The Poet who Loved the War: Ivor Gurney

Some of the most moving poetry in English came out of the First World War.

When we think of the war poets,

we probably have in mind Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon.

But there is a less well-known soldier-poet

who is quite unlike any of the others.

He found the war invigorating, at least some of the time.

For a while, it actually improved his health.

He was one of those who appreciated, at times even enjoyed,

the absurdity of war.

But he was also an accomplished composer, who wrote songs while serving in the trenches.

And while most war poets were officers,

he fought as a regular front-line soldier, a private.

And this is our man.

He's Ivor Bertie Gurney, the son of a Gloucester tailor,

and he fought in the war. He was shot, he was gassed,

he was invalided out, and he spent

the last 15 years of his life in a mental asylum,

and it was there that he returned obsessively, compulsively,

to his wartime experiences.

My contention is that the body of work he wrote there in the asylum

stands alongside the work, the achievement,

of any of his contemporary soldier-poets.

People who have heard of Ivor Gurney

might know him as the composer of polite but beautiful art song,

and as a poet who produced a couple of volumes of rare work

before he went mad and died in an asylum.

But recently, we have been starting to explore

a remarkable treasure trove.

Gurney wrote over 1,000 poems in the asylum,

now preserved in the county archives in his home city of Gloucester.

Those poems can be clumsy and repetitive. For many decades,

they were commonly dismissed as the sad product of mental decline.

Most are unpublished,

but then you find a masterpiece like The Silent One,

where Gurney does the unthinkable.

In the heat of battle, he talks back to an officer.

It is a brutally candid self-representation

and it shows a poet more interested in survival than obedience

and derring-do.

There it is. That's wonderful.

Crossings out, as well. Gurney crossed out

"'Do you think you might crawl through there, Gurney? There's a hole.'

In the afraid darkness, shot at,

"I smiled and politely replied,

"'I'm afraid not, sir.' There was no hole, no way to be seen."

Even 100 years on, the trenches of the First World War can still

be traced on the fields of Flanders and Picardy.

When Ivor Gurney as part of the 2nd/5th Gloucesters

was on his way to France, the Allies had already been fighting

for two years, and stories back from the front were grim.

Gurney and his battalion, the 2nd/5ths, arrived at Southampton docks.

They had several hours to spare,

which they spent wandering around on dockside,

and they may have been discussing rumours of German submarine activity in the Channel,

or stories they had heard of the horrors of conditions in the trenches.

They would certainly have been under no illusions

as to what awaited them in France.

So we can only guess at their mood as the 800 men

and their officers filed on board His Majesty's Troopship - HMT 861,

each laden with 80lb of kit.

It was 24th May, 1916, and at last,

they were headed to the Western Front.

After the 2nd/5th arrived at Le Havre,

they rested for a couple of days before boarding a train to the front-line.

They were destined for the Fauquisart-Laventie Sector

near the border with Belgium.

Soon, Gurney would see flares lighting up the night sky

and hear the distant thunder of guns.

The battalion was almost ready for war.

Their first task was to relieve a contingent of the London Welsh.

I'm meeting with Piet Chielens from the In Flanders Museum

who is an authority on Gurney and the Gloucester Regiment.

So the Gloucesters go in to the trenches,

"first time in" as Gurney calls it, in early June 1916.

They are met by this Welsh Regiment, and Gurney,

maybe feeling apprehensive, understandably,

finds that this is going to be one of the most memorable evenings

of his life, not for the reasons that he would perhaps expect?

No, no, because he's listening to music all of a sudden,

to Welsh folk singing and he is discussing Shakespeare

with these guys so it's quite unexpected to have, all of a sudden,

this wealth of culture landing on him while they are going in

for the first time, so there's this double excitement, all of a sudden,

and it's so hard for him to cope with it that he has

to write about it, and to repeat it.

After the dread tales and red yarns of the Line

Anything might have come to us

But the divine afterglow brought us up to a Welsh colony

Hiding in sandbagged ditches

Whispering consolatory soft foreign things

Then we were taken into low huts, candle-lit

Shaded close by slitten oil sheets

And there, but boys gave us kind welcome

So that we looked out as from the edge of home

Sang us Welsh things, and changed all former notions

To human hopeful things.

And the next day's guns nor any Line pains

Ever quite could blot out

That strangely beautiful entry to War's rout.

Ivor Gurney was born in Gloucester in 1890.

His father David ran a small tailoring business,

while his highly strung mother, Florence, kept house

and helped out with the sewing.

His father was an old-fashioned countryman,

who taught his children the names of plants and wildlife,

instilling in them a love of the natural world.

Prodigiously gifted, Gurney was soon part of the Gloucester Cathedral choir.

Scholarship after scholarship followed, culminating in a place

at the Royal College of Music.

