Any contact between Robert Graves and Ivor Gurney has been hidden until quite recently, until revealed in a brief reference in Gurney’s Collected Letters,¹ and the discovery of two letters from Graves in the Haines archive at Gloucester Library. Although Michael Hurd mentioned Gurney’s trip to Oxford in 1919 in his pioneering biography, The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (1978), he did not suggest there that the two poets actually met on the occasion, though it seems likely enough.

‘Well, here goes for Masefield, Captain Stratton, Reynard the Fox and all!’ – as Ivor Gurney wrote to his friend Marion Scott on the train to Oxford on 8 November 1919.² John Masefield had invited him with his friend the poet (and singer) Will Harvey to come and perform some of his songs at the house on Boar’s Hill. A few days later he wrote to John Haines, a solicitor and amateur poet:

On Saturday […] we visited Masefield in his proper haunt at Boar’s Hill, where are Graves, Nichols and Bridges also. He was extremely nice, a boyish, quiet person, with a manner friendly enough, and easy to get on with. […]

Neither FWH nor myself thought he cared much for ‘By a

Bierside’, but ‘The Halt of the Legion’, & ‘Up on the Downs’ pleased him. Masefield expressed admiration for my last book [War’s Embers], and I fancy wants me to go to Oxford on a grant.³

This occasion was probably Gurney’s first meeting with Graves, who was living with his wife, Nancy, in a cottage in Masefield’s garden, while he studied at St John’s College. He had already expressed admiration for Graves in various letters the previous year: ‘Sorry that the reviewers think Graves cannot write; for he is a poet and I am not.’⁴ Gurney’s six settings of Graves all followed this meeting. They are: ‘Star Talk’, ‘Nine of the Clock’, ‘Goodnight to the Meadow’, ‘Hawk and Buckle’, ‘Loving Henry’ and ‘Brittle Bones’. To date, the first four have been published to date, as well as recorded.⁵

‘Star Talk’, one of Graves’ earliest poems, (a modern nursery rhyme, from which Gurney chose just three of the five verses) is interesting as it was set twice: first in 1920, then again in 1925, when Gurney had been in the asylum for two years. It was the latter version which was published, and shows some signs of disturbance towards the end. Luckily his friend, Marion Scott, had made a copy of the first version, which has survived.⁶ The next known contact was a letter from Graves to Gurney in November 1920 from Boar’s Hill:

Dear Gurney,

Many thanks for yours, and glad to hear about ‘Brittle Bones’ being accepted by Rogers. – My new book should be out about Christmas [The Pier-Glass], and contains several lyrics of correct quality, but is very different as a book from Country Sentiment. Shanks is a very good fellow; Blunden one of the best in the world and solid all through; he is one of the great prose-writers of the future. He will never (but this is a private opinion not to be divulged) perhaps improve on The Waggoner volume in poetry though. Are you coming to Oxford? By the way, when fixing up an agreement with Rogers, please don’t sign away any copyright of mine. – Of course I won’t queer your pitch by asking too much for the words, but I have to do all these jobs through my literary agent.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Graves.⁷

Winthrop Rogers was an American music publisher in London who took on several of Gurney’s songs and his ‘Five Preludes’ for piano, but regrettably died before this song could be published. His daughter, who took over the business, refused to publish it, which is not surprising as it is certainly the least original musically, being in a conventional ballad style. Graves’s next letter was written from Harlech on 30 July 1921:

Dear Gurney,

I couldn’t write before as I had nobody who could play the accompaniments, but a very capable sister was found today to tackle the job, and both she and I were very much impressed and delighted. – I can stop Heath doing ‘Brittle Bones’, which he has not started yet, I think. – ‘Apples and Water’ is a real winner. I’ve just been doing the best work of my life; very compressed dramatic pieces, full of abstract brain. – I don’t know how on earth you can get a government grant at Oxford: it’s only done by already belonging to a college as I did: by pulling strings on the strength of your musical attainments. – But I can’t think who to approach: John Masefield would be able to work it perhaps, he’s in with all the principal people. So glad your music is as good as I expected, and better. – Packing up today to return to Boar’s Hill tomorrow.

Best of luck. Do you want the scores returned?

Robert Graves.⁸

Gurney’s setting of ‘Apples and Water’ has regrettably been lost.

