The early 20th century seems to have been a golden age for music and literature in Gloucester and the Forest, with Gloucester Cathedral being the focal point for distinguished musicians, poets and other writers.

There was another independent colony of writers based in Dymock at that time, including Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, Robert Frost, Wilfred Gibson, and Edward Thomas.

These writers seem to have had no connection with the Forest except for their brief residence in Dymock before going off to war or back to the USA. Rutland Boughton, an English composer of opera and choral music, was a later immigrant to our area, moving to Newent in the mid 1920s.

But the Gloucester Cathedral musical and literary set were predominantly from Gloucester and the Forest of Dean.

Hubert Parry, who composed famous music for the hymns such as ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Lord and Master of All Mankind’, and was the master of Highnam Court, was a music teacher with a memorial plaque in the Cathedral.

Herbert Howells of Lydney was a composer and organist, supported in his musical career by a member of the family of Charles Bathurst, the first Viscount Bledisloe, who had taken an interest in the budding musician.

He learned the organ from the Gloucester Cathedral organist Herbert Brewer, and became his articled pupil in 1905 at sixteen years of age along with Ivor Novello and Ivor Gurney, studying counterpoint and harmony.

Ivor Novello became a famous name in post-second world entertainment as an actor and singer.

Howells and Gurney became close friends, going on long walks through the Gloucestershire countryside discussing their shared love of music and English literature. Ivor Gurney, a poet and composer, and a great friend of Will Harvey, was wounded and gassed during Great War, invalided out of the war, and deteriorating mental health caused him to be brutally committed to an asylum in Kent in which he was confined for 15 years until his death in 1937.

While there, he wrote the sad lines ‘Memory is poor enough consolation for the soul hopeless gone’.

Another formative experience for the young Howells was the premiere in September 1910 at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

Howells related in later years how Vaughan Williams sat next to him for the remainder of the concert and shared his score of Edward Elgar’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ with him.

Will Harvey of Minsterworth was a student at Kings School, Gloucester, forming friendships with Ivor Gurney and Herbert Howells. Howells set some of Will Harvey’s poems to music.

When war came in 1914, Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Will Harvey and Ivor Gurney went to war.

Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke did not survive, and Ivor Gurney was wounded and gassed so badly that it might be the cause of the bi-polar condition that dragged him into a mental hospital for the last 15 years of his life.

Will Harvey became a prisoner of war, and spent the last couple of years in an internment camp in Germany, having been imprisoned in solitary confinement for the early stage of his incarceration.

But this incarceration provided some material for his poetry. One poem was a very polite message to the German Kaiser, gently but effectively pointing out the evils of war; he’s homesick in captivity for the Severn plain; he makes a brave cheerful acceptance of his period of solitary confinement; he gently laments the death of a colleague, shot by the Germans while he was trying to escape.

There’s a sarcastic complaint about salaries and responsibilities in the army, in which the maximum of danger means the minimum of pay.

There’s a sad tribute to his friend Ivor Gurney, incarcerated in a mental hospital for the last 15 years of his life; there’s a trip from Framilode to Bollopool in a small sailing boat when he and his friends were young and reckless– Bollopool being just upstream from Framilode – another excuse for a poem – people have horses or motor cars, but never a boat to take them from Bollopool to Framilode and, possibly, the most famous of his poems, the quirky verse that describes the glorious absurdity of the ducks and the things that they do.

Back in England, he describes in slow motion on a cricket field the whizzing of the ball from a bat to a waiting fielder – time stands still, and the memory of this event remains.

He signs off with his ‘Apology for a Merry Rogue’, where he confesses his sins, but adds ‘From stodginess and hypocrisy, From envy, meanness and cruelty, May God of His grace, deliver me’.

I think you’re OK on that one, Will.