Indeed, all of the music in this programme was composed by Ivor Gurney.

It was here in London in 1913 that he suffered

his first nervous breakdown, a portent of later mental health problems.

Then in 1914, war broke out.

Gurney immediately volunteered but was rejected

because of his poor eyesight.

Months later, with troop numbers falling catastrophically,

the criteria were relaxed.

In February 1915, Gurney was finally accepted

into the Gloucesters.

But he wasn't there on a patriotic mission

to serve King, country and Empire.

He wasn't there to have a "kick at the Kaiser".

Gurney hoped that the physical exertions of soldiering

together with the camaraderie and discipline of army life

might alleviate his mental illness.

Ivor Gurney had joined up as an experiment.

In letters, he confesses to finding some of the route marches,

square-bashing and button-polishing pointless,

but adds that the comradeship, banter and the physical fatigue

have brought huge mental benefits.

The experiment, he claims initially, is a success.

At the front, he was engaged in the deadly work of a signaller,

crawling through deep mud into no-man's-land to repair field telephone wires,

while artillery shells from both directions whined overhead.

After one particular act of bravery,

there was talk he might be recommended for a Distinguished Conduct Medal.

Gurney was a charismatic original, by turns charming and opinionated.

He could be awkward, shambolic,

indifferent to clothing and personal appearance.

Nevertheless, he attracted all manner of people to him,

many of whom stayed loyal throughout his life.

But the most important relationship,

which inspired a decades-long correspondence

was with the elegant, urbane Marion Scott.

13 years older than Gurney,

she had studied at the Royal College of Music before turning

to writing and music criticism.

On seeing Gurney for the first time at the Royal College,

she wrote "What struck me was the latent force in him,

"the fine head with its profusion of light brown hair - not too well brushed!

"'This,' I said, to myself, 'must be the new composition scholar

"'from Gloucester, whom they call Schubert.'"

Ivor Gurney was a prolific letter writer

and he wrote with extraordinary honesty.

His correspondence paints a detailed picture of the day-to-day reality

at the Front. These letters enable us to chart the physical,

emotional and mental state of the man.

Gurney's letters home in June 1916, just after going into the Line,

are remarkably calm, even detached,

not apprehensive or emotional.

It's as though choice has been lifted from him

and he now enjoys the calm of the fatalist.

Army is catering for his daily needs

and his whole life's destiny is in others' hands as well.

And that seems to give him the freedom to enjoy the brotherhood

of his fellow Gloucesters. He enjoys their stories, he enjoys their wit

and their friendship. He loves their company,

and he's full of admiration for their bravery.

And like soldiers through the ages, he can face the dangers

ahead of him because he's not facing them alone.

He's facing them with his fellow men.

Gurney is so detached at this point that he starts to enjoy

the experience of being in the war.

So he writes on the 7th June 1916,

"War's damned interesting. It would be hard indeed

"to be deprived of all this artist's material now."

Gurney jokingly wrote to Scott asking for a piano,

but his mind was also consumed with poetry.

Writing was one way of getting through the war.

Far from destroying Gurney, the war made him as a poet.

He writes intensely about the commonplace.

He chronicles the rations of the front-line soldier.

He names the hills of Gloucester and the villages of France

as though bringing them together in the same place.

He sees the meandering Severn river in Gloucestershire

mirrored in the River Somme, near where his battalion had been deployed,

and continually he sends his poems back to England.

Marion Scott responded with appreciative notes

and suggested that with her literary connections,

a first volume of poetry might just find a publisher.

One of the myths of the soldier-poets

is that war hurt them into poetry.

In fact, Sassoon, Owen, Graves, Rosenberg,

they were already writing before the war.

The exception was Gurney,

but of course he had the perfect poetic apprenticeship,

setting other people's words to music, showing

heightened attention to the nuances of language and rhyme and rhythm.

Gurney's early poems,

collected in his first volume Severn and Somme,

were perfectly conventional and perfectly good.

They knew their craft,

and because the book didn't challenge any orthodoxies,

it was received politely enough.

What that book did demonstrate, even at this early stage

in Gurney's writing career, was an intense attention to place.

Surrounded by comrades who loved the same Gloucestershire landscapes

that he loved, Gurney felt as nostalgic and homesick as ever,

and he would write love poems to the localities which had nurtured him.

The dead land oppressed me, I turned my thoughts away,

And went where hill and meadow Are shadowless and gay.

Where Cooper's stands by Cranham, Where the hill-gashes white

Show golden in the sunshine, Our sunshine God's delight.

Let my thoughts slide unwitting To other, dreadful trees,

And found me standing, staring Sick of heart at these!

