by Peter Parker
Of all the composers who set Housman’s words, none was more obsessed by the idea of England and Englishness than Gurney. The second of the four children of a tailor, he was born in Gloucester in 1890. His background was modest and, to judge by their surviving letters, his parents’ education had been rudimentary. When his mother and father took Gurney to be christened, they had omitted to provide godparents, so the officiating vicar and his young curate were obliged to step in. This was a piece of extraordinary luck, since the curate, Alfred Cheesman, was a cultivated and well-read young man with a fondness for boys, and young Ivor soon became his protégé. It was Cheesman who introduced Gurney to poetry and who suggested that he should apply to join the cathedral choir at the age of ten, which meant that he would also be able to attend the adjoining King’s School on a scholarship.
Gurney subsequently became an articled pupil of the cathedral organist, Herbert Brewer, who was also a composer and a leading figure in the Three Choirs Festival. As a chorister and a King’s schoolboy, Gurney had been taken into the heart of Gloucester’s ancient history, and the palpable presence of the past accompanied him as he explored the surrounding streets: ‘Yet walking Gloucester History seems / A living thing and an intense’, he wrote in a poem of 1927. His father came from Maisemore, a small village upriver along the Severn, and every Sunday evening, weather permitting, would walk there to visit his mother, often taking his children with him on a round journey of some eight miles. In this way Gurney got to know the countryside as well as he already knew the city. As he grew older, he would go walking on his own or with friends such as F.W. (‘Will’) Harvey, a budding poet two years his senior who lived at Minsterworth, a Severnside village a few miles to the west of Gloucester, and Herbert Howells, another of Brewer’s pupils, who lived some nineteen miles downriver at Lydney.
Gurney was introduced to the poetry of Housman at the age of seventeen, when Alfred Cheesman gave him a copy of A Shropshire Lad. He must have been struck by Housman’s use of place-names, since these would become a notable feature of his own poetry; the difference was that Gurney knew intimately all the places he mentioned in his poems. But these names would similarly conjure up a lost world, particularly when, like the Shropshire Lad, Gurney was exiled from his western homeland in London, was looking out across the ruined landscapes of France and Belgium while serving as a private in the First World War, or was confined to an institution in the unlovely environs of Dartford in Kent. Within months of receiving A Shropshire Lad, Gurney had set his first Housman poem, ‘On your midnight pallet lying’, which has a distinctly, not to say rather too obvious, military piano accompaniment, but is nonetheless a considerable accomplishment for a seventeen-year-old. The following year, in May 1908, he asked permission to set ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ and ‘Is my team ploughing’. Housman, amused by the correspondent’s address, told Grant Richards: ‘Mr I.B. Gurney (who resides in Gloucester Cathedral along with St Peter and Almighty God) must not print the words of my poems in full on concert-programmes (a course which I am sure his fellow-lodgers would disapprove of); but he is quite welcome to set them to music.’
It would be some years before this happened. In the meantime, it was Gloucester’s turn in 1910 to host the Three Choirs Festival, during which Gurney and Howells attended the first performance of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. The piece may have had a mixed critical reception, but for Gurney it was a revelation, and the two young men were so excited that they couldn’t sleep afterwards and spent the rest of the night pacing the streets. They felt, they said, that ‘something of great importance had happened in English music’.
The following year Gurney won an open scholarship to the Royal College of Music. ‘Why does he bother?’ Brewer complained. ‘He can get all he wants here.’ This proved prescient because, although Gurney clearly benefited from his time at the RCM, Gloucestershire would always be the mainspring of both his music and his poetry. He enjoyed exploring the London streets and the River Thames, but never seemed at home in the capital. ‘For one thing the boy was wearing a thick, dark blue Severn pilot’s coat, more suggestive of an out-of-door life than the composition lesson with Sir Charles Stanford for which (by the manuscript tucked under his arm) he was clearly bound,’ a friend recalled. Gurney was already suffering from the nervous and digestive problems that would plague his life, and when in 1913 he experienced some sort of breakdown he was sent back to Gloucestershire to recuperate. Rather than stay with his parents, whose fraught relationship made their home less than restful, he was sent to Framinlode, on the banks of the Severn, to stay with a lock-keeper whose family he had known for several years. Part of his convalescence took the form of helping the lock-keeper load barges, mend boats, fish for eels and make hay, and his health eventually improved sufficiently for him to return to London and complete his studies. He continued to miss Gloucestershire. Lodging in Fulham, he recalled Barrow Hill, which rises a short distance from Framinlode: ‘lovely in itself, though tiny and probably not above 200 feet high’, it nevertheless gave
a view of the Forest of Dean, hills on the West, the whole broad Severn on the SW, Gloucestershire to the Southern Border to the S. And the whole line of Cotswolds on the S, SE and E. Likewise the Malverns on the North! Oh, what a place! Blue river and golden sand, and the blue-black hills – in fine weather of course.
