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

Tom Denny and Ivor Gurney in Gloucester Cathedral

It was Aunt Mary who introduced me to Tom Denny. ‘Here,’ she said, thrusting the Yorkshire Post into my hand almost as soon as we were through her front door, ‘you’re interested in stained glass. What do you think of this new Millennium window in Bolton Percy Church? We could go and have a look at it while you’re up here.’ I took the paper from her, and read the piece. The name Denny meant nothing to me then; fourteen years later, it means a great deal.  I now believe Tom Denny’s stained glass to be the most exciting achievement in recent ecclesiastical art in Britain, and I'll always be grateful to Aunt Mary for alerting me to it.

‘Stained-glass’, Denny has written, ‘is a medium ... where at first one can be strongly aware of colour

 and light as a kind of musical language, a ‘humming’ of colour, a riverine movement of light. And then there is room for the development of whole worlds of narrative and detail.’* Today you can see his work in cathedrals, colleges, abbeys, parish churches and tiny chapels. His largest, perhaps most spectacular window, is in Durham. Often his windows come in pairs, as at Gloucester, Tewkesbury and Malvern. Don’t expect to see saints and biblical scenes in them, though, at least not as such scenes traditionally appear. Denny’s windows mix the abstract with the allegorical, and his figures sometimes seem to be disappearing into a landscape, rather than emerging out of it.

Landscape indeed is one of his hallmarks, and the scale of these vistas may be wide-angle (as at St. Christopher’s Warden Hill) or miniature. Hereford Cathedral has a pair of small two-light windows, in the Audley Chapel, celebrating Thomas Traherne, the 17^th century visionary and poet, born in the city. Here Denny’s sense of the importance of place is focused both on the cathedral itself, with swifts wheeling ecstatically around its tower, and on the local countryside through which Traherne walked as an act of joyous communion with the created world. These are windows to be enjoyed up close and at eye level: the patination of the surface, the varying thicknesses of the glass, even the character of the leadwork, invite us to engage with the materiality of stained glass in a way rarely possible elsewhere.

And later this month there is a new Denny window to be dedicated, again in celebration of a local writer – though, as with Traherne, another writer who is by no means to be pigeon-holed by his local identity: Ivor Gurney. Gurney already has one memorial in Gloucester Cathedral, a discreet plaque describing him as ‘composer and poet’ and ‘chorister of this cathedral church’. His new memorial is equally discreet. In a chantry on the north side of Gloucester’s Lady Chapel, Tom Denny has part-filled two Perpendicular windows, each of which has four narrow lights, and each divided by a transom: the upper halves now contain the eight panels making up the whole. In the top section of each are fragments of 14^th and 15^th century glass, and Denny has designed his own glass to complement these fragments, even using lead-work to signal the continuity between old and new.

Physically the chapel housing this Gurney memorial is dominated by the C17^th effigy of Bishop Godfrey Goldsborough; and, for the time being at least, one has to look at the glass through the mullions of a stone screen separating the chantry from the Lady Chapel. This is not inappropriate. It reminds us that for the last fifteen years of his life Gurney was himself partially hidden from view, housed in a mental hospital far away from the Cotswold countryside he had longed for as a soldier in France, and which he constantly evoked in his music and poetry. The title of his first volume of poetry was Severn and Somme.

What Denny has done is to reflect across the eight panels aspects of Gurney’s life and art. Each panel echoes one or more of Gurney’s poems. In the first light of the left-hand window, for instance, a man walks away from us over a curiously pitted, ancient landscape (there appears to be a Neolithic hand-axe lying on the ground at the foot of scene). He strides towards distant May Hill, ‘that Gloster dwellers / ’Gainst every sunset see’. (I have written about May Hill’s significance before: see In Gloucestershire.) But in the last light of this window, the same man gazes plaintively from behind a hedge at the leafless willows lining the Severn in winter:

And who loves joy as he

   That dwells in shadows?

Do not forget me quite,

   O Severn meadows.

‘There are strange Hells ….’ It would be impossible for a window memorialising Ivor Gurney not to reflect his life as a soldier, but this Tom Denny does in a wholly unexpected way. In the first panel of the right-hand window, abandoned boots and helmets strew the ground in front of a flooded shell hole. Look carefully and you will see the ghoulish faces of drowned and drowning soldiers in the water. A hand and perhaps other limbs break the surface of this Stygian pool: it is a vision of hell. And then on the crater’s far bank a spectral army stands: Gloucester soldiers with their backs turned away from the nightmare of No Man’s Land – turned away, too, from the Gloucester tailor’s son who had fought alongside them:

There was not one of all that Battalion

Loved his comrades as well as I – but kept shy.

Or said in verse, what his voice would not rehearse.

War memorial windows from the 1920s onwards have occasionally depicted the battlefields of France and Flanders. I have never seen another that represents such a scene of horror and overwhelming loss as Denny has created here. I don’t know which specific poem or poems prompted this landscape of despair, but the lines that come to my mind are from ‘Farewell’, a poem Gurney wrote in 1924 in Dartford asylum and which marks him out as one of the most remarkable of all the war poets: a man who hoped that comradeship and the physical effort of soldiering would save him, and yet who drowned in the end, not in a flooded shell hole but in his own mental distress:

Dear Battalion, the dead of you would not have let

Your comrade be so long—prey for the unquiet

Black evil of the unspoken and concealed pit.

The Ivor Gurney memorial window will be dedicated at Evensong in Gloucester Cathedral on Saturday 30th April.

Adrian Barlow

[See also my succeeding post: Short Measures (vi): Ivor Gurney and George Herbert]

* Tom Denny, ‘A note on the window’ in Wisdom’s Call: a new stained-glass window at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge (published by the College, 2012)

[Quotations from poems: the description of May Hill appears in ‘The Fire Kindled’, and ‘Only the wanderer knows’ comes from ‘Song’; both poems first published in Severn and Somme (1917).  ‘There are strange Hells’ are the opening words of the poem ‘Strange Hells’, and the lines addressed to his ‘Dear Battalion’ come from ‘Farewell’. Both poems are quoted here from Oxford University Press’s new anthology, Poetry of the First World War, edited by Tim Kendall .

[illustrations: (i) the newly installed Gurney memorial windows by Tom Denny in the north chantry of Gloucester Cathedral’s Lady Chapel; (ii) and (iii) details from the Traherne windows in Hereford Cathedral: Traherne running, and swifts around the tower ; (iv) and  (v)  details from the Ivor Gurney windows. All photographs (c) Adrian Barlow