Gurney was a poet who chronicled the details in landscapes,

but he was also a man who needed to be on the move,

whether it be a stroll through a Gloucestershire meadow

or a route march at the Western Front.

Eleanor Rawling has traced Ivor Gurney's footsteps.

He's not the kind of poet who likes to stand

as a passive observer and look at the landscape,

and then write about it. Gurney likes to be in it,

involved in it, immersed in it. You see the clues in his poetry

because it's not just visual, he's not describing a scene.

He's giving you the experience of being in it,

so you get the sounds, the smells,

the earth smell, the sight of the clouds,

the leaves and the tree branches brushing past him.

He needed to be immersed in it and moving through it.

He realised very early on

that he felt better when he was moving, so he walked.

I think he ran as well, not as in running a marathon,

but as in the joy of running down a hill or along a ridge or whatever.

You can tell from his poetry how fast he's moving through the landscape,

so he felt better.

But secondly, I think he knew that this is what inspired his creativity.

That sort of upsurge of joy you get.

That was when he suddenly saw clearly what it was about,

this place that really got through to him, and how he wanted to express it.

Many of his poems are quite difficult to read.

They've got strange rhythms.

Almost more Gerard Manley Hopkins-like with his sprung rhythm.

They bump about a bit from here to there,

and more to me, they have in them a breathlessness.

So there's one that I've got here in front of me, Old Thought,

when he's up on the Cotswold edge.

"Oh, up in height, Oh, snatched up

"Oh, swiftly going." I think he's going up the hill

-and he's pausing, going...

-SHE GASPS

..as he takes a breath, so the reader has to take a breath too.

What he's doing, it's more what you might call

stream of consciousness.

He's actually pouring out what's happening to him.

In Severn and Somme,

Gurney switches between weathers, themes and even countries,

experiencing everything around him viscerally.

From a very young boy, Gurney revelled in the landscape

of Gloucestershire and the River Severn.

It was also a place where deep friendships began.

As a young man, Gurney formed two particularly close bonds,

with Herbert Howells and FW Harvey.

Howells, two years younger, dapper and handsome,

was destined to become one of the country's most celebrated composers

of choral and sacred music.

Will Harvey, who published poetry as FW Harvey,

was slightly older and an absolute inspiration to Gurney.

How they interacted has been pieced together by Anthony Boden,

founder of the Ivor Gurney Society.

They bought a little boat

here at the lock

and they called it the Dorothy,

which was Gurney's youngest sister's name.

They sailed it up and down in great joy.

The other thing they did, of course, was to come to a point like this,

and here we are looking out over the Severn,

the May Hill in the distance,

and being a tidal river, the flotsam and jetsam go up the river

and later in the day, come down the river.

They would bring their air rifles and take pot shots at it.

In that way, they became very good shots.

So that explains how it is Gurney's a crack shot, because I was always

puzzled by the fact that here's someone who fails to get

into the army in 1914 because of his poor eyesight,

and yet who boasts in his poetry of being a top marksman.

He probably needed his glasses on to do it.

Maybe when he was rejected by the army,

they wanted someone who'd got pretty good eyesight without spectacles.

But of course, they were less fussy when they'd had so many men killed

that they could afford to have people who were not exactly perfect in their vision.

But, yes, he was a very, very good shot, except of course he hated

the idea of killing another human being, and he did so.

And in one of his less great poems -

"I shot him, it had to be him or me."

You can see that it's tearing him up that he's actually done this.

The Battle of the Somme would last four and a half months.

Friendships formed on the banks of the Severn

would be shattered under fire.

The Somme Offensive is raging

and Gurney hears some desperate news.

His closest friend - FW Harvey, Will Harvey -

is missing, presumed dead.

Gurney's response is to write an elegy which has become

his best-known poem, To His Love, celebrating his friendship.

He's gone, and all our plans Are useless indeed.

We'll walk no more on Cotswolds

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

You would not know him now...

But still he died Nobly, so cover him over

With violets of pride Purple from Severn side

Cover him, cover him soon!

And with thick-set Masses of memoried flowers -

Hide that red wet Thing I must somehow forget.

The remarkable thing about To His Love

is that it starts as an orthodox pastoral elegy,

hoping for the consolations of the natural world.

But war's horrors have caused a rupture,

and those desperate pleas - "Cover him, cover him soon,

"Hide that red wet Thing" - admit the failure

of a long poetic tradition to cope with the new circumstances

of mass technological slaughter.

The poem was a sign of things to come. Gurney's dissatisfaction

with the old ways of expression and his desire to make

a new language to convey the truth of war.

In fact, Gurney was to discover that Harvey had miraculously survived.

He was captured during a solo trench raid

and spent the rest of the conflict in prisoner of war camps.

Gurney was able to write to him, even sending songs that Harvey

performed with his fellow POWs.

