F.W. Harvey: Soldier, Poet E-Book

Anthony Boden

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 483

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

F.W. Harvey was one of a generation whose lives were splintered by the First World War, and one of that group of war poets for whom the war changed everything. He joined the 5th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment only days after war was declared, and was among the first Territorials to land in France. As a Lance-Corporal he was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for 'conspicuous gallantry' and was commissioned shortly afterwards. He survived the Somme offensive but in August 1916 was captured by the Germans while reconnoitring alone behind enemy lines. He spent the rest of the war in p-o-w camps. But Harvey was more than just a tough soldier. A contemporary of Sassoon, Brooke and Thomas – and with Ivor Gurney his closest friend – he wanted nothing more when 'at rest' than an interval of quiet in which to set down in verse his longing for his Gloucestershire homeland, his outrage at the waste of war, his joy in comradeship, his humour and his unflinching faith. This biography contains many of the poems, including the world-famous 'Ducks', and is illustrated with a wealth of contemporary photographs

Leseprobe

FOR

KRISTINA AND JONATHAN

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to F.W. Harvey’s daughter, Eileen Griffiths, for her advice, support and friendship; to his son, Patrick, for making available to me the poet’s own copies of his published works, for granting permission to quote his father’s poems and prose, for reading my typescript and making many valuable suggestions; and to Harvey’s niece, Rosemary Passmore-Rowe, who not only typed out my manuscript but also provided encouragement, hospitality and many of the Harvey family photographs in this book. To these three, to the poet’s cousin and close contemporary, Georgina Dye (née Harvey), and to Ivon Adams, Richard Carder, Brian Frith, Robin Haines, Phyllida Harris, Stephen Jack, John Marchant, Arthur Rigby, Robert Waller and David Wyatt, I am grateful for their time and reminiscences.

I would like to thank Mr R.A.J. Bell, Mr D.A.L. Thomas and Mr R.C. Aldridge for their memories of Lydney cricket, and Dr Cyril Hart for permission to quote from his history of the Lydney Cricket Club, 101 Not Out; Mr Frank Hubber, secretary of the Gloucester County Hockey Association; and Mr Terry Smith, secretary of the Gloucester City Cricket Club.

I must also thank Lt.-Col. H.L.T. Radice, archivist of the Gloucestershire Regimental Museum; Mrs Jill Voyce, Mrs Barbara Griffith and the staff of the Local History Dept., Gloucester City Library; Mr D.J.H. Smith, the County Archivist, and the staff of the Gloucestershire Record Office; Mrs Ann Smith for giving me access to her late father Mr Walter Deavin’s records of the 5th Battalion Glosters Old Comrades Association; and Mrs Monica Adams for allowing me to borrow her late father Mr W.J. Wood’s personal account of his service with the 5th Battalion Glosters between 1914 and 1918.

I am grateful to the headmaster of King’s School, Gloucester, The Revd Alan Charters, and the Vicemaster of Rossall School, Mr Peter Bennett, for details from old school registers, and to Mr and Mrs F.S. Stait for allowing me the opportunity to visit their home, The Redlands, Minsterworth.

The photograph on page 19 is published by courtesy of Gloucester City Library; those on pages 85, 86, 114, 121, 140, 190, 238, 241 and 244 The Imperial War Museum; that on page 353, The Citizen, Gloucester; and that on page 141, Camera Press, London. The drawing on page 317 is by Lynette Schiele. The extracts from Leonard Clark’s A Fool in the Forest and Brian Waters’s The Forest of Dean are reproduced by courtesy of Dobson Books Ltd. and J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. respectively. Quotations from the letters and poems of Ivor Gurney are published with the kind permission of the Trustee of the Ivor Gurney Estate, Mr Robin Haines.

A.N.B. January 1988

I am grateful to Mr M.R. Payne of Hartpury, Gloucestershire, for pointing out to me that the census returns of 1891, which were not available when the first edition of this book was published, show that the Harvey family was still residing at Marlesend House, Hartpury in that year. I am indebted to Mr and Mrs Peter Edwards for bringing photographs on pp.123 and 150 and allowing their publication, and to the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival for permission to reproduce the photograph on p. 335.

A.N.B. December 1997

I am indebted to Roger Deeks, the Chairman of the F.W. Harvey Society, for sharing with me the fruits of his Harvey research, for good conversation, and for encouraging me to embark upon a revision of this book. I am also grateful to the Secretary of the Society, Marie Fraser Griffiths, and to her fellow Society committee members Teresa Davies and Steve Cooper, for kindly providing valuable archive information and support, and to Jayne Cole for supplying me with a copy of her work on the Harvey family tree.

I owe especial thanks to members of F.W. Harvey’s family: to his grand-daughter, Elaine Jackson, for searching out and supplying previously unpublished photographs of her grandmother, Sarah Anne Harvey. To the late Melville Watts, O.B.E. for his encouragement, and for giving me the text of Will Harvey’s lecture on G.K. Chesterton that appears in Chapter 29. And to Harvey’s niece Rosemary Passmore-Rowe, M.B.E., and his daughter Eileen Griffiths, without whose friendship and continued support this book could not have been written.

Finally, I am most grateful to Douglas McLean for his advice, guidance and professionalism: it has been a very great pleasure to work with him on this book.

A.N.B. November 2010

I was saddened to learn of the death of Rosemary Passmore-Rowe MBE in 2014. It is impossible for me to overestimate the huge debt of gratitude that I owed to Rosemary for all the help and support that she gave me in the typing and preparation of both this book and others: she was a selfless treasure. I am also deeply grateful to Douglas McLean, now enjoying well-deserved retirement; he could not have been more helpful, friendly or efficient in bringing the third edition of this book to press.

A.N.B. March 2016

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

MINSTERWORTH

1      The Redlands

2      Day-Boys and Choristers

3      Dreams

4      Renaissance

5      Drum Taps

6      Bernard

ANOTHER SOUND

7      Reveille

8      Plug Street

9      Conspicuous Gallantry

10    ‘The Bird Stuffer’

11    A Gloucestershire Lad

COMRADES IN CAPTIVITY

12    Capture

13    Solitary Confinement

14    Gütersloh

15    Music

16    ‘The Pink Toe’

17    Crefeld

18    Schwarmstedt—And a Bid for Freedom

19    Gloucestershire Friends

20    Holzminden

21    Bad-Colberg

22    Morgenfrüh

HOME AGAIN

23    Home Again

24    ‘Farewell’

25    Happy Singing

26    Broadoak

FOREST OFFERING

27    ‘Faery-Crazed or Worse’

28    Trials

29    Gallant Friends

30    Sporting Times and Radio Times

31    Lovers Goodbye

Bibliography

Copyright

If We Return

(Rondeau)

If we return, will England be

Just England still to you and me?

