On the Tower of Tewkesbury Abbey

The Gloucestershire poet and composer Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) loved Tewkesbury for all sorts of reasons. For him, it was the place

Where a cricketer was born, and a battle raged desperate

And mustard grew, and Stratford boys early or late

May have come, and rivers, green Avon, brown Severn, meet.  (Tewkesbury)

                                                                                                  

I wonder what he’d have thought of this picture, one I have known for over seventy years. Belonging originally to my grandparents, it was one of several small watercolours by an English artist, WJ Boddy, who signed and dated this view of Tewkesbury and its famous Abbey tower in 1900. My father inherited these paintings  and, after his death, my mother (herself a good watercolourist) treasured them, and now this picture is mine. I cherish it because Tewkesbury, its Abbey and especially its stained glass all mean a great deal to me.

 

It meant a great deal to Gurney, who struggled increasingly after the War  and wrote this short poem as if standing, as it were, exactly where the artist had stood to sketch:

What sorrow raised you mighty, for I have forgotten joy

And know only sufficient  black urge of pain,

Upon the fair thing standing up there in light promising rain,

Mask above meadows. (From the Meadows - the Abbey)  

Tewkesbury meant a great deal to MR James, too. In Abbeys, published by the Great Western Railway in 1926, he describes Tewkesbury Abbey as ‘probably the most splendid building to be described in this book’, which (to be clear) only focuses on abbeys within the reach of the GWR. Later, he claims that ‘Tewkesbury hardly yields to any church save Westminster [Abbey] in the number of great personages who rest beneath its roof.’ Hmmm.

I first came to Tewkesbury when I was five, on a Sunday School outing. Remarkable as it may seem now, I climbed with my mother to the top of the Abbey’s Norman tower and had great fun sliding down the lead-covered little pyramid roof that capped it off (as I suppose it still does; alas, my tower-climbing days are over). Afterwards, we had tea in the old Abbey Mill tearooms. In my picture, the mill itself – at one time the second most important building in Tewkesbury – is just out of view, but near the lower right-hand corner Boddy has included its wooden jetty, where boats tied up to deliver wheat and collect flour.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t a watercolour. It’s ink and wash on grey paper – wash with added body colour, to be pedantic. Everything in the foreground in drawn in brown ink over a brown or grey wash. The roof of the half-timbered cottage is wash first, then ink detail and highlights; ditto the wall of the malt house on the right, with the slanting shadow falling across the window of the cottage behind. The white highlights are body colour (probably poster paint): this can be applied thickly, as with the highlights on the cottages, or more thinly. See how the smoke is opaque as it leaves the tall chimney but quickly thins as it partly obscures the tower. Boddy gives the impression of precise attention to the Norman features: the louvred belfry windows, and the blind arcading around each wall; below, there are even ghostly outlines of the original nave and S. transept roofs. These are things you’d have to get closer to the Abbey to see so clearly in real life.

The tower certainly looms over the rooftops of the town. Is it fairer to say the cottages huddle beneath it or that the tower seems almost to be jostling them towards the river? This is, strictly, the Mill Avon: a short canal cut from the Avon itself, just below its confluence with the Severn a little higher upriver. Having for much of my life taken more than a passing interest in punts and punting, I have always enjoyed the little punt in the foreground of the picture, though at first I was puzzled by its shape. The huffs at either end (and at the boatman’s end particularly) seem to be raised too high; they give an almost oriental character to the little craft. But I had forgotten there is – at least, there used to be – a distinctive Severn punt, older and less streamlined than the sleeker Thames punt, designed definitely for work, not leisure. 

And only recently I’ve found this photo, taken in 1901,which unexpectedly confirms that the artist was perfectly accurate in depicting the punt as he did: taken only a year after W J Boddy (William) had sat down to sketch the view from the Ham (water meadow) side of the Mill Avon, here is what looks like the self-same Severn punt moored almost exactly where the artist had painted it.