One thing that Gurney constantly notes in his letters

is the absurdity of war.

"A whizz-bang missed me by inches while I was shaving," he reports.

"And the impression it gave and gives me now is chiefly of the comic."

Gurney never felt he was a real soldier.

He called himself a dirty civilian.

One thing Gurney did share with his fellow men

was the sense that the Germans weren't the evil enemy.

They were brothers. A mirror image betrayed by their elders.

We know about the Christmas truce of 1914 and the famous

football match on no-man's-land,

but we also have to remember that the trenches were so close together

that often the two sides could smell each other's cooking.

They could hear each other's music. Gurney writes of one moment when

the Germans were using their wind-up gramophone, and finally

Gurney had had enough. He puts his head up over the trenches -

quite a dangerous thing to do, I would have thought -

and shouts, "We're sick of Schubert, give us Strauss!"

Gurney's humour may have been just about holding up,

but cracks were starting to appear.

Gurney was no longer coping.

The depression was coming back.

He had never been the nattiest of dressers,

but now he was a bit of a mess.

When a young colonel came for the daily inspection

and was asking questions - "Who is this man? Why is he in this state?" -

Gurney's sergeant had to start making apologies.

"He's a good man, quite a good man, sir, but he's a musician

"and he doesn't seem able to keep himself clean."

The winter of 1916-17 in France was the coldest in living memory.

Sub-zero temperatures continued until the following March.

Suddenly Gurney's experiment was unravelling.

His mental state had started to suffer.

A decision was made to remove him from the front line

to the small town of Albert,

where he was detailed to work on the water carts.

Gurney was frustrated at not being up to the demands of the regular soldier.

Albert was famous for a Basilica where a Virgin and Child

hung perilously above the streets.

Superstition had it that defeat was assured for the side

who fired the shell that brought the statue crashing to the ground.

I'm meeting with Dr Kate Kennedy

who is writing a new biography of Ivor Gurney.

Gurney records in his letters to Marion Scott

that he's sitting around a little fire with his comrades

having a cafe au lait,

which for Gurney is the height of sophistication,

and wondering at this church tower which was ruined,

but would at one stage have been a glory,

and amazed at the sight of a hanging statue,

and of course here we have the hanging statue.

-It would have been dangling past the horizontal at that point?

-Yes.

This place was absolutely packed with troops heading towards the Somme.

They saw this extraordinary statue, and as they passed under it,

they thought, depending on their frame of mind,

the Virgin Mary is suicidal, flinging the Christ child down

to be destroyed along with us, another human sacrifice,

or she's redeeming Christ. She's helping to save us.

She's pulling Him towards herself. So all sorts of mythology

and superstition built up around this statue.

So what does Gurney think when she looks up?

When Gurney sees it, he's amazed by it, as he writes.

About 13 days later, as he's still around this area,

he writes a little impromptu in a letter home, called The Mother.

He writes, it begins, "We scar the earth with dreadful enginery,

"She takes us to her bosom at the last, hiding our hate

"with love, who cannot see of any child the faults.

"We'll wait there till our passion is passed."

So he is building on this idea of the mother bringing

in her children to her protection, to her arms.

It's a terrible, terrible time for Gurney,

the Somme is at its worst. The absolute worst of the Western Front.

The trenches are bitterly cold, mud everywhere,

he himself is ill. He's depressed, he's really struggling,

but at this crucial moment where it looks like he's about to break down entirely,

and that could have been the end of the war and of sanity for him,

he meets these wonderful Scottish soldiers, and he recounts

how they sing folk songs together.

He's endlessly quoting Robert Burns to them,

and one hopes they are enjoying it!

He spends Hogmanay with them, with a piper in the next village.

They give him their combined funds to go and forage

in Albert and whatever shops were left around here,

to go and get Christmas Day provisions.

I'd have thought it was quite dangerous giving your money to Gurney to buy food.

I wouldn't have trusted him myself!

Incredible that you can have fun right in the middle of the depths

of winter in the centre of the Somme. He writes

his poem Scots, as a kind of memorial, which has wonderful

folk song overtones to it. It has the refrain,

"Over the top this morning, at the cold light of day,

"the dawn's first grey" sort of thing,

which has just these little echoes of folk song,

echoes of Ye Banks and Braes,

so it's a kind of tribute to these comrades he's invested so much in

and has then lost.

But it wasn't only poetry which Gurney was writing at this time.

Despite the lack of a piano, his head was also full of new songs.

# This is a sacred city

# Built of marvellous earth

# Life was lived nobly there

# To give such beauty birth. #

Gurney composes By A Bierside while leaning, he tells us,

against some sandbags in a disused trench mortar emplacement.