London is worse than ever to bear after that.
Stanford, meanwhile, was doing his best to teach the young man composition. Although he numbered Vaughan Williams, Holst, John Ireland, Frank Bridge, Ernest Farrar and Arthur Bliss among his pupils, he said of Gurney: ‘Potentially he is the most gifted man that ever came into my care. But he is the least teachable.’ Gurney wrote some settings of Elizabethan poets, and although they would not be published as a cycle, he referred to them collectively as ‘the Elizas’. ‘I have done 5 of the most delightful and beautiful songs you ever cast your beaming eyes upon,’ he told Will Harvey with characteristic ebullience. ‘They are all Elizabethan – the words – and blister my kidneys, bisurate my magnesia if the music is not as English, as joyful as tender as any lyric of all that noble host.’ He would frequently talk of ‘the special Glory of English music’, and clearly saw himself as finding a place in that tradition.
In spite of being very far from A1 in the army’s fitness grading, Gurney attempted to enlist in the first month of the war, ‘driven’ to it, he later claimed, by the ‘appeals and scorn’ of an older woman friend. He was rejected because of his poor eyesight, but tried again in early 1915, by which time recruiting sergeants had become less fussy. He was accepted into the Reserve Battalion of the Gloucesters and began training at Northampton and Chelmsford, where, since some country recruits could not tell left from right, soldiers were issued with two bands to tie round their legs, one of hay and the other of straw, so that the drilling sergeant could call out ‘hay’ and ‘straw’ instead. As for many other soldiers, it was some comfort for Gurney to belong to his own county’s regiment, but even in Essex he felt homesick for the western landscape he so loved. ‘I suppose you are in Glostershire,’ he wrote enviously to Herbert Howells, ‘and soon will see apple blossom and the pear trees “praising God with sweetest looks”. Sometimes my heart aches for Framinlode and my little leaky boat; my gun and the ever changing Severn, now so full in Flood.’ Returning to Colchester after five days’ leave in September, he reported that ‘the beauty of my own county astounded and enchanted me more than ever […] Gloster’s delicate colours, long views and sea breezes are the whole breadth of England away. That soil bore me and must ever draw my dreams and for ever be home to me.’
He found little opportunity to write any music while serving in the army. ‘When I can lie quite still in joy by the side of some stream or in a meadow for an hour or more, then music will come easily and well,’ he wrote in October 1915 when embarkation for France was in prospect. ‘Not till then.’ In the meantime, he set about writing his own ‘balla
d of the Cotswolds, after Belloc’s “South Country”’, which echoes Housman:
When I am old and cannot bide
The grimy townships more,
When dreams and images will not
Assuage my longing sore,
I’ll shake their mire from my quick feet
And shut an alien door
And get me home to the dear West
Where men drive ploughing teams …
Gurney’s battalion was eventually posted to France in May 1916. He had spent his pre-embarkation leave bicycling round Gloucestershire, storing up images of familiar country scenes to sustain him in the future.
Conditions at the front made composing music not merely difficult but well-nigh impossible. Unable to perform the task himself, he encouraged Herbert Howells, who was prevented by ill health from joining up, to write music celebrating the English landscape. Learning that Howells intended to dedicate his 1916 Piano Quartet ‘To Chosen Hill and Ivor Gurney who knows it’, he wrote: ‘If you could write a Quartett [sic] inspired by Chosen, I can only conjecture how Framinlode would move you did you know it as I know it to be – the most magical and fascinating of places. Then Crickley Hill, a magnificent conception. Cranham, especially Portway; little Minsterworth, Redmarley, the noble Malvern road. Someday perhaps…’ For the most part, all Gurney could do at the front was to store up his impressions for later use: ‘This autumnal morning stirs in me all those thoughts which shall someday crystallize into the “English Preludes”,’ he wrote to his friend and patron Marion Scott. Meanwhile, he continued to encourage Howells: ‘I wait for the Violin Sonata clear fairly simple with the romantic slow movement singing of Western things. Show us Tintern and sunset across the Malvern and Welsh Hills. Make us see the one evening star among the trees.’ His own plan was to turn his attention to poetry instead, although this was intended as a temporary measure: ‘once in England and once with a healthy mind, I shall for ever chuck the Muse of Verse (if she was ever mine to chuck) and grind hard at Music.’