The place where we must earn our bread?

We, who have walked among the dead,

And watched the smile of agony.

And seen the price of Liberty

Which we have taken carelessly

From other hands. Nay we shall dread,

                If we return.

Dread lest we hold blood-guiltily

The things that men have died to free.

Oh, English fields shall blossom red

For all the blood that has been shed

By men whose guardians are we,

                If we return.

Introduction

FREDERICK WILLIAM HARVEYWASBORN on 26 March 1888 at Murrell’s End in the Gloucestershire village of Hartpury. He was one of that generation whose lives were caught up in the splintering experience of the First World War, who ‘walked amongst the dead’ but were spared only to see their dreams of lasting peace cast aside in a second conflict. Will Harvey viewed humour as an act of courage with which to overcome adversity, and he possessed both humour and courage in large measure. Although a solicitor by profession, he was a gifted poet by inclination, as well as a tough soldier, sportsman, broadcaster and good companion.

Soon after war broke out in 1914, Harvey joined the 5th Territorial Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment and was amongst the first volunteers to land in France early in 1915. As a corporal he was decorated for gallantry, but, soon after being commissioned as a lieutenant, he was captured and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner.

Much of Harvey’s best-known work was written during the war, both in the trenches and later whilst he was in captivity. Some of these poems first appeared in the 5th Gloucester Gazette and were published shortly afterwards by Sidgwick & Jackson in two collections of his verse: A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad (1916) and Gloucestershire Friends: Poems from a German Prison Camp (1917). It was whilst he was a prisoner of war that he wrote his most popular and enduring poem ‘Ducks’, from which came the title for a third collection: Ducks and Other Verses (1919). After the war Sidgwick & Jackson published two more collections of Harvey’s verse: Farewell (1921) and his work of greatest maturity, September (1925). In addition, they published the only book of prose to appear in his lifetime, Comrades in Captivity (1919), an account of his years in German prisoner-of-war camps, a new edition of which was published by Douglas McLean in 2010. In 1926, Harvey was honoured by the inclusion of a volume of thirty-one of his poems in the prestigious Augustan Books series, and in that same year a further collection, In Pillowell Woods,was published by Frank H. Harris. This was a time in which Harvey’s Gloucestershire idylls matched the nostalgic mood of people yearning for a return to the apparent quiet prosperity of pre-war days. The mood did not last. One by one the books went out of print.

Although Harvey’s poems continued to appear in anthologies, as they still do, no new work was published until 1947 when Oliver & Boyd produced a selection under the title: Gloucestershire. By then the public, barely recovered from the Second World War and living through one of the coldest winters in memory under conditions of extreme austerity, failed to listen to Harvey’s song.

Harvey’s work was introduced to a new generation in 1983 with the publication by Douglas McLean of an inexpensive volume of his poems, including many not previously available (F.W. Harvey—Collected Poems 1912–1957), which was re-published in a new edition in 2009.

Two biographies of Harvey were published in 1988 to mark the centenary of his birth: Frances Townsend’s The Laureate of Gloucestershire—The Life and Work of F.W. Harvey(Redcliffe Press), and the first edition of this present volume (a second edition followed in 1998). Prompted by the launch of an F.W. Harvey Society in 2010, a third, revised edition of this biography was published by Douglas McLean in the following year, as was a volume of Selected Poems of F.W. Harvey, edited by R.K.R. Thornton and myself. Unusually for a book of poems, this collection was released complete with a free CD recording of all the selected poems read by professional actors Jan Carey and David Goodland, as well as, in rare BBC archive recordings from 1938, five readings by F.W. Harvey himself. Recent developments have included the publication in 2009 of a monograph by Ross Davies in the War Poets series published by Cecil Woolf: F.W. Harvey: Poet of Remembrance.

Harvey’s son, Patrick, died in 2007 leaving a large and previously undisclosed collection of his father’s personal papers in the family home at Yorkley in Gloucestershire, including, inter alia, the manuscript of an unpublished semi-autobiographical novel, discovered as a result of a collaborative project between the Gloucestershire Archives and the University of Exeter. With the approval of Eileen Griffiths, the daughter of F.W. Harvey, a Unversity of Exeter doctoral researcher, Grant Repshire, appointed to work exclusively on the Harvey papers, prepared the novel for publication. It was published by The History Press in 2014 under the title F.W. Harvey: A War Romance. The novel was adapted for the stage by Paul Milton and received its premiere at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, in the summer of 2014.

The Harvey family has now placed all of the F.W. Harvey papers on permanent loan at the Gloucestershire Archives.

Now, as we approach the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, public awareness of the suffering of those many thousands of young men who crossed the Channel bravely to face unspeakable horrors and to fight and die in muddy holes remains undimmed. Equally, there is continuing interest in that infinitely smaller number who earned the title War Poet and through whose words we relive the hopes, fears, doubts, sorrows, humour and courage of the many. Will Harvey was one of these; a contemporary of Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Charles Hamilton Sorley—and Ivor Gurney was proud to be his closest friend.

* * * * *

On the 29 March 1980, a service of dedication was held in the south transept of Gloucester Cathedral at which Lieutenant-Colonel H.L.T. Radice of the Gloucestershire Regiment unveiled a tablet to the memory of Will Harvey; it bears the following inscription, which includes a quotation from the poet’s own work, his ‘F.W.H., a Portrait’:

Frederick William HARVEY DCM

Soldier and Poet of Gloucestershire1888–1957

He loved the vision of this world and found it good

All the music chosen for the service was by composers with Gloucestershire associations: Basil Harwood, Tony Hewitt-Jones, Sebastian Wesley, Hubert Parry, and Harvey’s close friend Herbert Howells. Harvey’s poem ‘Beauty’, dedicated to Sir Edward Elgar, was read by another Gloucestershire friend and fellow poet, Leonard Clark. All this was exactly as Will Harvey would have wished it.

Will Harvey never forgot the comrades who marched with him to war; who fought, wept, laughed and prayed by his side. This tribute to him must also be, at least in part, a tribute to all the men of the 5th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment in the Great War, as well as to one who was their voice.

