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