Gurney would in fact become as well known a poet as he is a composer. One of his most frequently anthologised war poems was written after news reached him in August 1916 that Will Harvey had failed to return from a patrol and was presumed dead. ‘Here I am beside a French canal,’ Gurney wrote, ‘watching the day, and remembering with an ache what Glostershire is in such a season as September, and with whom I usually spent the best of it.’ His poem written in memory of Harvey recalls those lost pre-war summers:
He’s gone, and all our plans
Are useless indeed.
We’ll walk no more on Cotswold
Where the sheep feed
Quietly and take no heed.
His body, that was so quick,
Is not as you
Knew it on Severn river
Under the blue
Driving our small boat through.
In the poem’s final stanza, the quick body is compared with the image Gurney now has in his mind of Harvey’s corpse, but this touching elegy proved premature. Harvey had in fact been captured and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp, where he would remain, safe but yearning for Gloucestershire, for the rest of the war.
The country names Gurney so often repeated in his letters also fill his first volume of poems, Severn and Somme (1917). Its title embodies the contrasts between what he often referred to as his ‘Western’ homeland (as in the title of his second Housman song cycle, The Western Playland) and the Western Front. ‘A burning love for Gloucester, Severn, and Cotswold shines through almost every poem of Mr Gurney’s, and it is expressed with the force and simplicity natural to so genuine a passion,’ wrote the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘The beautiful Cotswold names chime sweetly through the book like a bloom on the fragrant freshness of the verse.’ Much the same had been said of A Shropshire Lad, but Gurney chose place-names because they meant something to him personally rather than evoking by their sound an emblematic landscape. ‘I find a store of poetry, an accumulation of pictures – dead leaves, Minsterworth Orchards, Cranham, Crickley and Framinlode reach,’ he had written while still in England. ‘They do not merely mean intensely to me; they are me.’ Far from choosing place-names for their euphony, as Housman did, he chose them despite their lack of it: ‘You are right about Crickley Hill not sounding well,’ he wrote to Marion Scott, who had queried the use of the name in the last line of a poem. ‘Believe me, the view makes up for it, and I wrote from the viewpoint rather than the name.’ Perhaps he was right; the reviewer in the TLS singled out the line as an example of the love of Gloucestershire he or she so admired in the poems. It was perhaps inevitable that, referring to Will Harvey, whose first volume of poems had recently appeared under the title A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad, and through him back to Housman, the review of the book in the Sunday Times should appear under the headline: ‘Another Gloucestershire Lad’.
In spite of the conditions in which he found himself at the front, Gurney had not in fact abandoned music altogether, and managed to draft some songs. ‘By a Bierside’, setting words by John Masefield, was ‘written whilst lying on a damp sandbag in a disused trench mortar emplacement’. He also wrote ‘In Flanders’, setting words by Will Harvey that chimed with his own feelings for England:
I’m homesick for my hills again –
My hills again!
To see above the Severn plain,
Unscabbarded against the sky,
The blue high blade of Cotswold lie;
The giant clouds go royally
By jagged Malvern with a train
Of shadows.
‘Do you know, standing off from my song, I can now see that the very spirit of my country is quick in the song,’ he wrote to Marion Scott. ‘Gloster itself shines and speaks in it. It is as if, on the long night work, some kind of spirit of home visited me, when I think of it. And the end of the song is exactly like the “high blue blade” [sic] fading away to distant Bredon just above Evesham.’
