Ivor Gurney’s Gloucestershire

In 1917 the 27 year old Ivor Gurney was ‘at rest’ with his battalion, the 2/5^th Glosters, at Buire au Bois north of the Somme. Having suffered terrible conditions fighting on the Somme near Vermand, the Glosters were about to be sent north to join the 3^rd battle of Ypres. Despite, or perhaps because of, the ever-present horrors of war, Gurney’s thoughts in 1917 were back in his native Gloucestershire drawing on the image of his beloved ‘Peter’s Abbey’, as he called Gloucester Cathedral, that ‘fair-fashioned shape of stone’ rising above the Severn meadows and providing Gurney with peaceful memories and a sense of identity. Ninety six years later, on August 31^st 2013, a celebration of the life of Ivor Gurney will take place in Gloucester Cathedral in Gurney’s ‘Old City’ –  his talents have not been forgotten but my book Ivor Gurney’s Gloucestershire suggests that we may need to recognise more fully the intensity of his relationship with Gloucestershire.
 

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) is known as both a talented composer and a First World War poet, whose down-to-earth observations present the perspective of the common soldier, but he also wrote vividly and movingly about his native Gloucestershire, the place in which he grew up and which nurtured his creativity. When I first discovered Gurney’s poetry it was not his depiction of war that attracted me. What drew me to this poet with a startling leap of recognition was the clarity and distinctiveness of his images of Gloucestershire places that I knew in a similar way – ‘soft winter’s mornings of kind innocence’ on Cooper’s Hill (That Centre of Old); ‘the orchis, trefoil, harebells’ nodding all day ‘high above Gloucester and the Severn Plain’ (Crickley Hill); the Cathedral ‘like any ship over green peaceful seas’ (Ship over Meadows).

As I read and researched more, I realised that the key to understanding Gurney is to recognise that, first and foremost, Gurney is a poet of Gloucestershire. His poems engage directly with the places around him, using local names, recognising geographical features and providing first-hand observations recorded at all times and seasons.  More significantly, it is clear that Gurney drew on all his senses – sight, sound smell, touch – and needed to be there, preferably moving fast through the landscape, to gain the glorious rush of inspiration that led to poetic and musical creation. In a poem such as Old Thought, Gurney is not describing a view or a feature of the landscape, he is pouring out the experience of being there walking and running along the high Cotswold edge on Crickley or Cooper’s Hill. Gurney’s poem is filled with a natural exuberance and uprising of joy aroused by the movement in outdoors. ‘O up in height, O snatcht up, O swiftly going’ – the arrangement of the words forces us to breathe faster like a runner on the steep hillside - ‘breathing is loving’ the poet tells us.  As Gurney himself wrote in a letter to his trusted friend, Marion Scott - “Minsterworth orchards, Cranham, Crickley and Framilode Reach. They do not merely mean intensely to me … they are me”.

Suddenly we can see the huge significance of Gurney’s absence in the WW1 trenches of Belgium and Northern France. In a sense, as he told us himself in a poem called While I Write, it was being away from Gloucestershire amid the terror and confusion of war that crystallised out for him his calling as a poet. ‘War told me truth, I have Severn’s right of maker,/ As of Cotswold: war told me: I was elect, I was born fit / To praise the three hundred feet depth of every acre / Between Tewkesbury and Stroudway, Side and Wales Gate’. He drew on his Gloucestershire places as a form of release from the stresses of war. In a poem called That Centre of Old he recounts how –‘ in the still small space at the strafe end’ ie when the guns stopped, he, the frightened young soldier, conjured up images of Cooper’s Hill to save him from the noise and terror of war. He saw glimpses of Gloucestershire in a river bend (All things said Severn’ Crucifix Corner) or a hill shoulder (the low ridge of Laventie looked like Wainlodes’ Laventie Ridge). He called on memory to take him back to the calm of Crickley (‘If only this fear would leave me, I could dream of Crickley Hill’ Crickley Hill) or to let him see the soaring lines of the cathedral (‘like a ship over peaceful green seas’ The Ship).

In the post-war years 1918-22, Gurney found it difficult to hang on to his creativity and his identity as the traumas of re-entering civilian life were added to the stresses arising from his increasingly severe mental condition. In 1922, he was committed to the City of London Mental Asylum, Dartford where he remained incarcerated until his death in 1937.He didn’t stop writing about Gloucestershire but he had to rely on memory and gradually his memory faded. After 1926 the writing of poetry and music ground to a halt as, in the poet’s own words, he found memory ‘sliding content down to drugged sleep’ Memory. Some of his most bitter poetry of this period expresses ‘place absence’. ‘There is a coppice on Cotswold’s edge the winds love; / It blasts so, and from below there one sees move / Tree branches like water darkling – and I write thus / At the year’s end, in nine Hell-depths, with such memories’ (The Coppice).

Ivor Gurney died in 1937 in the City of London Mental Asylum at Dartford, Kent, far away from the hills and meadows of Gloucestershire and believing that his music and poetry had been forgotten. The tragedy of Ivor Gurney was to belong to this place so fully and then to be wrenched away from it so completely. 

The Memorial Festival in Gloucester Cathedral on August 31^st is one important step to ensuring that Gurney’s genius is widely celebrated and that he is given full recognition as the poet of Gloucestershire.

Eleanor Rawling is a geographer, literary researcher and walker. Having been born and brought up in Gloucestershire, she has a passion for its landscapes and places. Her book, Ivor Gurney’s Gloucestershire; exploring poetry and place is available now.