MINSTERWORTH

26. 3. 1888

March winds bugled that morn

In ear of a babe unborn:

‘Up, child! March!’

Lord, I have heeded Thy horn.

Song of Minsterwortb

Air: ‘The Vicar of Bray’

In olden, olden centuries

        On Gloucester’s holy ground, sir,

The monks did pray and chant all day,

        And grow exceeding round, sir;

And here’s the reason that they throve

        To praise their pleasant fortune,

‘We keep our beasts’—thus quoth the priests,

        ‘In Minsterworth—that’s Mortune!’*

So this is the chorus we will sing,

And this is the spot we’ll drink to,

While blossom blows and Severn flows,

And Earth has mugs to clink to.

Oh! there in sleepy Summer sounds

        The drowsy drone of bees, sir,

And there in Winter paints the sun

        His patterns ’neath the trees, sir;

And there with merry song doth run

        A river full of fish, sir,

That Thursday sees upon the flood

        And Friday on the dish, sir.

So this is the chorus we will sing,

And this is the spot we’ll drink to,

While blossom blows and Severn flows,

And Earth has mugs to clink to.

The jovial priests to dust are gone.

        We cannot hear their singing;

But still their merry chorus-song

        From newer lips runs ringing.

And we who drink the sunny air

        And see the blossoms drifting,

Will sit and sing the self-same thing

        Until the roof we’re lifting.

So this is the chorus we will sing,

And this is the spot we’ll drink to,

While blossom blows and Severn flows,

And Earth has mugs to clink to.

* The ancient name of the parish was Mortune—that is, the village in the mere; and the name was changed to Minsterworth early in the fourteenth century because it belonged to the Minster or Abbey of Gloucester, and was the Minster’s ‘Worth’ or farm where the cattle were kept.—F.W.H.

1

The Redlands

AFEWMILESTOTHEWEST of the old city of Gloucester is a land of water meadows and orchards entwined in the green curls of the River Severn. Clinging shyly to the northern bank of the river, almost hidden from the view of motorists speeding by to Chepstow and to Wales, is the village which to Will Harvey was ‘the queen of riverside places’, the place where he spent his youth, his first and most lasting love: Minsterworth.

Howard Harvey and his wife Cecilia Matilda (Tillie) had moved to Minsterworth in 1891 from the quiet village of Hartpury, a few miles to the north, when their son Will was three years old. His earliest memory was of seeing, as a tiny child, a hunt galloping over the Hartpury meadows: bright flashes in the sunlight, ‘viewhalloos’ and the raucous yelping of the pack.

The Harveys were of yeoman stock. Both Will’s father and grandfather were farmers, and the land which Howard Harvey bought at Minsterworth was ideally suited to the traditional farm so rarely seen today. There were pigs and poultry, dairy cattle, orchards of pear, apple and plum, and crops in the cultivated fields. But Howard Harvey introduced another enterprise: he bred the great shire horses, which in those days pulled the plough and the haywain. The property had once been known as Parlour’s Farm, but now, befitting the red earth of Minsterworth, it was called The Redlands.

The Redlands

The duck-pond at the Redlands

The large Georgian farmhouse at The Redlands still stands, well back from the main road and opposite a building that was once a part of the Harveys’ farm and is now the Apple Tree Inn. The massive brick-built barn is still there too, but the cattle-sheds, dairy and stables are silent. The solitary house is approached along a driveway bordered on one side by laurel bushes and on the other by a lawn, upon which the Harveys played croquet under the impassive gaze of a pair of stone lions. Behind the house was Will’s own wonderland: the big garden where he could play alone whilst Tillie kept watch from the house. Will occupied that special place in his mother’s heart reserved for a first-born son; extra-special as an earlier pregnancy had ended in a painful miscarriage.

To little Will the lawn must have seemed like a prairie in which to run and jump. But, better still, there was a small pond surrounded by trees where squirrels played; a square, rustic summer-house with a pointed roof; in the spring a crocus ring in the grass, dotted about with primroses. Beyond the garden was a paddock with a duck-pond for his delight. On either side of the paddock were fields with ancient names: Stony Barton and Barn Ground. Here Will grew to love the natural marvels of his surroundings through all the changing seasons. And nature rewarded him with a voice to tell of his love.

The Round Pool

When high flies the swallow

Fine weather will follow

And to this green hollow

    Will little boys come,

All heedless of mothers

And grim elder brothers,

Schoolmasters and others

    Who sit stern and glum,

To play round the water

With shout and shrill laughter

Till sunset and after,

    Forgetful of all;

While I never heeding

Time’s growth and rank seeding,

Mouse-like do sit feeding

    On joys past recall,

And hark to a singing

Of hours fleetly winging

To nowhere, yet bringing

    For ever new joy,

When earth was a chalice

Of wonder, not malice,

And time but a palace

    Built for a boy.

Howard Harvey c.1900

Tillie Harvey (1902).

Howard Harvey was a popular man. He worked the land with his brother Ernest and the two of them were familiar figures as horse-dealers in Gloucester, where they traded from an enclosure shaded by plane trees in the old cattle market. Howard was well known for his generosity and open, trusting nature; never short of friends who sought the warmth of his company, knowing that a visit to The Redlands would not end without a gift of vegetables, eggs or poultry. Tramps too knew that The Redlands was a ‘good house’ and left telltale chalk marks on the brick wall by the gate for the benefit of hungry fellow travellers.

Will’s father was attentive and kind in the care of his horses. Shortly after moving into The Redlands he bought a massive stallion which had been ill-treated and was, in consequence, of uncertain temperament and apt to kick out. One day, Tillie, looking out of the window, was alarmed to see that little Will was no longer in the garden where he had been playing. She rushed down to the pond, fearing what she might find and calling out ‘Where’s Willie?’ Howard and the farm boys came rushing in to the garden. The child was not in the pond and so an anxious search began. At last, they found him in the stables. Will was standing with the new horse, embracing one of its hind legs and resting his head against the animal, which remained absolutely still and docile, gazing round in curiosity at the child.1

In the six years from 1890, Tillie Harvey gave birth to four more children: first Eric, then Gladys in 1892, Fitzroy (Roy) in 1893 and lastly, in 1896, Bernard. Will now shared his games as an elder brother, but never a ‘grim’ one. The Harvey children all inherited that most splendid quality of the Gloucestershire farmer: a sense of humour. Friends and cousins came often and The Redlands was filled with life and laughter.