It's an astonishing achievement,

particularly given the circumstances,

surrounded as he is by the chaos and the noise

and the danger and busyness of war.

But in fact it's the first of five songs which Gurney

composes at the front-line.

Four of which are still considered today to be masterpieces.

Their themes, as we might expect,

are death, and the search for, or grief, at the loss of

the peace and the security and the loved landscapes of home.

By March 1917, with sub-zero temperatures persisting,

the Germans begin a strategic retreat to the Hindenburg line.

They mine roads, cut down fruit trees and poison wells

and water supplies.

This wanton violation of the countryside

enrages the advancing Allied troops.

The 2nd/5th Gloucesters are part of the campaign pursuing

the Germans through Picardy.

One night they came upon the village of Caulaincourt.

Caulaincourt was levelled. There was only one building still standing.

And it was this one, the mausoleum.

Rumour has it this building only survived

because a local landowner had bribed the Germans to keep it intact.

It's not surprising, at the end of a freezing winter,

the Gloucesters should have come here for shelter,

and Gurney writes about this in a celebratory fashion.

There were mouth organs, there were tin whistles,

and everyone had a raucous time among the dead.

What they didn't know was that the Germans had booby-trapped

the building, and fortunately, for whatever reason,

the bombs didn't explode.

The battalion was closing in on the retreating Germans.

They had captured a machine gun and taken seven prisoners.

A series of night patrols had discovered a copse

occupied by another German machine gun crew.

Gurney was set to be part of the next attack.

What happened on the outskirts of Vermand on Good Friday 1917

was to provide one of the defining moments of Gurney's life.

Years later, while incarcerated in the asylum,

he would relive its intensity, in great poem after great poem.

We're in a field, in the middle of nowhere.

Vermand is over there, about a mile away.

It would have been somewhere like this where Gurney

and the Gloucesters crossed land to attack the Germans.

That's right. They'd been chasing the Germans back

to the Hindenburg Line for the last few weeks.

This was around Easter of 1917.

They'd attacked them in various villages all the way up to here.

They'd surprised them shaving and having their breakfast in the village just down the road,

and now on Good Friday, they realised the moment had come.

They were in trenches probably somewhere very close to here.

For 40 minutes, the Gloucesters pounded the German lines,

trying to break the barbed wire.

When Gurney heard the whistle, over they went,

and he stumbled through this ploughed field in the pouring rain,

friendly fire hitting him from behind, Germans bombarding him

from the front, but what they found as they got across, the ones lucky enough to get that far,

was that the German wire was entirely intact.

The event was to be the catalyst for a poem we saw earlier in manuscript.

It's power and unflinching honesty mark Gurney out as one of the finest soldier-poets.

The silent one

Who died on the wires, and hung there, one of two -

Who for his hours of life had chattered through

Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks accent

Yet faced unbroken wires, stepped over, and went

A noble fool, faithful to his stripes - and ended

But I - weak, hungry, and willing only for the chance

Of line - to fight in the line, lay down under unbroken

Wires, and saw the flashes and kept unshaken,

Till the politest voice - a finicking accent, said,

"Do you think you might crawl through there? There's a hole."

In the afraid darkness, shot at, I smiled, as politely replied -

"I'm afraid not, Sir." There was no hole, no way to be seen,

Nothing but chance of death, after tearing of clothes

Kept flat, and watched the darkness, hearing bullets whizzing -

And swore deep heart's deep oaths Polite to God

And retreated and came on again, again retreated -

And a second time faced the screen.

At some point between lying under this wire,

refusing to go any further,

and being forced across no-man's-land, Gurney stumbles and

falls and as he reaches his arm out, he is shot

about here just below the shoulder, through a bicep,

and he's very lucky, it avoids his torso.

The bullet goes clean through his arm.

-Unfortunately, it's not quite bad enough to send him back to England.

-No.

This was Good Friday 1917.

It may have been only a flesh wound but it briefly took Gurney away

from the front line and thankfully wasn't the end of his career as a pianist, either.

Three days later, on Easter Monday,

the poet Edward Thomas was not so lucky.

He was killed by a shell near Arras.

Gurney later would set over a dozen of Thomas's poems to music.

Gurney was moved to a military hospital in Rouen,

where he spent six weeks writing letters

and fantasised about living in a stone Cotswold cottage.

After his recovery, he rejoins the 2nd/5th

who by now are engaged in action at Arras,

and he retrains as a machine-gunner.

The regiment then moves on to Ypres

where the Battle of Passchendaele is at its height.

Where there was once carnage is now high-grade agricultural land.

Piet Chielens is taking me to the spot where Gurney,

as a machine-gunner, sat at a distance watching his comrades go over the top.

Many of the guys he was with from 1915 onwards,

during training in England,

are in that attack,

and don't come back.

