Ivor Gurney

Memorial to Gurney in Gloucester Cathedral

Ivor Bertie Gurney (28 August 1890 – 26 December 1937) was an English poet and composer, particularly of songs.

Life

Born at 3 Queen Street, Gloucester in 1890, the second of four surviving children of David Gurney, a tailor, and his wife Florence, a seamstress, Gurney showed musical ability early. He sang as a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral, from 1900 to 1906, when he became an articled pupil of Dr Herbert Brewer at the cathedral, where he met fellow composer Herbert Howells who became a lifelong friend. Alongside Gurney and Howells, Brewer's third pupil at this time was Ivor Novello then known as Ivor Davies. He also enjoyed an enduring friendship with the poet F. W. Harvey whom he met in 1908. The most significant adult figures in Gurney's early life were the Reverend Alfred H. Cheesman and two sisters, Emily and Margaret Hunt who nurtured Gurney's interests in music and literature. Gurney began composing music at the age of 14, and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1911. He studied there with Charles Villiers Stanford, who also taught Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Marion M. Scott, Rebecca Clarke, Frank Bridge, Arthur Bliss, Howells and many others. Stanford told Howells that Gurney was potentially "the biggest of them all", but he was "unteachable". Gurney possessed a dynamic personality but had been troubled by mood swings that became apparent during his teenage years. He had a difficult time focusing on his work at college and suffered his first breakdown in 1913. After taking a rest, he seemed to recover and returned to college.

Gurney's studies were interrupted by World War I when he enlisted as a private soldier in the Gloucestershire Regiment in February 1915. At the Front, he began writing poetry seriously, sending his efforts to his friend, the musicologist-critic Marion Scott, who worked with Gurney as his editor and business manager. He was in the midst of writing the poems for what would become his first book Severn and Somme when he was wounded in the shoulder in April 1917. He recovered and returned to battle, still working on his book and composing music including the songs In Flanders and By A Bierside. Sidgwick & Jackson accepted Severn and Somme in July with publication set for the autumn. In the meantime, Gurney was gassed in September the same year and sent to the Edinburgh War Hospital where he met and fell in love with a VAD nurse, Annie Nelson Drummond, but the relationship later failed. There remains some controversy about the possible effects of the gas on his mental health, even though Gurney had shown some signs and symptoms of a bipolar disorder since his teens. "Being gassed (mildly) [his parenthesis] with the new gas is no worse than catarrh or a bad cold”, Gurney wrote in a letter to Marion Scott on 17 September 1917. After his release from hospital he was posted to Seaton Delaval, a mining village in Northumberland, where he wrote poems including 'Lying awake in the ward'. Severn and Somme, was published in November 1917.

Mental distress

In March 1918, Gurney suffered a serious breakdown, triggered at least in part by the sudden loss of Drummond. He was hospitalised in the Gallery Ward at Brancepeth Castle, County Durham, where he wrote several songs, despite the piano sounding, he said, like "a boiler factory in full swing because of the stone walls". In June he threatened suicide but did not go through with it. He slowly regained some of his emotional stability and in October was honourably discharged from the army. Gurney received an unconventional diagnosis of nervous breakdown from "deferred" shell shock. The notion that Gurney's instability should primarily be attributed to "shell shock" was perpetuated by his close friend Marion Scott, who used this term in the initial press releases after Gurney's death, as well as in his entry for Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Although Gurney seemed to thrive after the war, when he was regarded as one of the most promising men of his generation, his mental distress continued to worsen. He studied for a brief time with Ralph Vaughan Williams upon returning to the Royal College of Music but he withdrew from the college before completing his studies. His second volume of poetry, War's Embers, appeared in May 1919 to mixed reviews. He continued to compose, producing a large number of songs, instrumental pieces, chamber music and two works for orchestra, War Elegy (1920) and A Gloucestershire Rhapsody (1919–1921). His music was being performed and published. However by 1922, his condition had deteriorated to the point where his family had him declared insane.

It has been speculated that Gurney's mental health problems may have been the result of syphilis, contracted either while he was music student before the war, or perhaps while serving as a soldier in France. Blevins, Gunrey's biographer, however, concludes that he did not suffer from syphilis. The issue has also been discussed, more recently, by Cambridge academic and broadcaster Kate Kennedy.

He spent the last 15 years of his life in psychiatric hospitals, first for a short period at Barnwood House in Gloucester, and then at the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford, where he was diagnosed as suffering from "delusional insanity (systematised)". Gurney wrote prolifically during the asylum years, producing some eight collections of verse. His output included two plays in Shakespearean style - "Gloucester Play (1926) and "The Tewksbury Trial" (1926). During this time he appeared to believe that he was Shakespeare. He also continued to compose music, but to a far lesser degree. An examination of his archive suggests that up to two thirds of his musical output remains unpublished and unrecorded.

By the 1930s Gurney wrote little of anything, although he was described by Scott as being "so sane in his insanity".

Death and legacy

The grave of Ivor Gurney at Twigworth, Gloucestershire

Gurney died of tuberculosis while still a patient at the City of London Mental Hospital shortly before dawn on 26 December 1937, aged 47. He was buried in Twigworth, near Gloucester. His godfather, the Reverend Alfred Cheesman, conducted the service. Gurney was "a lover and maker of beauty", as it said on his gravestone (now replaced after it was damaged—the original stone now stored inside Twigworth church). Marion Scott preserved Gurney's manuscripts and letters and worked with composer Gerald Finzi to ensure that his legacy should not be forgotten.

On 11 November 1985, Gurney was among 16 Great War Poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." A memorial to Gurney was erected in 2009 near Ypres, close to the spot where he was the victim of a mustard gas attack in 1917, and a blue plaque on Eastgate Street in Gloucester, commemorates his life.

