Who was Donald Ford?

I'm due to play for a young singer tomorrow at the Dunedin Singing Competitions.  We've got half a dozen songs up our sleeves, so it's going to be a reasonably busy day.

One of the songs is a lovely piece called To Daffodils.  The words are by Robert Herrick and the music is by Donald Ford.  Herrick, of course, is a reasonably well-known poet from the 17th century, a vicar by calling and the writer of some 2,500 poems.   His career as a clergyman was interrupted for fourteen years during the English Civil War, and used the interim to write and publish some of his poetry.  His clergy status was restored in 1662, but it seems that much of the focus of his life resided in his poetic work, even though in his time he was not widely acknowledged.  He died an old man of 83.

There's a good deal known about Herrick.  Donald Ford, however, is a mystery.  A friend had thought that he'd written another song,  A Soft Day, which has a similar warmth and feeling, but it turns out this is by Charles Stanford.   Ford is credited with writing He is Tender with the Beasts, Nod, and Romance, to words by Wilfred Gibson, Walter de la Mare and Robert Stevenson respectively.   There's also a list of ten pieces that appear to be for children on this site which may or may not be by him, though it's probable it's the same composer.

Other than that he seems invisible.  I'd be really interested to find out more about him, but even Google seems flummoxed by this request.

The 'grandfather of NZ music' strikes again

1st day of my holidays, and I woke at something like 4.30 am. Eventually went back to sleep, but some visitors got up early, and so most of us were around by seven. Finally lack of sleep caught up with me and I went back to bed, only to be woken by some music on the radio.
It turned out to be the end of Douglas Lilburn's: Elegy in Memoriam Noel Newson. From where I was in bed listening, it sounded as though the words came from Shakespeare - I caught 'nothing shall afright thee' or some such, but the rest of it was so badly articulated that I couldn't get the detail at all.
More than that though was the almost perverse way in which the string accompaniment seemed to be at odds with the singer(s). The latter were chauntering along in a banal enough way - the melody line, typically of Lilburn, having virtually no melody - but the strings kept fluffling around doing some chordal stuff that seldom integrated with the singers. And at the end, they played a few desultory bars and pretty well gave up. Lilburn the great pioneer New Zealand composer shoots music in the foot again!
I can't find much out about this piece of music (the few references on Google all seem to go to broken links). To be fair, I'll see if I can track it down at the library and give it another shot. But what I heard this morning (even coming out of a deep sleep) was enough to make me think that I'm not going to be impressed.
Later: I've just found a small amount on the SOUNZ site. The last piece, as I thought, was to words by Shakespeare: Fear no more the heat o' the sun. Herrick, Blake and Herbert are the other three lyricists.