It is one of those moments

which he will reflect upon for the rest of his life.

How do you think the Gloucesters felt about him opting out,

as they might have seen it, becoming a machine-gunner?

Yes, especially the camaraderie in the regiment, and especially

in a territorial regiment, is very, very important amongst the ranks.

And so he refers to his corporal, Don Hancox,

who is blaming him for changing jobs.

Because although he's still following the infantry battalion,

he is no longer at that point part of the 2nd/5th Gloucester Regiment.

That hurts them. They feel left behind by him.

It's like he has deserted them.

Don Hancox is one of Gurney's closest friends, isn't he?

-And he's killed in the valley here.

-Yes, he is killed.

Gurney is at the time itself not sure.

He knows he's taken out of battle.

In one of the poems, he refers to

"whether Gloucester's buried Gloucester, I know not."

He doesn't know, maybe not until

he's back home, back in Gloucester, that he learns about his fate.

But he knows that he was hit during the battle of the 22nd August.

We know now that he's buried at Lijssenthoek Cemetery,

and that he died in the CCS - the casualty clearing station,

the following day.

18B - Lee, Ormsten, Havelin...

Turner,

Townsend,

Wilson,

Nash, aged 21...

Hancox.

So here lies Gurney's greatest friend during the war.

20338, Corporal LD Hancox,

Gloucestershire Regiment, 23rd August, 1917.

Rest in peace.

Gurney writes obsessively about Hancox in later years,

years later in the asylum, poem after poem about Hancox.

He admires Hancox for his bravery,

for his Gloucester goodness, as Gurney puts it,

simply for liking Gurney's poetry, even, so there was

a mutual admiration between the two men.

I think it might be appropriate just to...

..read this.

"Don Hancox, shall I no more see your face frore,

"Gloucester-good in the first light But you are dead!

"No more to march happy with such good comrades,

"Watching the sky, the brown land, the bayonet blades

"Moving - to muse on music forgetting the pack."

One of the unique characteristics about Gurney's poetry,

certainly if you compare him to Sassoon or to Owen,

is that he names these people whom he lives with,

whom he fights with, whom he jokes with.

He names them so we can come and find their graves.

We know about Don Hancox because Gurney tell us about him

in poem after poem.

The poetry itself, as Gurney wanted,

becomes a memorial for those who lived and died alongside Gurney.

During the Battle of Passchendaele, Gurney was part of a planned attack

on a German fortress.

The Germans had been using mustard gas for two years.

As a weapon of terror, it is designed to immobilise large numbers

without necessarily killing them.

Gurney, like others in his machine gun crew,

was working his away along a trench carrying heavy gun parts.

Such was the physical effort involved that wearing a gas mask

was out of the question.

A previous barrage of mustard gas lay dormant in puddles.

The entire crew of eight were subjected to its noxious fumes

and without firing a shot, were out of the battle.

Mystery surrounds how badly gassed Gurney was,

but it got him a Blighty, a ticket home.

Certainly his experiment had failed.

15 months of Army life had left him in a fragile mental state.

He may have thought he'd pulled a fast one.

Nothing was further from the truth.

The effects of mustard gas can last a lifetime.

So Gurney, one way or another, had finally got his Blighty wound.

He was coming home and he himself had chosen

to be sent to Bangour in Scotland.

His reasoning being that it was too far away

for his family to visit. But there were other reasons

why this was an excellent decision.

Bangour was a progressive military hospital.

It had its own self-sufficient farm, which provided fresh meat and veg.

It had a series of concert parties.

The culture of Bangour was excellent for Gurney, it was his ideal place.

Bangour believed in treating the whole body and mind together.

Ivor Bertie Gurney could not have been more fortunate.

The fresh white sheets and peace of Bangour

soon worked their magic on Gurney.

Away from the hellish sound of war, he thrived.

He had more time to write

and then promptly fell for a pretty volunteer nurse.

Annie Nelson Drummond was the only daughter of an industrious

Scottish family of four sons.

A girl amongst boys, Annie possessed a native intelligence.

She was an enterprising and highly capable woman.

She had never met anyone quite like Ivor Gurney, musician and poet.

They talked incessantly.

He introduced her to literature and music.

Their affection, it seems, was equally matched.

He wrote to his friend Herbert Howells,

"I forgot my body when walking with her".

Ivor Gurney had found love.

Six weeks later, Gurney was discharged and sent to a camp in Northumberland.

During that time, Annie, the lovely but practical Scot,

realised that as engaging as Ivor was, he was unstable.

In short, he wasn't husband material.

When the Dear John letter came, Gurney was devastated.

His mental state deteriorated rapidly.

He sent goodbye letters to friends, threatening suicide.

He intended to drown himself in a canal but lost courage

and was found sitting on the bank in despair.

