John Stafford Smith was christened in Gloucester Cathedral on 30 March 1750.  He was educated at the cathedral school where he became an accomplished boy-singer.  He was later accepted as a choir boy at the Chapel Royal, London and also studied under the famous Dr Boyce. 

By the 1770's he gained a reputation as an excellent composer and organist.  This led to his election as a member of the very select Anachreontic Society which boasted amongst its membership such persons as Dr Johnson, James Boswell, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Henry Purcell.

About 1780 Smith composed the music for the society's constitutional song entitled 'To Anachreon in Heaven' that was inspired by the sixth-century b.c. Greek lyric poet who wrote odes on the pleasures of love and wine.

J.S. Smith was successively a gentleman of the Chapel Royal, lay-vicar of Westminster Abbey and one of the organists at the Chapel Royal.  He also acted as organist at the Three Choirs Festival held at Gloucester in 1790.  He died in 1836 at the age of eighty-five, allegedly from a grape-pip lodged in his windpipe.

The song 'To Anachreon in Heaven' became very popular on both sides of the Atlantic following the establishment of several Anarchreontic Societies in America.

During the second year of the war of 1812 the British fleet made a strategic night attack on Fort McHenry which protected the city of Baltimore on the eastern seaboard of the United States. A local attorney, Francis Scott Key, had gone aboard a British warship in an endeavour to secure the release of an American prisoner.

Key was held on board ship so that he could not pass any prior information to the patriots ashore. Throughout the night he remained on deck watching the bombardment in which congreve rockets were used in an attempt to batter the fort into submission.

As dawn broke he saw, to his great surprise and delight, the huge American stars and stripes flag still flying over the badly damaged fort. He immediately penned a four verse poem to the tune composed by John Stafford Smith. It began:

Oh! say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there.
Oh! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

The poem was printed on handbills the next morning and distributed throughout Baltimore. The song became immediately popular and three months later it was played during the Battle of New Orleans. Although the American Army and Navy had long recognised 'The Star Spangled Banner' as the national anthem of the USA it was not until March 1931 that Congress officially adopted it as such.

Extract from Historic Gloucester by Phillip Moss, buy a copy here|

Interested in finding out more about John Stafford Smith and the city, why not take a Gloucester Historic City Walk, run by Gloucester Civic Trust.