As the five children grew together their energetic games developed in them the speed and co-ordination of hand, foot and eye from which good sportsmen are made. Will became an enthusiastic and effective cricketer, footballer and hockey player, much in demand by local village teams. Later, he went on to play cricket and hockey for the Gloucester City teams and ultimately cricket for Lydney. Will even invented a particularly fast and unpredictable form of cricket which was played at The Redlands. This hilarious game was later to be described by Will’s friend and fellow Gloucestershire poet Leonard Clark: ‘You played Harvey’s cricket in a long, narrow court, no more than four feet wide, at the back of the house. There were no wickets but only a high wall behind you. The courtyard also had a roof, which covered it for half its length. The ball was a hard one, something in size between a cricket and a fives ball. You hit this, or at least tried to hit it, with a shortened hockey stick. You were out if the ball hit the wall three times. Every visitor to that house who had any interest in cricket was pressed to play that version of the game, whatever the season of the year. It had a long list of distinguished casualties, including two cathedral organists (bumps on the head), four county batsmen (broken knuckles), and many of the local farmers (normally, black eyes). I begin to ache again when I think of my wild efforts at that savage game’2

Howard and the farm boys taught Will to ride even before he could read, not letting him cut lessons short in spite of his complaints when his little legs were stiff and sore from sitting astride the broad spread of the big horses’ backs. ‘The cure for that’, Howard would say, ‘is to get right up again!’ In time, Will was given a pony of his own and the world grew from the confines of garden and farmyard to the fascination of exploring the Severn meadows.

Opposite The Redlands, Watery Lane leads through orchards and fields to Minsterworth village and Corn Ham, a broad tract of open land held in a restless, uncertain crook of the river. This was a good place to ride, even if sometimes the Severn asserted its sovereignty and flooded the ground such that Will, quite unafraid, turned for home with the water rising to touch the pony’s belly.

Eric, Roy and Bernard grew to be tall and good-looking, characteristics inherited from their mother. Will, however, remained short and was always, unjustifiably, ashamed of his appearance, later describing himself as: ‘A thick-set, dark-haired, dreamy little man, uncouth to see’. In his features and olive skin was a hint of the Jewish blood inherited from Tillie’s great-grandmother, Catherine Levi. Perhaps to compensate for his lack of height and handsome looks, Will determined to develop his physical power. He became a keen weight lifter, delighting himself and others with displays of strength. The gardener at The Redlands, Joe Freeman, himself no lightweight, was astonished when young Will suddenly came up and lifted him bodily off the ground, a trick often repeated for the amusement of friends.3 Mrs Harvey protested in vain that the effect of straining under such heavy weights would surely retard Will’s growth, and only rarely did he ignore her advice.

Tillie was the inseparable heart of Will’s Minsterworth world. To him she was more than a much-loved mother, the symbol of constancy and reassurance. Her tall, stately beauty, sensitive mouth, russet eyes and quiet-spoken dignity dazzled his imagination. In his mind she held the authority and grace of a Roman patrician lady, whose guidance and comfort he sought to the end of her life. Tillie, both home-loving and talented, ran The Redlands household with an ideal blend of domestic order and perceptive good taste. In this she was helped by a cook, washerwoman and live-in kitchen maid. Her unmarried sister, Kate Waters, also lived at The Redlands and shared in the chores as well as the privileges of so comfortable a home. Kate was a fine cook and extremely popular with Will, especially so when she made the delicious damson cheese which was his particular favourite.

The table at The Redlands boasted the best from the farm, and from the river nearby came a yield of silver treasure harvested by moonlight in traditional Severn putcheons.4 There is salmon-fishing by Minsterworth no longer, but men still wade out with lantern and net to catch the elusive local delicacy which Will loved to eat, fried with egg, for his breakfast: elvers!

Up the Severn River from Lent to Eastertide

Millions and millions of slithy elvers glide,

Millions, billions of glassy bright

    Little wormy fish,

        Chewed-string fish,

            Slithery dithery fish,

In the dead of night.

Tillie’s joy was to make a good home for her family. But more than that, she was a cultured woman who loved the arts, whose most proud possession was her grand piano, which she played well, and who entertained herself and her guests with a pleasant singing voice. She was ambitious for her children and insisted that they should have the very best education the family’s means would allow.

Will was to be brought up as a gentleman.

My Village

I love old Minsterworth. I love the trees:

And when I shut my eyes they are most clear,

Those leafy homes of wren and red-breast dear,

Those winter traceries so black and light.

I love the tangled orchards blowing bright

With clouds of apple blossom, and the red

Ripe fruit that hangs a-shining in blue air

Like rubies hanging in the orchard’s hair.

I love old Minsterworth. I love the river

Where elver fishers bend with twinkling lights

And salmon catchers spend their fruitful nights.

I love the sleek brown skin, the mighty rush,

The angry head upreared, the splendid hush

When the Great Bore (grown breathless) ’ere he turns

Catches his wind; and nothing on the thick

Tide moves; and you can hear your watch’s tick.

I love old Minsterworth. I love the men:

The fishers and the cider-makers and

All who laugh and labour on that land

With humour and long patience loved of God.

I love the harmless gossips all a-nod,

The children bird-like, and the women old

Like wrinkled crab-apples: and I will pray—

God save old Minsterworth, and such, for aye.

Notes

F.W. Harvey’s own record of the two years spent in German prison camps, Comrades in Captivity (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1920; reprinted by Douglas McLean Publishing, 2010), provides the chief source material for chapters twelve to twenty-two of this book.

It has been possible to reconstruct a fairly detailed account of Harvey’s other war experiences through the information given on the 1/5th Battalion Glosters in The Gloucestershire Regiment in the War 1914–1918 by Everard Wyrall (Methuen, 1931), and on the 2/5thBattalion Glosters in The Story of the 2/5th Gloucestershire Regiment 1914–1918 edited by A.F. Barnes, MC (The Crypt House Press, Gloucester, 1930). In addition, the first-hand account by the late Mr W.J. Wood, European War with the 5th Gloucesters (at Home and Overseas from 3 August 1914 to 21 March 1918), as published in The Back Badge and also privately printed by Mr Wood’s family, has been particularly valuable. In the following notes, these three references are identified by ‘Wyrall’, ‘Barnes’ or ‘Wood’ as appropriate.