In September 1918, two months before the Armistice,

Gurney was discharged from the Army as unfit for service.

He took a series of jobs,

and while there were certainly bumps along the way,

by the following month his spirits had started to lift.

He received royalties for Severn and Somme

and learned that a second edition was planned.

At last, Gurney started to feel he was getting the recognition he deserved.

War's Embers, a second volume of his poetry written mostly during the war

was published, and Gurney returned to London

to pursue his first love - music.

Gurney came back to the Royal College of Music as a war veteran in 1919.

This time, his tutor was the finest composer of his generation,

Ralph Vaughan Williams.

This was a time of huge success for Gurney.

He was being published, he was being performed,

he was moving in high artistic circles.

And he was productive.

60 songs in 1920 alone and dozens of poems.

But inwardly, things were starting to go wrong.

More wrong than previously, Gurney acknowledged.

He could no longer cater for his hygiene or his basic dietary needs.

He failed his exams at the Royal College. His scholarship ran out.

And he took off across the countryside on long walks.

Hoping that that old cure would fix him again.

He moved from job to job,

all the while his head was full of songs and poems.

What wonders he would achieve, he told Marion Scott,

if only he were well.

MOURNFUL MUSIC

Gurney had exhausted his options.

He had tried living with his brother.

He had even followed his wartime fantasy

by installing himself in

a derelict, stone Cotswold cottage and trying to live off the land.

None of these attempts at normality stood a chance.

In September 1922,

Ivor Gurney was declared insane

and committed to Barnwood House,

an asylum on the outskirts of Gloucester.

In December, after several successful escape attempts,

he became a private patient at the City of London Mental Hospital

in Dartford, Kent.

Though well intended, this decision, taken by his London friends,

tore him away of his beloved Gloucestershire

and, in the process, broke his spirit.

The irony being that Gurney's war experiences

had all but rid him of the anxieties, the mood swings

and the visions which had plagued him previously.

Now that he was safe again, the old troubles started to resurface.

"After the war, what hopes there were,"

Gurney wrote to Marion Scott from the asylum,

"to earn a living and to write praise of England."

This first war poet, as he now began to consider himself,

was bewildered at the reasons given for his confinement, complaining,

"All England should be honouring me."

Edgar Jones is a Professor in the History of Military Psychiatry

at the Maudsley Hospital in London,

who has studied Ivor Gurney's medical records.

The Maudsley was founded in 1915 as a war hospital,

and it remains a leading centre for research into

the effects of shell-shock and gas.

He himself seems unsure as to the real reason,

as he puts it, why he gets... sent home to Blighty.

Obviously he inhales gas,

but at the same time he says, you know, he spends five days

at Third Ypres shaking with the shaking of the guns,

that sounds to me like a kind of early shell-shock.

Yes, Gurney is in a front-line infantry battalion.

He's been a signaller. He's attached to a machine-gun unit.

So he's really been through a very stressful period.

He's been in the front line for nearly a year and a half

and that would stress the nerves of any man

because he would have been subjected regularly to artillery bombardments,

and that's one of the most difficult things to deal with

because there's nothing you can do to protect your life.

Is it possible that actually

his creativity helps him in those conditions?

There's one poem where he talks about

thinking about music while under bombardment,

and clearly at other times he's even writing poetry under bombardment.

Presumably that's one way of moving yourself out of the situation?

It may also be a way of trying to understand it

and coming to terms with it

because it's a very difficult thing to accommodate.

You know, why am I there? Why am I putting up with this?

I'm seeing my friends killed and wounded

and I can see no obvious gain.

If you can then think of some way of conceptualising that,

or making it bearable...

And he draws comparisons with the Gloucester countryside

and what he's having to go through in these trenches.

So it could be a coping mechanism.

Gurney has been reduced to a pitiful state.

He has psychotic episodes and grandiose delusions.

But his creativity is unbridled - he's still writing poems and songs.

During these years, Gurney's poetry takes an experimental turn,

inventing original grammars and rhythms

to convey the extremities of battle terror.

Reliving his experiences at Passchendaele,

he crafts this description of fatigue and illness -

"Half dead with sheer tiredness,

"wakened quick at night

"With dysentery pangs..."

At the limits of endurance,

poetry becomes a unique witness.

It's believed that Gurney was bipolar

but Edgar Jones thinks the diagnosis could lie in another direction.

The doctors at the time described him

as suffering from delusional insanity,

which doesn't help us very much.

But what is clear is that his mental state is fairly static

over the 15 years that he was at Dartford,

and it's characterised by persecutory delusions.

He has the idea that someone is transmitting

electricity or wireless waves

to control him and torture him,

to the extent that he tries to seal up the windows of his ward.

