Catherine Winkworth was an English hymnwriter and educator. She translated the German chorale tradition of church hymns for English speakers, for which she is recognized liturgically by The Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She also worked for wider educational opportunities for girls, and translated biographies of two founders of religious sisterhoods. When 16, Winkworth appears to have coined a once well-known political pun, peccavi, "I have Sindh", relating to the British occupation of Sindh.
Early life
Catherine Winkworth was born on 13 September 1827 at 20 Ely Place, Holborn on the edge of the City of London. She was the fourth daughter of Henry Winkworth, a silk merchant. In 1829, her family moved to Manchester, where her father had a silk mill and which city figured in the Industrial Revolution. Winkworth studied under the Rev. William Gaskell, minister of Cross Street Chapel, and with Dr. James Martineau, both of them eminent British Unitarians. Urban historian Harold L. Platt notes that in the Victorian period "The importance of membership in this Unitarian congregation cannot be overstated: as the fountainhead of Manchester Liberalism it exerted tremendous influence on the city and the nation for a generation." She subsequently moved with the family to Clifton, near Bristol. Her sister Susanna Winkworth was also a translator, mainly of German devotional works.
Chorale tradition
Catherine Winkworth spent a year in Dresden, during which time she took an interest in German hymnody. Around 1854, she published her book Lyra Germanica, a collection of German hymns which she had chosen and translated into English. A further collection followed in 1858. During 1863, she published The Chorale Book for England, which was coedited by the composers William Sterndale Bennett and Otto Goldschmidt. In 1869 she followed this with Christian Singers of Germany. According to The Harvard University Hymn Book, Winkworth "did more than any other single individual to make the rich heritage of German hymnody available to the English-speaking world." Four examples of translations by her hand are published in The Church Hymn Book 1872.
According to the Encyclopedia of Britain by Bamber Gascoigne, it was Catherine Winkworth who, learning of General Charles James Napier's ruthless and unauthorised, but successful campaign to conquer the Indian province of Sindh, "remarked to her teacher that Napier's despatch to the governor-general of India, after capturing Sindh, should have been Peccavi". She sent her joke to the new humorous magazine Punch, which printed it on 18 May 1844. She was then sixteen years old. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations attributes this to Winkworth, noting that it was assigned to her in Notes and Queries in May 1954. The pun has usually been credited to Napier himself. The rumour's persistence over the decades led to investigations in Calcutta archives, as well as comments by William Lee-Warner in 1917 and Lord Zetland, Secretary for India, in 1936.