But look now at the Abbey tower. This photo clearly exposes the liberty William Boddy has taken. Far from being literally a towering presence, Tewkesbury’s tower – seen from this angle and distance – scarcely rises above the chimneys of the buildings. But my admiration for what Boddy has achieved is only enhanced by my realising (belatedly) that his picture shows me more than the eye can see. Like all good art, it’s an eye-opener. The tower now rises, an architectural Leviathan, to dominate the town and half the sky too. 

MR James would have approved of Boddy’s representation of the tower, which he calls ‘probably the noblest Norman tower we have’. He adds: ‘The height of it, 132 feet, is not great but its effect is entirely independent of that’. Which is, surely, exactly what my picture shows: the tower standing ‘in high eminence’ – that phrase is Ivor Gurney’s – above the mist and smoke of the town. 

The ‘square stone’ of Tewkesbury’s tower was, for Gurney, a symbol of ‘what is best of England’:

The slow spirit going straight on,

The dark intention corrected by eyes that see,

The somehow getting there, the last conception

Bettered, and something of one’s own spirit outshown;

Grown as oaks grow, done as hard things are done.

For this Gloucestershire lad, the patience and effort needed to achieve something as magnificent as Tewkesbury’s tower mirrored his own dogged determination (‘something of one’s own spirit outshown [i.e. revealed]’) to produce lasting work both in poetry and music. As for William Boddy, I am just grateful to him for this picture I have always loved.

Adrian Barlow

Illustrations: (i) Tewkesbury and the Abbey Tower (1900) by WJ Boddy; (ii) Title page of Abbeys, by MR James (1926); (iii) Photograph of Tewkesbury from the Mill Avon canal (1901), picture credit: Tewkesbury Historical Society.

Note: The poems by Ivor Gurney that I have quoted here were written after the First World War, when his mental health was beginning to deteriorate rapidly, In her defining biography of Gurney (Dweller in Shadows, 2021) Kate Kennedy writes movingly and convincingly about how in this distressing period Gurney  continued to develop as  poet of real stature and significance. The poems I have quoted here can  be found in P.J. Kavanagh: Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney, 1984)

I have written before about Gurney:

Tom Denny and Ivor Gurney in Gloucester Cathedral

Ivor Gurney and George Herbert

Men and Women of Letters

 What is, or was, a man or woman of letters? Does the phrase still have any meaning or value? These questions have been on my mind recently because I have been re-reading two biographies by my friend of more than fifty years, John Smart: Tarantula’s Web, John Hayward, T.S. Eliot and their Circle (Michael Russell, 2012) and Shores of Paradise, The Life of Sir John Squire: The Last man of Letters (Matador, 2021) Each book is about someone who in his day was certainly thought of as ‘a man of letters’; one of them has those words on his gravestone. But what does the phrase really signify? Who qualifies? Who doesn’t?

Originally, to be ‘a man of letters’ just meant you were literate. However, by the mid-eighteenth century it could be applied to – and adopted by – people such as Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose public persona was as a writer whose range included fiction, poetry, literary criticism (Preface to Shakespeare, 1765, in particular), travel writing, and of course lexicography. In an age in which the essay as a literary form was taken seriously, he was widely admired for the essays he published in his twice-weekly newsletter, The Rambler. He gave his readers to understand that literature could not only give pleasure but could also enhance one’s moral, intellectual and imaginative understanding of life. He was a writer who used his standing as an author and critic to advocate for, and comment on, literature as something essential for society and the individual.   

By the nineteenth century, ‘man of letters’ had become a widely recognised term, but with two not quite overlapping meanings. First, it was used to identify people who had established reputations particularly through literary journalism and publications aimed at a wider, educated but not academic audience. Second, and largely through a series of literary biographies launched in 1878 called simply English Men of Letters, it came to refer to any prominent writer within a range of fields – history, philosophy, poetry and fiction – ranging from Chaucer to Thackeray but including (at first) only one woman, George Eliot. 