Since the publication in 1998 of the second edition of this book, the collections of Harvey’s notes and letters that were formerly held in the Local History Collection of the Gloucester City Library have been transferred to the Gloucestershire Archives, formerly the Gloucestershire Record Office, indicated below by the abbreviation ‘G.A.’ The letters of Ivor Gurney are also held in the Gloucestershire Archives, and are published in the R.K.R. Thornton edition indicated below.

1.  Eileen Griffiths reminiscences.

2.  Clark, A Fool in the Forest, pp. 107–108.

3.  Georgina Dye reminiscences.

4.  Wickerwork funnels for trapping the fish.

2

Day-Boys and Choristers

STANDINGONLYAFEWFEETAWAY from the river bank at Minsterworth is the Parish Church of St Peter, opened in 1870 and aptly-named in a place where once village fishermen gave part of their catch to an earlier church. The Severn, dissatisfied with this proxy tribute, had often washed over the graveyard, forced its unwelcome way under the doors and rippled up the nave to kiss the chancel steps. This watery intrusion was solved with Victorian thoroughness. The old church was demolished and its proud, decorated successor raised up by four feet and protected from the river by an earthen bank. Twenty-one years after its consecration the new village church became a regular place of worship for the Harvey family.

Will’s attendance at St Peter’s was no mere obedience to middle-class convention. The liturgy of the church, the familiar, insistent metre of the Psalms and the rich language of the Authorised Version of the Bible gave the child his first knowledge of the power of words.

Minsterworth Church

In 1906, the Revd. C.O. Bartlett was appointed vicar at Minsterworth. The families at The Vicarage and The Redlands enjoyed each other’s company and the Bartletts’ son, Nigel, who was the same age as Bernard, became a good friend of the Harvey boys. In his teenage years Nigel often visited the farm to play tennis or cricket with the brothers, or set off on walks over the Severn meadows with one or more of them, the Harvey family pet spaniel, Nelson, chasing on ahead.

Will was a committed and lifelong Christian and, in his youth, took an active part in the life of St Peter’s Church, serving as both churchwarden and choirmaster for a time. Later he would write: ‘My love for certain men and women is the all-compelling personal argument for another life than this. Earth is too small.’

In one of the charming little poems for children which he wrote during the war, Will captures the wonder of a small boy from Minsterworth village going to church for the first time; in a subscript to the poem he tells us that it is ‘a true tale’:

Little Abel goes to Church

And this is what he heard

And saw at church:

Oh, a great yellow bird

Upon a perch—

Quite still upon a perch.

And then a man in white

Got up and walked to it,

And talked to it

For a long while (he said);

But the yellow bird

(Although it must have heard!)

Never turned its head,

Or did anything at all

But look straight at the wall!

School was not for Will Harvey until he was nine years old. Until then, his education was placed in the care of a governess, Miss Whitehead, the erudite daughter of a local vicar. She introduced Will to the world of literature, including the work of her favourite poets, Shelley and Browning amongst them. She was soon to discover that her young pupil not only shared her enthusiasm for verse, but that he had the ability to memorise lengthy poems with apparent ease. By the time Will was seven years old he could recite Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ and the Twenty-third Psalm by heart. During the following year much more was committed to his memory, including Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome’ and, a particular favourite, Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, that delightful children’s story in verse of no less than three hundred and three lines.1

Miss Whitehead was not Will’s only teacher at The Redlands. Tillie happily shared her musical talent with her first-born, patiently sitting by his side at the piano and guiding him along the uneven, stony road of scales, arpeggios and broken chords. Will was an eager pupil and became a competent pianist, but always maintained that his fingers were not quite long enough for the piano—only fit to hold a cricket bat. However, it was soon found that he had a good singing voice, and so the choice of his first school was probably an automatic one for Howard and Tillie. In 1897 they sent him as a day-boy to The King’s School in Gloucester, which since the days of Henry VIII had provided choristers for the cathedral.

Early each morning Will set out on his pony from Minsterworth along the road into Gloucester. These were the days before motor cars and lorries spoilt the peaceful scene with noise and fumes, or even electric street lamps illuminated the way. His journey took him past Highnam Court, country home of the composer Hubert Parry, and across the river at Over Bridge. All the while he would see the city set in its valley, dominated by the magnificent tower of the Cathedral Church of St Peter and the Holy and Indivisible Trinity, an inescapable landmark and his daily goal. Riding down the gently sloping road, he would enter Gloucester by the Westgate Bridge and come into the city which breathed history from its Roman shape, its ancient buildings and evocative street names. Here, King William had ordered the Domesday Book to be compiled; Bishop Hooper was burned at the stake by Queen Mary’s command; and Colonel Massey’s Roundheads withstood a Royalist siege.

The King’s School stood, as it still does, in the shadow of the cathedral. But unfortunately the education and facilities that it offered could not compare with those available at many other fine schools. The standards at King’s at that time were a far cry from those of today’s fine school, and it seems, too, that the then dean and chapter of the cathedral were interested in the school only as a source of choristers.

The King’s School (‘The College’), Gloucester.

School began at 8.45 a.m., but was interrupted by morning service from 10.15 to 11.30. Before lunch there was music practice between 12 noon and 1 p.m. with lessons resuming at 2 p.m. Evensong was from 4 to 4.45 p.m.,2 after which Will climbed back on to his pony, patiently waiting in the schoolyard, to clop back to Minsterworth and tea.

Will settled into the rigorous routine of cathedral school life. He excelled at cricket and football, and even became a serious amateur weightlifter for a while. In spite of the low standard of tuition, he was happy to claim in later years that he had, at The King’s School, ‘learned to love music and the Cathedral and to learn how to learn’.3

In the autumn term of 1900 a new boy entered The King’s School, two years younger than himself, with whom, eight years later, Will would forge the strongest links of friendship. His name was Ivor Gurney.