The ‘capable sister’ was Rosaleen, who was to undertake medical training, and become a GP in South Devon. But her own musical accomplishments were good enough to have her arrangement of a Breton folk-song, ‘The Silver Mirror’, published by Stainer & Bell in 1928; in it she preserves the modal (Dorian) scale, typical of Celtic music, and shows some sophistication in her piano writing.

‘Heath’ was Dr John Heath of Barmouth, the local GP in North Wales, and an amateur self-taught composer, who nevertheless had several pieces published, including two songs to Robert’s poems: ‘Cherry Time’, and ‘Allie’ in 1920 and 1921. Gurney wrote to Haines in February 1921 about Graves’s recent book: ‘Country Sentiment has yielded up 5 or 6 now; – a bad setting of ‘Allie’ by J. R. Heath gave encouragement.’⁹ Heath’s setting is not as bad as Gurney implies, and though not as sophisticated as Gurney’s, has an appropriately simple melody for this childlike lyric, which rises above the merely corny.

Graves had earlier enlisted, through contact with Eddie Marsh, the services of Ivor Novello, who by 1918 had become famous, with songs such as ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. Novello was given two poems, ‘The Careless Lady’ and ‘Vain Man’, but achieved only the writing of a tune for the second, in May 1918, before losing interest; which is hardly surprising given the weakness of the lyric! ‘The Careless Lady’ was later enlarged to seven verses for inclusion in Country Sentiment. But Graves had realised their incompatibility when he visited Novello in London that year while in his army uniform. As he described sarcastically in Goodbye to All That:

I found him wearing a silk dressing-gown, in an atmosphere of incense and cocktails. He and his young stage-friends were all sitting or lying on cushions scattered about the floor. Feeling uncomfortably military, I removed my spurs (I was a temporary field-officer at the time) in case anyone got pricked. Novello had joined the Royal Navy Air Service but, his genius being officially recognized, was allowed to keep the home fires burning until the boys came home …¹⁰

Despite this, he was still up for having Novello to set his poems,

as he wrote to James Pinker in 1920 that Enoch (Dr Heath’s music publisher) had been selected to publish them.

Gurney already knew Novello, as they were fellow pupils of the organist at Gloucester Cathedral, where a third pupil, Herbert Howells, used to be bribed by Novello to do his counterpoint exercises for him. This is not to deny that both Graves and Gurney also sought commercial success, but it never came to Gurney; and to Graves only after publication of Goodbye to All That in 1929, by which time Gurney had been in the asylum at Dartford for four years.

Of the other residents of Boar’s Hill in 1920, Robert Bridges was the then Poet Laureate, and founder of the Society for Pure English before the war, to which Graves had contributed a piece,

‘On Hyphens’, in 1921; following which he wrote to Bridges that

[…] it would be far better for the language to remain slipshod & cloudy than to become hag-ridden by an Official Academy. […] But the purification is essential if, as I expect & hope, English is to become the World-Language […].¹¹ Although he liked Bridges, he was not uncritical of his poetry, as is apparent in a letter to Robert Nichols in February 1917:

Yes, Bridges is just what you claim for him, a nice common little geranium flower from the nursery gardens – better than the tea roses of the nineties or the passion flowers of these bad fellows like Byron and Co., but […] there are harebells and rowan-trees on your own hills, what need ye more?¹²

Bridges fell short of Graves’s essential prescription for modern poetry, which was that it should use the language of everyday speech. He was still writing lines such as ‘Thou didst delight mine eyes’.

Gurney, on the other hand, was not put off by the antiquated language, admiring the poems for their lyrical qualities, which he had started to set to music as early as 1909. Indeed, he was to set more of Bridges than any other poet, twenty songs in all. But he bridled when Marion Scott said she was sending his poems to Bridges in March 1917:

The news that my poor versifications [Severn and Somme] are to be shown to R. B. gives me no pleasure at all. I did not want technical criticism, being quite aware that good stuff does not come out of such a one as myself in a hurry.¹³

Edmund Blunden did not enter Graves’s life until after the war, when he was recommended by Sassoon for inclusion in The Owl in 1919; he moved to Oxford that autumn to study Classics at the university. Graves wrote to him in July: ‘Siegfried Sassoon lent me a copy of “3 Poems” and one of “The Barn”. And I think them the real stuff.’¹⁴ Gurney had known him since at least 1916, perhaps through an encounter at Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in London. Blunden wrote to him on 13 October: ‘Come along about 1 pm if you can. I shall have to hurry off after lunch but that doesn’t matter. Bring a poem or two for my benefit.’¹⁵ And he wrote again in November 1920:

I got your card this morning and have just returned from the

Athenaeum. Mary is not yet able to get up, and there’s the baby to look after. Everybody’s out of the house on amusements and I dare not leave her alone. This is a great shame but we can’t run any risks, so do forgive me, I was most eager to come. E.B.¹⁶

This was likely to have been an invitation to a concert of Gurney’s music. His setting of Blunden’s ‘The Idlers’ did not appear until January 1925, and is one of his best songs in his more modern style, using harmonies based on fourths, such as he may have imbibed from Scriabin, about whom he had enthused.

Robert Nichols came to Gurney’s notice through his poetry. In July 1917 he wrote to Marion Scott from France: ‘Nichols, I should say, may become a big man someday. He is new and speaks of real things, and has the knack of saying much with few words – a vital test.’ But only a month later, after Scott had sent him the book Ardours and Endurances, he had changed his mind:

Nicholson’s [sic] book has arrived […] I am very disappointed with it, though of course, not all has yet been read. […] [N]othing in this man’s work but that quoted by the T.L.S. attracts me. He is violent, (a sign of weakness), wrests the true nature of verse, knows something but not enough to justify his liberties; his love of soldiers seems to me to be somewhat of a pose (a dreadful accusation). […] His attitude to War and the men of war seems to me to be as detached as that of Zola; not so near as Fabre on his insects.¹⁷

Nevertheless he attempted a setting of Nichol’s poem ‘The Full

Heart’ in 1921, though he did not find the inspiration to finish it.

Graves had met Nichols earlier in 1917, and liked him, but with reservations, as he wrote to Sassoon in January:

Also I met Robert Nichols: you’ll be amused at where I found him – in a private hospital having an injection of 606 [for syphilis]: his commission has been cancelled on this account. But I liked him in a way: quite enthusiastic about the right things and very well read. So I gave him a hell of a lecture on his ways, and finding he took it well, made friends with him. It was the usual story – shellshock, friends all killed, too much champagne, sex, desperate fornication, syphilis.¹⁸

Moving to other poets away from the ‘Parnassus’ on Boar’s Hill, Graves had met Thomas Hardy in Oxford in 1920, when he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the university, and was the senior poet he admired without reservation. Later that year in August, when Robert was having a period of depression, Nancy suggested a cycling holiday, so they set off for Devon, and called on Hardy as they passed through Dorchester. Hardy was scathing about ‘free verse’, and said: ‘All we can do is to write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before us’, a sentiment with which Robert was quite in tune.¹⁹

Gurney had been an avid reader of Hardy’s novels from an early age, and had set his dramatic poem about the Battle of Trafalgar in 1913, while still a student at the Royal College of Music, though his other three settings were not done until 1924 in the asylum.

Of these, the most successful (set in December) is ‘In the Black

Winter Morning’ (Hardy’s ‘Bereft’), where his use of spare textures and bleak harmonies perfectly echoes the poem’s mood of a widow lamenting the loss of her husband; and it contains another example of Gurney’s experiments with the intervals of fourths, rather than thirds, which were also being used by Holst and

Hindemith at the time.²⁰

Graves’s connection with Walter de la Mare is more difficult to track down. He clearly admired his poems when, in a letter to Edward Marsh of June 1922, he included him in the ‘excellent’ tradition of early Georgianism, in whose ranks he was proud to belong. But he was concerned that its original values were being corrupted in some of the poets that Marsh planned to include in the fifth Georgian Poetry anthology: ‘Tortures wouldn’t drag from me the names of this sham-Georgian school but it is recognizable by its infernal cleverness and damnable dullness.’²¹ In the same month he had written to Blunden about a severe misunderstanding with de la Mare, which is illuminated in his postcard from Godalming in July about the anthology Come Hither which de la Mare was editing:

My dear Delamare,

The delay is due to me (& us all) being in a van touring the country. I write this by the roadside, while Kitty champs the grasses from the forest’s ferny floor. By all means have those poems: my agent is Pinker who will write about fees. ‘In the Wilderness’ is for some reason or other priced for anthologies other than the others, [sic] – a whim of Monro who shares the copyright. My new book of poems,