The author of the George Eliot biography was Sir Leslie Stephen, who had contributed the opening book in the series, appropriately on Samuel Johnson. Stephen was a quintessentially Victorian man of letters and the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, to which he personally contributed over 370 biographical essays. To most people today, however, he is best remembered as the father of the artist Vanessa Bell and her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf. During the twentieth century, in addition to her formidable achievements as a novelist, Woolf championed the literary essay as collected, for instance, in her books The Common Reader (first and second series: 1925,1932).  A woman of letters? Without a doubt.

Virginia Woolf’s phrase, ‘common reader’, is significant. She addressed all those who had in common an interest in literature. Herself denied a university education by her father,  Woolf wrote for an audience outside the walls of the universities: an audience of people who enjoyed reading for pleasure but who took seriously books and what writers of the past and present had to say; these were people who recognised that literature mattered to them and who believed that literature matters, full stop. You did not have to have a degree in English Literature to qualify; in fact it might disqualify you.

You don’t hear the phrase ‘man of letters’ much these days and this is not just because of its gendered connotation. (Virginia Woolf dealt with that, forensically and passionately, in A Room of One’s Own.) As the twentieth century progressed, the term ‘man of letters’ suffered  because, by contrast with the more serious-sounding ‘literature’, the very word ‘letters’ seemed to imply some frivolous, mannered, dilettante; hence, ‘man of letters’ came to identify writers (essayists especially) tainted by association with the outdated tradition of ‘belles-lettres’.  How easily then do the subjects of the two biographies I have been re-reading wear the mantle of man of letters? JC Squire (1884-1958, familiarly known as Jack Squire) and John Hayward (1905-1965) were both clubbable figures easily identified in the London literary world. Both considered themselves to be men of letters (it was Hayward whose gravestone describes him thus) but they were not friends with each other and their spheres of influence were polar opposites. The one word on Squire’s gravestone was ‘Poet’. 

Squire had risen to prominence both as a poet and as a reviewer and journalist for The New Age and the New Statesman before and during the First World War. As a poet, he was always identified as a contributor to the Georgian Poetry anthologies; his greatest achievement as a man of letters was to found and edit the London Mercury, which became in the entre deux guerres period of the twenties and thirties a very successful and influential journal. He was knighted for his services to literature. The latter years of Squire’s life, frankly but sympathetically described in John Smart’s biography of him, make sad reading, but he was admired by many loyal friends. John Betjeman was one such; indeed, in several respects (as Smart suggests) he can be seen as Squire’s successor. Both men were clearly antagonistic towards, and despised by, the literary avantgarde; each of them had a strong and abiding affection for England and traditional English life and culture. Both were prominent conservationists (Squire had led a successful and very public campaign to ensure the landscape around that Stonehenge would be properly preserved and protected) and each of them embraced the new media of their day. Squire was an early and popular voice on the radio – he was the first person to provide live commentary on the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race – while Betjeman became famous for his idiosyncratic television documentaries. Embracing the opportunities offered by the new mass media greatly increased the public appeal of both Sir Jack and Sir John as writers.

The trajectory of John Hayward’s life as a man of letters was rather different. He knew from an early date exactly what he wanted to be: writing at the start of the Second World War, he explained, ‘When I was a little boy I used to play at being a man of letters. This engrossing game of make-believe kept me quiet for years on end.’ From childhood onwards he was severely handicapped by muscular dystrophy, but he never let this embitter him, unless his reputation for having a biting satirical wit betrayed his frustration at a life lived mainly in a wheelchair. By the time he left school (Gresham’s, where as editor of the school magazine, he was the first person to publish the poems of his younger contemporary, WH Auden) he was already being taken seriously as a scholarly editor of seventeenth and eighteenth century poets. He was commissioned by Nonesuch Press to edit the poems of Lord Rochester even before he had gone up to King’s College, Cambridge. While still an undergraduate he was being described as ‘charming, and brilliant and the most erudite bibliomane in King’s bar none.’ His Nonesuch edition of the poetry and selected prose of John Donne sealed his reputation as an editor; by the end of the Thirties,  when he was still only 35, his wide circle of Bloomsbury and Cambridge contacts and friends (of whom TS Eliot was to become the most significant) ensured he was well known both in Britain and abroad as an important reviewer and commentator on the London literary scene . 