* * * * *

In 1902 Howard and Tillie decided that Will should have a change of school. This may well have been because of the poor academic reputation of King’s at that time or simply because his voice had broken. However, unlike Eric, Roy and Bernard who were all sent as boarders to Abingdon, for Will they selected Rossall School. Certainly the standards at Rossall were high, but there is another plausible reason for their choice. Will had begun to be troubled by a small glandular swelling in his neck and, at a time when tuberculosis was a pernicious scourge, they feared that their son had an infected gland. No treatment with drugs was available and, short of surgery, plenty of fresh sea air was a recommended treatment. Rossall School is situated on the breezy Lancashire coast close to Fleetwood. However, in addition to the suspicion of a developing medical problem, Will was beginning to display that characteristic sometimes found in the creative spirit: he was, they said, ‘highly strung’.4

Will was undoubtedly reluctant to leave his beloved Gloucestershire and all his friends. Tillie took him up to Lancashire in a taxi for his first day at Rossall and, arriving in Fleetwood early, mother and son walked together by the sea for a while, wrapped up against a chilly autumn day. Then, like so many before him and since, a rather anxious little boy was kissed goodbye at his new school, and left with his trunk and his thoughts.

The first flavour of Rossall life which Will had to taste was the initiation ceremony. The custom then was for newcomers to be made to stand on a table in the refectory during the evening meal and to give some sort of performance in front of the whole school gathered there. Perhaps this nervous lad was expected to dissolve into tears; but not so. Up climbed Will, amid jeering, laughter and the banging of table-tops. Quite undeterred he began to recite in an unfaltering voice:

Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick,

By famous Hanover city;

The river Weser, deep and wide,

Washes its wall on the southern side . . .

The noise stopped. Every boy in the room began to listen in amazed silence and admiration as, on and on, through hundreds of perfectly-remembered lines, Will recited Browning’s ‘Pied Piper of Hamelin’, coming at length to the last of its fifteen stanzas:

So, Willy, let me and you be wipers

Of scores out with all men, especially pipers!

And, whether they pipe us free from rats or from mice,

If we’ve promised them aught, let us keep our promise!

When Will sat down it was to cheers, respect and acceptance. In the following weeks and months, the respect was consolidated as he went on to gain places in both the football and hockey First XIs.5

By the time Will was sixteen his voice had settled into a pleasant baritone and, although he did not consider himself a musician, he was persuaded to enter for the singing prize at Rossall. The scene in the crowded school chapel as Will made his way to the chancel steps past pupils and staff may well be imagined. He had chosen to sing John Liptrot Hatton’s setting of Herrick’s poem ‘To Anthea’, which had been recorded in 1904 by the great baritone Sir Charles Santley. The pianist played the opening bar, but Will, suddenly gripped by nerves, missed his entry. Without hesitating, the pianist repeated the introduction as though by design, stressing the prompt notes a little more forcefully, and this time all went well. Will sang from the heart:

The Chapel, Rossall School.

Bid me to live, and I will live

Thy Protestant to be,

Or bid me love, and I will give

A loving heart to thee.

The singing prize was his.6

Will left Rossall School in 1905. Back at The Redlands the months passed by pleasantly, but by the time he reached his eighteenth birthday in the following year he still had no clear idea of what he should do to earn a living. He had begun to express his love for Gloucestershire in verse, and most probably cherished a wish even then to become a poet. But Tillie, ever practical, wanted a firmly based profession for her eldest son.

Taking the initiative as always, she hauled Will off to a phrenologist. Will sat in puzzled silence whilst fingers probed the mysteries of his cranial ‘bumps’. After a while, the examination concluded, the phrenologist pronounced that Will would be suited to either the musical or the legal profession.7 That was good enough for Tillie: a lawyer he would be!

F.W. (Will) Harvey c.1906.

Notes

F.W. Harvey’s own record of the two years spent in German prison camps, Comrades in Captivity (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1920; reprinted by Douglas McLean Publishing, 2010), provides the chief source material for chapters twelve to twenty-two of this book.

It has been possible to reconstruct a fairly detailed account of Harvey’s other war experiences through the information given on the 1/5th Battalion Glosters in The Gloucestershire Regiment in the War 1914–1918 by Everard Wyrall (Methuen, 1931), and on the 2/5thBattalion Glosters in The Story of the 2/5th Gloucestershire Regiment 1914–1918 edited by A.F. Barnes, MC (The Crypt House Press, Gloucester, 1930). In addition, the first-hand account by the late Mr W.J. Wood, European War with the 5th Gloucesters (at Home and Overseas from 3 August 1914 to 21 March 1918), as published in The Back Badge and also privately printed by Mr Wood’s family, has been particularly valuable. In the following notes, these three references are identified by ‘Wyrall’, ‘Barnes’ or ‘Wood’ as appropriate.

Since the publication in 1998 of the second edition of this book, the collections of Harvey’s notes and letters that were formerly held in the Local History Collection of the Gloucester City Library have been transferred to the Gloucestershire Archives, formerly the Gloucestershire Record Office, indicated below by the abbreviation ‘G.A.’ The letters of Ivor Gurney are also held in the Gloucestershire Archives, and are published in the R.K.R. Thornton edition indicated below.

1.  Eileen Griffiths and Patrick Harvey reminiscences.

2.  Hurd, The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney, p. 13 (Herbert Howells reminiscences).

3.  Patrick Harvey reminiscences.

4.  Eileen Griffiths and Georgina Dye reminiscences.

5.  Rossall School Register.

6.  Eileen Griffiths and Patrick Harvey reminiscences.

7.  Eileen Griffiths reminiscences.

3

Dreams

ON 21 JULY 1906, WILLEMBARKEDUPON the study of laws common, civil and criminal, articled to Mr Frank Treasure, a Gloucester solicitor. Treasure’s office was then, as it is now, situated in St John’s Lane, a narrow byway forming the hypotenuse to the right angle of Northgate and Westgate.

Along these two Roman streets, and their sisters Southgate and Eastgate, folk from the Gloucestershire countryside came to trade in the city with produce from the fields, fish and elvers from the Severn, sheep and wool from the Cotswolds, cattle from the meadows, timber and coal from the Forest of Dean, and heavy horses from Minsterworth. Hard by in Gloucester’s ancient docks tall-masted ships unloaded cargo from far away and sailed out again laden with wool and flour. The market, the streets and the inns were filled with men and women in whose faces was recorded a proud and ancient rural English heritage.

These sights, sounds and smells were in sharp and tantalising contrast to the shaded precision of a solicitor’s desk. Lifting his eyes from dry documents Will could gaze out of the windows at the back of Treasure’s office and see, almost close enough to touch, the beckoning tower of Gloucester Cathedral.

Try as he might, Will could not prevent daydreams of Cotswold ways and Severn meadows from leading his mind away from the essentials of tort, contract and conveyance. Time and again he would wander out of the office to find a quiet place by the river, in the woodlands or on the hilly slopes around the city, to sit and study nature’s stirrings and harmony.