Whipperginny is now ready to be sent to the publishers. ‘The Veil’ is good, especially the monologue which I find very painful indeed, but of course nobody will have said – except the author – much more than ‘very musical’ to what is really the expression of disharmony in its acutest form, but admirably harmonized like the torture of ‘The Tempest’. Forgive this. I was sorry we missed [meeting] last term at Oxford. R.G.²²

Gurney’s first mention of de la Mare comes in a letter to Marion Scott of September 1915, soon after he had joined the army:

There is an excellent article in this week’s ‘Saturday Westminster’, a paper of which I am very fond. It is a review by Walter De [sic] la Mare, and is that poet’s confession of Faith. There is also a charming poem on Bach, called ‘during Music’.²³

Gurney was to set eight of his poems, one of which he mentions in a letter to Haines of February 1921. Walter de la Mare also wrote to acknowledge a setting of ‘An Epitaph’, ‘long considered, but a failure still’.²⁴ This song, however, was among the first to be published by Oxford University Press, in 1938, in Gerald Finzi’s two albums of his songs, along with ‘Bread and Cherries’ and ‘The Scribe’, the proofs of which Gurney saw just before his death. His comment shows the very high standard he demanded of himself in finding the right music for a poem, as it was soon to become a favourite with many singers. He continues: ‘I saw him on Sunday, and am just sending him a setting of “All that is Old”.

He was very nice.’²⁵ Gurney set ‘The Ruin’ c. 1922:

Graves’s early letters reveal that his judgements of poets changed frequently. In 1916 he wrote to Marsh from France on receipt of the first volume of Georgian Poetry: ‘[O]ccasionally I sometimes dislike W. H. Davies, though I thought ‘The Bird of Paradise’ was very good indeed.’²⁶ By July 1918, however, he was of a different opinion: ‘I read Davies’s Poet’s Pilgrimage to Nancy with great pleasure: a delicious book, we both loved it. Davies is a great man, one of the few.’²⁷ And in 1921 he was invited to contribute to The Owl.

Gurney was already enthusing about Davies in early 1914 in a letter to Harvey, telling him to get,

as I have just got, Davies Farewell to Poesie[,] Foliage (his latest book) and Songs of Joy’ – the finest lyric poetry in English. God bless the day when Haines recommended that last book to the Gloucester Library. What a Treasury of divine simplicity!²⁸

He had set Davies’s poem, ‘The Sea’, in the same year,²⁹ and went on to set seven more. In 1922 he wrote to Davies, enclosing one of his songs, probably ‘The Moon’:

Dear Mr Davies,

Ever since Nature Poems was first shown to me I have always been a sincere admirer of your work, and have carried your books in London, Gloucestershire and France. […] I wonder whether you ever came across Framilode – opposite Rudford, near Newnham on Severn? It was a place I read your poems most at […]. I can think that the poem which has a phrase about the ship of sunrise being launched was written there. [See ‘Early Morn’, also well set by

Gurney.]

With best wishes I remain,

Yours very truly,

Ivor Gurney. ³⁰

His setting of Davies’s ‘A Bird’s Anger’ dates from July 1924.

Of the poets of Graves’s own generation, his fractious relationship with his ‘best friend’ at the time, Siegfried Sassoon, is well known, though they both provided useful criticism of each other’s poems. Graves was pleased to note in a letter to Marsh of March 1916 that Sassoon’s poems were ‘getting infinitely better than the first crop’ he had seen, ‘much freer and more Georgian’.³¹ He had been consulted by Marsh while still a 16-year old at

Charterhouse on poems to be included in the first volume of Georgian Poetry, when Marsh told him that his poems were using an outworn vocabulary. Graves took this to heart, and swore never to use ‘thee’, ‘thou’ or ‘where’er’ again in his poetry.³²

Gurney first heard of Sassoon in the summer of 1917, and wrote to Marion Scott in August: ‘I do hope you will send me some more Sassoon, for his touch of romance and candour I like. He is one who tries to tell Truth, though perhaps not a profound truth.’³³ Sassoon’s poem ‘Everyone Sang’ celebrates the Armistice of November 1918, when he was still in the front line in France; whereas both Graves and Gurney were by then back in England. Gurney’s method for writing songs was to learn the poem by heart before he set pen to paper, but in the process he frequently forgot the odd word or phrase, which was the case here, when he omitted ‘My heart was shaken with tears’. Nevertheless, the song (c. 1921) still stands as a good one, and it is worth noting that he was the only British composer to set any poems from the war such as this; he also set ‘In Memoriam’ by Edward Thomas, and ‘In Flanders’ and ‘If We Return’ by his friend Will Harvey.³⁴