In April 2014 BBC Four broadcast a documentary about Gurney, entitled The Poet who Loved the War, presented by Tim Kendall, which focused on how the First World War had in some ways helped Gurney through the periods of depression he suffered and had helped him become one of the war's foremost poets.

In June and July 2014 Gurney was the subject of BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week, based on Dr Kate Kennedy's biography, 'Ivor Gurney: Dweller in Shadows', as part of the station's "Music in the Great War" series. The programmes included a number of Gurney's pieces especially recorded by the BBC.

Works

Gurney wrote hundreds of poems and more than 300 songs as well as instrumental music. He set only a handful of his own poems, the best-known being Severn Meadows. His best-known compositions include his Five Elizabethan Songs (or 'The Elizas' as he called them) and the song-cycles Ludlow and Teme and The Western Playland, both settings of poetry by A. E. Housman. There is something of Schubert and Schumann, but considerably less of the prevailing folk idiom of the time, in the intensity of his musical language.

Gurney is known both as a poet and composer and his reputation in both arts has continued to rise. Edmund Blunden, at the urging of composer Gerald Finzi, assembled the first collection of Gurney's poetry which was published in 1954. This was followed by P. J. Kavanagh's Collected Poems, first published in 1982 and reissued in 2004. It remains the most comprehensive edition of Gurney's poetry. Gurney is regarded as one of the great World War I poets, and like the others of them, such as Edward Thomas whom he admired, he often contrasted the horrors of the front line with the beauty and tranquillity of his native English landscape - these themes were explored in the 2012 musical play A Soldier and a Maker.

Gurney set to music many of the poems of his contemporaries as well as those by the older poet A. E. Housman. He composed settings for at least nineteen of the poems written by Edward Thomas and at least seven by W. H. Davies.

Posthumous collections of poetry and letters

• Severn & Somme and War's Embers, ed. R.K.R. Thornton. Carcanet Press, 1997.
• 80 Poems or So, ed. George Walter and R.K.R. Thornton. Carcanet Press, 1997.
• Rewards of Wonder: Poems of London, Cotswold and France, ed. George Walter. Carcanet Press, 2000.
• Best Poems and The Book of Five Makings, ed. R.K.R. Thornton. Carcanet Press, 1995.
• Collected Poems, ed. P.J. Kavanagh. Fyfield Books (Carcanet Press), 2004.
• Stars in a Dark Night: The Letters from Ivor Gurney to the Chapman Family. Anthony Boden (ed.), The History Press, 2004 (2nd edition).

Five Elizabethan Songs

• Orpheus
• Sleep
• Spring
• Tears (5 E. S.)
• Under the Greenwood Tree

Other Songs

• A Piper
• All Night Under The Moon
• An Epitaph
• Black Stitchel
• Blaweary
• Bread And Cherries
• Brown Is My Love
• By a bierside
• Cathleen ni Houlihan
• Desire In Spring
• Down By The Salley Gardens
• Edward, Edward
• Epitaph in old mode
• Even Such Is Time
• Far in a western brookland
• Golden Friends
• Goodnight to the meadow
• Ha'nacker Mill
• Hawk and Buckle
• I Praise The Tender Flower
• In flanders
• Is my team ploughing?
• Lament
• Last hours
• Loveliest of trees
• Ludlow and Teme
• Ludlow Fair
• Most Holy Night
• Nine of the clock
• On the idle hill of summer
• Only the Wanderer
• Reveille
• Severn Meadows (setting of his own poem)
• Song of Caibhan
• Song of Silence
• Snow
• The Aspens
• The Apple Orchard
• The Boat is chafing
• The Cloths Of Heaven
• The Far Country
• The Fiddler of Dooney
• The Fields Are Full
• The Isle of Peace
• The Lent Lily
• The Night of Trafalgar
• The Scribe
• The Ship
• The Singer
• The Sun at noon to higher air
• The Twa corbies
• The Western Playland
• Thou didst delight my eyes
• Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town
• To Violets
• Twice a week the winter thorough
• Walking Song
• When I was one-and-twenty
• When smoke stood up from Ludlow
• You are my sky

Selected Poems

The following poems provide a good introduction to his work:

• Strange Hells - the effect of war on soldiers' psyches.
• The Ballad of Three Spectres - a soldier's vision.
• Maisemore - a soldier thinks of home.
• The Estaminet - comradeship.
• Purple and Black - the politics of death.
• To the Poet before Battle - a soldier poet prepares for the fight.

Sources

• P. J. Kavanagh (ed.) (2004). Ivor Gurney, Collected poems (reprint ed.). Fyfield Books. ISBN 1-85754-709-8. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)
• Kate Kennedy, ed. 'Ivor Gurney: Poet, Composer', Ivor Gurney Society Journal 2007.
• Pamela Blevins, "Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty", The Boydell Press, 2008.
• Pamela Blevins, "New Perspectives on Ivor Gurney's Mental Illness", The Ivor Gurney Society Journal, Volume 6, 2000, pp,29-58.
• Pamela Blevins, "One Last Chance: Dr. Randolph Davis and Ivor Gurney", The Ivor Gurney Society Journal, Volume 9, 2003, pp. 91–99.

External links

• "Archival material relating to Ivor Gurney". UK National Archives.
• The Ivor Gurney Society (UK site)
• The Ivor Gurney Society (US based site)
• Gurney Literary Archive and profile, Oxford University
• Works by or about Ivor Gurney at the Internet Archive
• Works by Ivor Gurney at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• "Music from the Western Front", performance by Chamber Domaine, which includes the premiere of Ivor Gurney's Slow Movement for violin and piano (1924), given at Gresham College, 26 September 2007 (available as an MP3 or MP4 download, as well as a text file).
• Free scores by Ivor Gurney at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)