which emerged after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, and to publish it to acclaim in both the UK and the US.
The son of Kenneth and Edith Shaw, Michael was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, was educated in various places, finally by Jesuits in north London, and went to the Westminster diocesan seminary at Ware, Hertfordshire. After ordination in 1974, he worked with the liturgist Harold Winstone at the newly built St Thomas More church. It had been established by Cardinal John Heenan as a liturgy centre: avant-garde worship in the church above; liturgical advice dispensed from offices beneath.
Michael's success meant that the liturgy centre grew too big for its basement offices and moved to more spacious accommodation at Hendon. Losing its parochial setting, however, the centre no longer flourished. Michael withdrew, left the ministry in 1990 and married Gwen Walker that year. He put his publishing experience to good use, first working for others and eventually founding his own company, Matthew James Publishing, named after his two sons. Though ready to turn his hand to anything, his staple business was resources, especially catechetical resources, for schools and parishes, and printing reams of documents for Catholic bishops.
At his funeral Michael was described as a placid man. No one, said the eulogist, had ever seen him run. He was, it was added, also an epicure, to which I can testify. The last time we met was for lunch at Richard Corrigan's restaurant in Mayfair, where he had been having a cookery lesson, a present from Gwen. Not that he was a particularly fussy eater. Lively debates took place around him long into the night in many a local eatery, a particular favourite being what he called "the Sultan's armpit", a modest corruption of its Turkish name.
Gwen, his sons, his parents, two brothers and two sisters survive Michael. James will continue the publishing business.