Another young poet to be considered here is the Canadian Frank Prewett, whom Graves had met at Garsington after the war, and who was included in the fifth volume of Georgian Poetry, which is probably where Gurney found his poem. He ran a farm at Tutney, near Oxford, where Robert and Nancy took their children to stay in two army tents for a week in the spring of 1922. Prewett returned to farming in Canada from 1926 until 1935, when he came back to England. Graves was later to edit his Collected Poems, after his death in Scotland in 1962. ‘Voices of Women’

(1925) is similar to his setting of Housman’s ‘Is My Team Ploughing’, in having two distinct voices, and also in being a war poem, though best suited to a female voice. We are reminded of the slaughter of thousands in France in its final verse:

Behold your love,

And how shall I forget him, His smile, his hair, his song?

Alas, no maid shall get him

For all her love,

Where he sleeps a million strong.³⁵

The final young poet to be considered here is Will Harvey, Gurney’s best friend, and the singer at the Boar’s Hill concert, twelve of whose poems he set to music though, regrettably, those comprising the cycle ‘A Gloucestershire Lad’ (with one exception) were lost soon after their first performance in March 1919.³⁶ Gurney wrote about their composition to Marion Scott:

F.W.H., the same, or nearly the same, as ever, has been putting me up these last few days, and has told me much about his captivity. We had a great stunt last night; sat up together to make a cycle of songs called a Gloucestershire

Lad. ‘In Flanders’ was already done. ‘The Horses’ nearly so. So I did ‘The Rest Farm’, ‘Pipers Wood’ and ‘Minsterworth

Perry’; all of which we shall do at Stroud on Saturday week. This performance started with milk, went on to Perry, which was succeeded by Champagne, to end with sloe gin! Only

‘Pipers Wood’ needs much attention. Needless to say this was the last of the set, made between 4 and 5 o’clock!!³⁷ ‘In Flanders’, one of Gurney’s best songs, was composed while he was in the trenches of France at Christmas, 1916, being a song of homesickness:

I’m homesick for my hills again – My hills again!

To see above the Severn plain

Unscabbarded against the sky

The blue high blade of Cotswold lie […].³⁸

Both men knew well that view, and it was to recur many times in

Gurney’s own poems. They had shared many walks, and sailing in Gurney’s dingy at Framilode on the Severn before the war.

Harvey is probably most remembered today for his comical poem ‘Ducks’, written as a prisoner of war in Germany; but he also penned another war poem, ‘If We Return’, set by Gurney c. 1918, which regrettably he did not complete:

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.³⁹

This is another powerful song, but Gurney’s music breaks off after the sixth line, ‘And seen the price of […]’. So more music was needed, and my own completion of this song was made easier in that the rondeau form allows similar music for the second verse, beginning at ‘Dread’.⁴⁰

The two friends were to have only four more years of companionship, before Gurney’s final incarceration in the asylum at Dartford. Harvey qualified as a solicitor, married, and practised in the Forest of Dean for the rest of his life, continuing to write poems, play cricket, and drink cider and perry liberally, until his death in 1958. This latter side of his character found expression in his ‘Praise of Ale’, set as a rumbustious drinking song after the war.

Graves had clearly been much impressed by the quality of Gurney’s music, as he took the trouble to stop Dr Heath writing any more songs, so it is likely that they met again. Gurney had a position as organist at Christchurch in High Wycombe, and was in habit of walking between London and Gloucester; and he records a further visit to Graves in a letter to Haines of June 1921.⁴¹ He is known to have made five more journeys between the two cities after that date, which could well have included visits to Graves, though there is no further evidence of this. In January 1925, Edward Thompson, his neighbour in Islip, was asking for contributions to his series of sixpenny Augustan poetry pamphlets, and Graves replied:

I’m sorry Siegfried can’t do things for you. Ivor Gurney, now in a madhouse, has I believe a good many poems of excellent quality which he can’t find a publisher for – c/o Sidgwick and Jackson should find him. He suffers from warneurosis in a most acute form and from a persecution mania.⁴²

There are at least two brief references to Graves in Gurney’s papers in 1925 from the asylum at Dartford in Kent: ‘I have to say his (seeming) natural goodness is such one would like him very much. But his insolence and cutting hair short. “Speak” was

Robert Graves [sic] agony word.’⁴³

Graves remained haunted by the fear of going mad for the rest of his life, as is evidenced by several of his poems. This may be why he appears to have never mentioned in later years his brief friendship with Gurney, who wrote much of his best poetry in the asylum, as well as several good songs, before his death from tuberculosis in 1937.

Richard Carder is a composer, clarinettist and conductor, who has been editing Gurney’s unpublished music since 1984, following a grant from the Worshipful Company of Musicians. His edition of the Seven Sappho Songs was published by Thames in 2000, and has been recorded by Georgina Colwell on Dunelm CD, The Tend’rest Breast. These and many more have been performed at concerts of the English Poetry and Song Society, of which he is Chairman. His edition of Gurney’s two Piano Trios of 1921 and 1924 was performed at Bristol University in January this year by the English Piano Trio. His own new cycle of songs to poems by Hodge, Graves and Cameron (from Work in Hand) was premiered by Sarah Leonard at the Colston Hall, Bristol, in May this year.

NOTES

¹Ivor Gurney, Collected Letters, ed. by R. K. R. Thornton (Manchester:

Carcanet, 1991), p. 500.

²Collected Letters, p. 498.

³Collected Letters, p. 500.

⁴23 May 1918, Gurney, Collected Letters, p. 428.

⁵English Heartland Songs, Joanna Morton (soprano), Colin Howard (tenor), Jeremy Huw Williams (baritone), Anna Roberts and Nigel Foster (piano) (Mynstrallsy: REPS 101, July 2009).

⁶See Richard Carder, ‘Gurney’s Journeys to Graves’, Ivor Gurney Society Journal, 10 (2004), 73–84.

⁷Haines Archive, Gloucester Library.

⁸Haines Archive, Gloucester Library.

⁹‘Allie’ (London: Enoch, 1920, 1921).

¹⁰Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: Cassell, 1957 (1929)), p. 222.

¹¹Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic 1895– 1926 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), p. 259.

¹²In Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves, ed. by Paul O’Prey (London: Hutchinson, 1982), pp. 65–66. ¹³ Collected Letters, p. 233.

¹⁴In Broken Images, p. 112.

¹⁵Haines Archive, Gloucester Library.

¹⁶Ibid.

¹⁷Collected Letters, p. 315–16.

¹⁸In Broken Images, p. 63.

¹⁹Goodbye to All That, p. 271.

²⁰See Richard Carder, ‘The “Mad”Songs of Ivor Gurney’, Journal of the British Music Society, 30 (2008), p. 79.

²¹In Broken Images, p. 136.

²²Bodleian Library, Oxford.

²³Collected Letters, p. 35.

²⁴Ibid., p. 507.

²⁵Ibid., p. 508.

²⁶In Broken Images, p. 39.

²⁷In Broken Images, p. 100.

²⁸Collected Letters, p. 10.

²⁹Severn and Somme, Roderick Williams (baritone), Susie Allan (piano) (Somm Recordings, SOMMCD 057, 2007).

³⁰Collected Letters, p. 541.

³¹In Broken Images, p. 44.

³²In Broken Images, p. 28.

³³Collected Letters, p. 307.

³⁴See Richard Carder, ‘Song Cycles, Sets and Sappho’, Ivor Gurney Society Journal, 5 (1999), 37–51.

³⁵The Collected Poems of Frank Prewett (London: Cassell, 1964), p. 2.

³⁶Three of the surviving songs are recorded on Severn and Somme.

³⁷Collected Letters, p. 472.

³⁸F. W. Harvey, A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad (London:

Sidgwick & Jackson, 1916), p. xv.

³⁹A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad, p. 25.

⁴⁰Richard Carder, ‘Song Cycles, Sets and Sappho’, p. 50. ⁴¹ Collected Letters, p. 518.

⁴²Robert Graves Archive, St John’s College, Oxford.

⁴³Gurney Archive, Gloucester Record Office.