He also believes that there is a machine under the floorboard

transmitting, again, wireless electricity into his body and mind.

And he asks the medical superintendent

to dig up the floorboards and take the machine away.

And those sort of

persecutory delusions and auditory hallucinations

are more characteristic of schizophrenia

than bipolar affective disorder.

The doctors also identified periods where

he's regarded as incomprehensible.

They can't follow what he's saying.

His speech has a bizarre characteristic.

And again, that is more typical of schizophrenia,

of what would later be called formal thought disorder.

MUSIC: "Sleep" by Ivor Gurney and John Fletcher

# Come,

# Sleep

# And with thy sweet deceiving

# Lock me in delight awhile

# Let some pleasing dream beguile

# All my fancies... #

The Thiepval Memorial at the Somme, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens,

lists the names of over 72,000 men, whose bodies were never found.

Gurney himself came very close to death, several times,

but of course he survived.

After the war, when he was feeling suicidal,

he begged to be allowed to die, to commit suicide.

And he came to regret deeply

the fact that a bullet had not finished him off in the war.

Honour is the theme that comes up more than any other

in Gurney's writings during this period,

because it summarises his sense of abandonment

by country, by friends and by family.

His letters at this time

are the most desperate documents I've ever read.

They're worse than suicide notes.

They're harrowing appeals, begging to be allowed the release,

the freedom, to kill himself and end the pain.

Incarcerated at the Dartford asylum,

Gurney - the irrepressible walker - refuses to take exercise outside.

"This is not country," he cries.

One day, the widow of the poet Edward Thomas visits him

and is shocked at his condition.

She returns a few days later

with an Ordnance Survey map of Gloucestershire.

Together, with the map laid out on the bed,

they trace the outlines of his old haunts.

Gurney's spirits lift as he recalls individual paths, trees,

stiles and streams.

He can visualise his youthful wanderings

by the symbols on the map.

PIANO PLAYS

During the war he was writing quite well-behaved,

conventional, orthodox poetry.

And it didn't break any rules

but it was praised, it was popular.

He had no problems getting it published.

After the war, especially in the on-rush of the asylum years,

he was writing in the white heat of inspiration.

In one month alone, we think he wrote four books of poetry

and, at that point, he could no longer get published.

The work was idiosyncratic, it broke all the rules of grammar,

it was shoddily presented, in many respects,

but it had the hallmarks of genius.

Gurney would send it out to publishers

and it would be rejected.

It just added to that sense that he had -

lost in the asylum in a county on the other side of the country

from his beloved Gloucestershire -

that he had been forgotten, abandoned,

that the honour that was due to him by the country

was never going to be forthcoming.

CRIES OF WADING BIRDS

At Dartford, Gurney writes in order to resist.

..he warns defiantly.

Immersed in poems,

he can escape to the happier times which the war represented,

and used that war service to upbraid the present

for its appalling betrayal.

Gurney proclaims himself as the sole honest man,

a teller of truth and "war poet whose right of honour",

he boasts, "cuts falsehood like a knife."

Marion Scott, ever his most loyal friend,

pays most of the medical bills, constantly visiting him,

taking him out on day trips.

She documents his work and photographs him.

In what is believed to the last picture of Gurney,

he stands on the beach at Dover looking across to France,

as though he is trying to make sense of it all.

Then everything shuts down, the poetry and the music stop.

Almost a decade later, on the 27th December, 1937,

the City of London Mental Hospital

informed the coroner that Ivor Bertie Gurney had died there.

He was aged 47.

PIANO PLAYS

And that might have been that.

But Marion Scott and the composer Gerald Finzi preserved his papers,

recognising that they possessed some special quality of genius.

It is these jewels which we are now discovering

and bringing out of the archive to an appreciative audience.

Private 3895 Ivor Bertie Gurney

is finally attracting the reputation he deserves.

You know, what I love most about Gurney's poetry

is that he is a celebrant of the particular.

"The dearness of common things," as he puts it.

It matters that he tells us which Gloucestershire hillside

he is walking over or which village in France he is marching through.

And he gives us as well the sense of the daily life of soldiers.

He tells us what he's been eating.

He creates a "Catalogue Aria" of trench rations

Machonachie, Fray Bentos, Tickler's jam.

This is local detail that you don't get in any of the other

soldier-poets' work.

And yes, he has those iconic moments of going over the top

or being under artillery bombardment, but he also gives us

that fuller picture of the soldier's experience.

The boredom of trench life, the diurnal, the banal,

what the cafe au lait is like in the local estaminet.

So Gurney's vision then, is more capacious, I would argue.

It's more varied and it's more generous

than any other of the soldier-poets of the First World War.

The songs I had are withered

Or vanished clean...

PIANO MUSIC PLAYS