Ivor Gurney: Placing Poetry and Making Music

A morning sharing the story of the Gloucester WW1 poet and composer curated by Chris Hillman - taking place at the All Saints Sacristy from 10am to 1pm on Saturday 7th November. Gloucester-born Ivor Gurney was inspired to become a composer after hearing Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis at the 1910 Three Choirs Festival. He went on to study at the Royal College of Music alongside Herbert Howells, but his studies were interrupted by the First World War, where he discovered a gift for poetry as a way of making sense of the brutality and strange beauty of war. Gassed and sent home in 1917, he struggled with his mental health and spent his later years in a mental hospital, still writing about the trauma of the war and his beloved Gloucestershire. Largely forgotten after his death in 1937, he has since been recognised as a poet and composer of real worth. This morning explores his poems, his music and his love of nature and asks how we understand and care for those who struggle with mind and mood.