One day, in 1908, Will had boarded a tram in Gloucester when a young man whose face was vaguely familiar came and sat beside him. A few words quickly established that both had attended The King’s School, although in different classes. The young man was Ivor Gurney, now an articled pupil of Dr Brewer, the cathedral organist.1 The conversation of the two turned to music and poetry; and so began a lifelong friendship.

Sometimes, if Ivor Gurney could get away from the cathedral, the two friends would go off together, sharing their discoveries and talking endlessly of music and books. A favourite place was Chosen Hill, close enough to the city to be reached easily, but far enough away to be blissfully tranquil. From the top of the little hill the view stretches away across the Severn Vale to the Malverns, the Cotswolds and Bredon; there are traces of an encampment from which the Romans kept watch over Gloucester, and a little church marks a place of worship older than Christianity. Will and Ivor felt themselves to be possessed by Gloucestershire. For them the life-giving air carried the essential balm of Gloucestershire’s earth.

Whenever possible the pair would escape together to the welcoming farm at Minsterworth to help in the fields, to walk in the Severn meadows, to pick fruit in the orchard, to play ‘ping-pong’ on the long dining-room table or cricket with Will’s brothers and friends, to set off with guns to bag rabbits for the pot, to make music, and always to talk. At Gurney’s favourite Severn-side village, Framilode, they bought a little boat, which they named after one of Gurney’s two sisters, Dorothy, and found in her the strenuous pleasure of sailing wide stretches of the river. In later, less innocent years, both men were to celebrate the Dorothy in verse. Here is Will Harvey’s poem:

Ballade of River Sailing

TheDorothy was very small: a boat

    Scarce any bigger than the sort one rows

With oars! We got her for a five-pound note

    At second-hand. Yet when the river flows

    Strong to the sea, and the wind lightly blows,

Then see her dancing on the tide, and you’ll

    Swear she’s the prettiest little craft that goes

Up-stream from Framilode to Bollopool.

Bare-footed, push her from the bank afloat,

    (The soft warm mud comes squelching through your toes!)

Scramble aboard: then find an antidote

    For every care a jaded spirit knows:

    While round the boat the broken water crows

With laughter, casting pretty ridicule

    On human life and all its little woes,

Up-stream from Framilode to Bollopool.

How shall I tell you what the sunset wrote

    Upon the outspread waters—gold and rose:

Or how the white sail of our little boat

    Looks on a summer sky? The hills enclose

        With blue solemnity: each white scar shows

Clear on the quarried Cotteswolds high and cool.

    And high and cool a fevered spirit grows

Up-stream from Framilode to Bollopool.

Envoi

Prince, you have horses; motors, I suppose,

    As well! At finding pleasure you’re no fool.

But have you got a little boat that blows

Up-stream from Framilode to Bollopool?

* * * * *

The City of Gloucester is more than the commercial focus of a largely agricultural community. For approaching three centuries it has played host in every third year, alternating with Hereford and Worcester, to the annual celebration of music known throughout the world as the Three Choirs Festival. The music is centred on the cathedrals of the three cities and the programme each year includes a number of large-scale choral works. Whilst a boy at The King’s School, Will Harvey would have attended some of these concerts and become familiar with oratorios such as Handel’s Messiah andMendelssohn’s Elijah. Then, in 1900, a new British sacred choral work received its first performance in Birmingham and soon proved to be not only equal in popularity to those great works but also an undoubted musical masterpiece.

Edward Elgar, a devout Roman Catholic and pillar of the Three Choirs Festival, composed The Dream of Gerontius in exultant mood. He knew the worth of his creation and inscribed the finished score in quotation from Ruskin: ‘This is the best of me . . . this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory’. Cardinal Newman had written his visionary poem, set by Elgar, in 1865 in response to emotions felt at the death of a dear friend. His words and Elgar’s magisterial music combine in a devout expression of Catholic Christianity: an affirmation of unshakeable faith.

The only difficulty for the Establishment was that this faith was not that of right-thinking Protestants. No matter how God-given was Elgar’s inspiration, his masterpiece was at first deemed unsuitable for performances in Anglican cathedrals. Even Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, respected composer and professor of music, is said to have told Elgar: ‘My boy, it stinks of incense’.

It has to be remembered that the Church of England had, in the previous seventy years, been buffeted by the arguments which had surrounded the Oxford Movement: the activities of that group of clergy which had exerted pressure for the Church to move towards Anglo-Catholicity. Add to this the fact that John Henry Newman had been a pivotal figure in the group; that he had taken his beliefs to their ultimate conclusion and become a convert to Roman Catholicism; that he had risen in the hierarchy of the Church of Rome to become a cardinal, and a hostile reaction from the Anglican Church was hardly surprising.

None the less, if the doors of Gloucester Cathedral were to be, for the time being, closed against Elgar’s finest work, the members of Gloucester Choral Society would sing it in any case. In the Shire Hall, on the evening of 3 December 1906, The Dream of Gerontius was performed in Gloucester for the first time. The tenor Gervase Elwes, himself a staunch Catholic, sang the name part; Percy Underwood sang the bass parts of The Priest and The Angel of the Agony; the name of the contralto soloist is lost. Eighteen-year-old Will Harvey was in the audience. The impact of the work upon him was immediate, lasting, and in his own words, ‘white hot’.

Writing to his great friend August Jaeger, Elgar had said that he imagined Gerontius a sinner, a worldly man, and so he had not filled ‘his part with Church tunes and rubbish but a good, healthy full-blooded romantic, remembered worldliness’.2 This vision of death and the journey of the soul after death exactly matched Will’s instinctive beliefs and hopes: that it was perfectly reasonable and proper to enjoy life to the full in this world, and yet not be denied atonement and the chance to see God ‘in the truth of everlasting Day’.3

The first flagstone on the path, which would eventually lead Will Harvey to Rome, had been cemented firmly into place.

* * * * *

Credit for the first Gloucester performance of The Dream of Gerontius must go to the conductor of the Gloucester Choral Society and founder of the Gloucestershire Orchestral Society, the largest amateur orchestra in the country at that time, Dr (later Sir) Herbert Brewer, who was also the cathedral organist and Ivor Gurney’s teacher. In 1907, another pupil came to Dr Brewer, a young man from Lydney, a small town in the Forest of Dean. His name was Herbert Howells.