The Malverns were not the only blue hills Gurney had in mind on the Western Front. ‘I wonder whether at last I might try Housman’s Shropshire Lad?’ he wrote in April 1917 from a hospital in Rouen, where he was recuperating from a bullet wound he had received in his right arm during an attack on Good Friday. He had not brought his copy of the book with him and asked Scott to send him another one, along with some musical manuscript paper. Having re-read the poems, he reported ‘once again I feel rather incapable of setting them’, which suggests that his earlier plan to set ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ and ‘Is my team ploughing’ had been abandoned. ‘Such precise and measured verses are too easy to set,’ he felt, ‘do not give the scope that R. Bridges songs offer one.’ Nevertheless, back in the line some six weeks later he reported: ‘In my head is “On Wenlock Edge” waiting to be written.’ The opportunity to do so came in September when Gurney was gassed at St Julien and sent back to Britain to be treated at a hospital near Edinburgh.
Discharged in October, Gurney was sent on a signalling course at a military camp in Northumberland, from where he wrote to Jack Haines, a Gloucestershire solicitor, minor poet and amateur botanist to whom he had been introduced either by Cheesman or Harvey, asking for the 6d edition of A Shropshire Lad. (Having lost several volumes at the front, he had returned for safe keeping the copy that Marion Scott had sent him in France.) ‘Well, here comes Housman’s Song,’ he announced on Christmas Eve, but his setting of ‘On Wenlock Edge’ for voice and piano was not published during his lifetime, nor was it revised for either of his Housman song cycles. He continued to be plagued by illness, at first put down to the after-effects of gas, but there was evidently something more seriously wrong with him. In May 1918 he was sent to a hospital specialising in treating the effects of war trauma, but by now he feared that he was going mad. He wrote Marion Scott a farewell letter before setting out to drown himself in the canal, but in the event lacked the resolve, and after several more months of medical treatment was discharg
ed from the army as medically unfit for further service. The official diagnosis was ‘deferred shell-shock’, and Gurney’s future looked very uncertain: but at least he was finally going back to Gloucestershire.
He returned to the Royal College of Music in January 1919 to take up his scholarship, which had been left open for him, and to study composition under Vaughan Williams. Although his friends and family were worried by his unpredictable behaviour, he was writing a great deal of music, including a Gloucestershire Rhapsody, which would remain unperformed until 2010, and a setting of ‘Is my team ploughing’, which would be included in his second Housman cycle, The Western Playland. Back in Gloucestershire he was reunited with Will Harvey, and began to collaborate on an unrealised Gloucestershire Lad song cycle, of which only ‘Walking Song’ was completed to add to ‘In Flanders’. In the second half of the year he composed some forty songs as well as several instrumental pieces, and this frenetic creative activity continued through 1920, matched by his erratic wandering around the countryside, walking from place to place and sometimes covering huge distances (London to Gloucester, for example), sleeping in the open, and earning a little money by labouring on farms or singing folk songs in wayside pubs. He always carried with him his notebooks, in which he wrote down snatches of music and poetry.
Given the chaos into which Gurney’s life was descending, it is astonishing that between September and December 1919 he managed to complete the first of his Housman cycles, Ludlow and Teme. Inspired by Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, Gurney had set seven poems for male voice (baritone), string quartet and piano. The cycle starts with a beautiful setting of ‘When smoke stood up from Ludlow’, followed by a dreamlike ‘Far in a western brookland’, the words of which would have increasing potency for the composer, a sprightly ‘’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town’ and a rather rambling setting of ‘The lads in their hundreds’ under the title ‘Ludlow Fair’. ‘On the idle hill of summer’ recaptures the mood of the second song, evoking a summer idyll that is interrupted by the strident call of the military before the piano and strings return us to the hillside. ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ is accompanied by a charmingly tripping tune that only falters right at the end, and the cycle ends with a somewhat melodramatic ‘The Lent Lily’. It was performed by Steuart Wilson, the Philharmonic Quartet and Gurney himself on piano in March 1920 at a ‘Gloucestershire Evening’ organised by Marion Scott at her London house. Wilson was the dedicatee of Vaughan Williams’s Four Hymns (1914), and he would become the leading interpreter of the composer’s On Wenlock Edge after Gervase Elwes was killed in an accident at a railway station in Boston in 1921. He also benefited after the war from a fund set up by George Butterworth’s father which allowed him to spend time studying singing in France, and he gave further performances of Ludlow and Teme in 1920.