Poetry editions and anthologies added further to Hayward’s visibility and reputation. From 1934-1938 he was chief London editor of the New York Sun, for which he wrote a regular column called ‘London Letter’. Full of literary news and gossip, as well as reviews of books, plays and exhibitions, this column had the breadth and informality that today one might associate with a blog or a podcast. After the war much of his literary attention was focused on editing a new journal, The Book Collector. For this, too, he wrote a regular column that became essential reading for anyone interested in the world of books, book collecting and literary life. He himself by this time was recognised as one of the most important authorities both on the history of the printed book and on the great private collections of books held in Britain but increasingly dispersed and sold (often to American universities) in the postwar period. Hayward and Squire were very different characters and John Smart places them firmly in the centre of their different London circles: Hayward’s (his spider’s web – ‘Tarantula’ was his nickname) the world of The Criterion, Faber & Faber and the salon of Lady Ottoline Morrell; Squire’s (the Squirarchy) the world of Edward Marsh, Harold Monro and the Georgian Poetry anthologies, of cricket and of his own magazine, The London Mercury. 

Coming back to both these biographies, as I have been doing ever since I learned with distress last summer that John Smart had died, has made me realise – more clearly than before – how valuable these two books are. Taken together, they map the landscapes of literary London in the first half of the twentieth century in a way that has not been done by anyone else. They reveal too, at once critically and sympathetically, just how deeply both Squire and Hayward cared about literature past and present, about reading and about the contribution of literature to the health of society. These, I am sure, are essential characteristics of men and women of letters writing at any time and in any country. Men and women of letters still exist (of course they do) and their participation in debates about literature and their encouragement of reading is as important as ever; these days, however, they simply travel under a different passport.

Lives of writers, and of their biographers, matter too. Re-reading both Tarantula’s Web and Shores of Paradise I have heard John’s voice alongside the voices of Hayward and Squire, whom he brought to life in a way many historians and biographers never quite manage with their subjects. John’s research was formidable, his knowledge of English poetry ditto, but his writing was always accessible and never pedantic. Sometimes (especially in his writing about Squire) I have heard John chuckling, too; his quiet amusement – his wry response to the vicissitudes of life and to the foibles of students, colleagues or friends –always at hand. He loved his family and his home, his books and his wine; he enjoyed company and was an excellent host but he loved, too, simply to be out walking with his dogs or watching birdlife on the Norfolk marshes. He was one of the least self-important people I have ever known, and I would say of John Smart that he was the kind of teacher whom alumni remember with affection and gratitude. As indeed do I. More than ever now, I admire him as the teacher and writer I knew for over fifty years – we met in Durham on the same PGCEd course in 1971 – and I shall always remember our friendship as one of the most important of my life.

In Tarantula’s Web, I came across this in the Acknowledgements: ‘Adrian Barlow is the godfather of this book. He first gave me the idea of writing about John Hayward and using the papers at King’s that had been embargoed until 2000.’  And after that book was published, John rang me about a possible subject for his next biography. ‘I’m thinking of JC Squire – what do you think? he asked, slightly nervous when he heard me burst out laughing. 'I think it’s an excellent idea,’ I replied, ‘especially as at this very moment my feet are resting on an almost complete set of The London Mercury someone has just bequeathed to me. Would you like them?’ John generously mentioned this too in the Acknowledgements of Shores of Paradise. I cannot adequately express how glad I am that our friendship led to the writing of two such books.

© Adrian Barlow, 2025

Illustrations: (i) the two books by John Smart under discussion; (ii) the title page of Virginia Woolf’s book, The Common Reader (second series). The Epigraph reads: “... I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be generally decided all claim to poetical honours.” Dr. Johnson, Life of Gray; (iii) Sir John Squire; The Book Collector - the yellow-covered copy is Volume 1, No. 1; (iv) John Smart’s biography of John Hayward, Tarantula’s Web.

I have also written about John Smart in two previous posts:

Tarantula: John Hayward, Man of Letters

At the Biographers’ Club Prize Dinner