Howells’s father was a tradesman whose business had failed, but Herbert’s musical talent had already been noticed and he was fortunate enough to attract the patronage of the wealthy Bathurst family who funded his private lessons with Dr Brewer. Later Howells became an articled pupil alongside Ivor Gurney.4

Howells and Gurney were very contrasting characters: Howells short, good-looking, carefully dressed and precise in manner; Gurney tall, handsome, bespectacled, often untidy, disorganised and fun-loving. Even so, they had much in common: an ambition to achieve something worthwhile in music and to find fame, an appreciation of poetry and, not least, a deep love for Gloucestershire. Their lasting friendship was assured and, when Gurney introduced Howells to Harvey, three like minds met in harmony: a triumvirate of remarkable creativity.

Howells recalled that friendship in a BBC radio tribute, broadcast in the year following Will Harvey’s death:

…Obviously, the beginning of it all was the interest all three of us had in music. Harvey was one of the pleasantest amateur singers I ever knew. He had a light baritone voice and had a way of making his singing as interesting as his talk and that is saying a great deal.

But gradually the music seemed to fade and what took its place was a series of extensive walks in which we discussed the universe… if one walked to Deerhurst, as one often did. I like to recall that in those days, of the three of us, Harvey had by far the greatest common sense. This was before the First World War when things seemed not to have happened to him which made him take quite another turn, both mentally and spiritually. …He came to live in a world of fantasy and I’d be far from saying that the foundations of that world had not already been laid … and of course, he was oblivious of time. That timelessness in Harvey was a comparatively early development. . . .

Harvey was a man supersensitive to the sensibilities of other people. You never met a man who didn’t like Harvey.

Harvey and Gurney had two things very much in common. Gurney could meet anyone and talk his language, and the gift that Harvey possessed remarkably in those early years was of letting every man blossom in his presence. Every man would reveal himself quite easily to Harvey. . . .

He had a curiously instinctive understanding of the art which was not precisely his. Music was not his art, but I can think of very few people whom I would more willingly talk to about music.5

In the following years the three friends developed artistically together and Will continued to strive with the law. All three—Gurney, Howells and Harvey—became immersed in and influenced by the music and literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Later, Howells was to say that all through his life he had felt that he belonged to the Tudor period, and Harvey once exclaimed; ‘I would love to be able to wear the colours of the Tudors—but here I am dressed all in brown!’6

Through professional contacts in Gloucester, Harvey met another lifelong friend: the solicitor John (Jack) Haines, himself a published poet and friend of poets. Ivor Gurney and Will Harvey were regular callers at Haines’s office in King Street7 and one can imagine that very little of the conversation was concerned with legal matters.

Haines was a fine hockey player, eventual chairman of the Gloucester City Club and a member of the England Hockey Selection Committee. Will played regularly for the Gloucester City Thursday XI and therefore his contacts with Haines—business, literary and sporting—were frequent. In addition, he was often invited to visit the Haines family home: ‘Midhurst’ in Green Lane, Hucclecote, just outside Gloucester.8

It is remarkable that four young men of like-mind, like-age and inspirationally supportive of each other should come together in the same place and at the same time as if so pre-ordained. But between the four the closest bond was that tied by Will and Ivor. And Haines confirmed as much when, years later in an article on Gurney, he wrote: ‘F.W. Harvey was Damon to his Pythias from the earliest years’.*

Also firm in friendship and in support of Will’s poetry was William (Pat) Kerr, civil servant and published poet: a literary talker, and writer of style and wit, who was to become leader-writer for the Yorkshire Post and literary critic of the Gloucester Journal. Kerr held strong Catholic beliefs and undoubtedly influenced Will in the direction which his spiritual path was to take.

At about this time Will wrote in his notebook: ‘Only a muscular Catholicism can save England’.

Notes

F.W. Harvey’s own record of the two years spent in German prison camps, Comrades in Captivity (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1920; reprinted by Douglas McLean Publishing, 2010), provides the chief source material for chapters twelve to twenty-two of this book.

It has been possible to reconstruct a fairly detailed account of Harvey’s other war experiences through the information given on the 1/5th Battalion Glosters in The Gloucestershire Regiment in the War 1914–1918 by Everard Wyrall (Methuen, 1931), and on the 2/5thBattalion Glosters in The Story of the 2/5th Gloucestershire Regiment 1914–1918 edited by A.F. Barnes, MC (The Crypt House Press, Gloucester, 1930). In addition, the first-hand account by the late Mr W.J. Wood, European War with the 5th Gloucesters (at Home and Overseas from 3 August 1914 to 21 March 1918), as published in The Back Badge and also privately printed by Mr Wood’s family, has been particularly valuable. In the following notes, these three references are identified by ‘Wyrall’, ‘Barnes’ or ‘Wood’ as appropriate.

Since the publication in 1998 of the second edition of this book, the collections of Harvey’s notes and letters that were formerly held in the Local History Collection of the Gloucester City Library have been transferred to the Gloucestershire Archives, formerly the Gloucestershire Record Office, indicated below by the abbreviation ‘G.A.’ The letters of Ivor Gurney are also held in the Gloucestershire Archives, and are published in the R.K.R. Thornton edition indicated below.

*     Pythias offended Dionysius, the ruler of the Sicilian town of Syracuse, and was condemned to die. He begged to be allowed to go home to see his wife and children, but Dionysius laughed him to scorn, believing that, once gone, Pythias would never return.

          Pythias’s friend Damon came forward to offer himself as surety for Pythias. Dionysius was astonished that a man should love his friend so dearly as to offer his life in his friend’s place for the sake of Pythias’s wife and children.

          As Pythias rode back to Syracuse, his horse was killed and his return was much delayed. Damon prepared to die, but Pythias arrived just in time to save him. Even so, Damon pleaded with Dionysius to let him bear the punishment instead of his friend. Dionysius, who had not thought such faithfulness existed in the world, took the hands of both men into his own and begged to be allowed to share their perfect friendship.

1.  Patrick Harvey reminiscences.

2.  Ian Parrott, Elgar (The Master Musicians series).

3.  Quotation from The Dream of Gerontius.

4.  Hurd, op.cit.,p. 24.

5.  A Portrait of F.W. Harvey by His Friends, BBC broadcast produced by Robert Waller, 1958.

6.  Reminiscences of Eileen Griffiths.

7.  Robin Haines reminiscences.

8.  Ibid.