despite Howells' frequent infidelities, and produced two children, Ursula (1922–2005), later an actress, and Michael (1926–1935). In the same year he joined the staff of the Royal College of Music, where he was to remain until 1979. Among his pupils were Robert Simpson, Gordon Jacob, James Bernard, Paul Spicer, Madeleine Dring, and Imogen Holst. The post at the RCM, which from 1925 he combined with the position of Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School, and frequent work as a competition adjudicator, was to reduce the amount of time he could devote to composition; but he continued to write orchestral and chamber music, including the string quartet In Gloucestershire (originally written 1916, but rewritten in whole or in part several times and not reaching its final form until the 1930s), the overture Merry Eye (1920) and the second Piano Concerto (1925). The first performance of the last named work occasioned a demonstration in the concert hall from a hostile critic. Howells, always over-sensitive to criticism, withdrew the work and produced few significant compositions for several years. Howells' friend and fellow composer, Martin Sumpter, encouraged this temporary hiatus from composing large scale works. One exception was Lambert's Clavichord (1928), a rare example of a composition by a 20th-century composer for that instrument. It was inspired by a clavichord lent to Howells by his friend Herbert Lambert, an instrument maker and photographer based in Bath. Several other major compositions written around this time, however, remained unperformed, notably an a capella Requiem to English words written in 1932, and a choral work, A Kent Yeoman's Wooing Song, written the following year. Family tragedy and the war In September 1935 Howells' nine-year-old son Michael contracted polio during a family holiday, dying in London three days later. Michael was buried in the churchyard of St Matthew's Parish Church in Twigworth, Gloucestershire. Howells was deeply affected and continued to commemorate the event until the end of his life. At the suggestion of his daughter Ursula he sought to channel his grief into music, and over the next three years composed much of the large-scale choral work which was eventually to become Hymnus Paradisi, drawing on material from the still unpublished Requiem of 1932. This remained, in Howells' words, "a personal, almost secret document" until 1950. Other commemorative works written around this time include the Concerto for Strings (written in 1938), the slow movement of which