31 Facts About Ivor Gurney

Ivor Bertie Gurney was an English poet and composer, particularly of songs.

Ivor Gurney suffered from bipolar disorder through much of his life and spent his last 15 years in psychiatric hospitals.

Critical evaluation of Gurney has been complicated by this, and by the need to assess both his poetry and his music.

Ivor Gurney himself thought of music as his true vocation: "The brighter visions brought music; the fainter verse".

Ivor Gurney was born at 3 Queen Street, Gloucester, in 1890, as the second of four surviving children of David Gurney, a tailor, and his wife Florence, a seamstress.

Ivor Gurney sang as a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral from 1900 to 1906, when he became an articled pupil of Herbert Brewer at the cathedral.

Ivor Gurney began composing music at the age of 14, and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1911.

Ivor Gurney studied there with Charles Villiers Stanford, who taught Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Marion Scott, Rebecca Clarke, Frank Bridge, Arthur Bliss, Herbert Howells and many others.

Stanford told Howells that Ivor Gurney was potentially "the biggest of them all", but he was "unteachable".

Ivor Gurney possessed a dynamic personality, but he had been troubled by mood swings that became apparent during his teenage years.

Ivor Gurney had a difficult time focusing on his work at college and suffered his first breakdown in 1913.

Ivor Gurney's studies were interrupted by World War I, when he enlisted as a private soldier in the Gloucestershire Regiment in February 1915.

Ivor Gurney was in the midst of writing the poems for what would become his first book, Severn and Somme, when he was wounded in the shoulder in April 1917.

Ivor Gurney recovered and returned to battle, still working on his book and composing music, including the songs "In Flanders" and "By A Bierside".

In March 1918, Ivor Gurney suffered a serious mental breakdown, triggered at least in part by the sudden ending of his relationship with Drummond.

Ivor Gurney was hospitalised in the Gallery Ward at Brancepeth Castle, County Durham, where he wrote several songs, despite the piano sounding, he said, like "a boiler factory in full swing because of the stone walls".

Ivor Gurney received an unconventional diagnosis of nervous breakdown from "deferred" shell shock.

Ivor Gurney seemed to thrive after the war and was regarded as one of the most promising men of his generation, but his mental distress continued to worsen.

Ivor Gurney studied for a brief time with Ralph Vaughan Williams upon returning to the Royal College of Music, but he withdrew from the college before completing his studies.

Ivor Gurney continued to compose, producing a large number of songs, instrumental pieces, chamber music, and two works for orchestra: War Elegy and A Gloucestershire Rhapsody.

Blevins, Ivor Gurney's biographer concludes that he did not suffer from syphilis.

Ivor Gurney spent the last 15 years of his life in psychiatric hospitals, first for a short period at Barnwood House in Gloucester, and then at the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford, where he was diagnosed as suffering from "delusional insanity ".

Ivor Gurney wrote prolifically during the asylum years, producing some eight collections of verse.

Ivor Gurney continued to compose music but to a far lesser degree.

Ivor Gurney died of tuberculosis while still a patient at the City of London Mental Hospital, shortly before dawn on 26 December 1937, aged 47.

Ivor Gurney was "a lover and maker of beauty", it was stated on his gravestone.

On 11 November 1985, Ivor Gurney was among 16 Great War Poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.

In June and July 2014 Ivor Gurney was the subject of BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week, with contributions by Kate Kennedy and featuring a number of first recordings made by the BBC especially for the programme.

Ivor Gurney wrote hundreds of poems and more than 300 songs but only set a handful of his own poems to music, the best-known of those being "Severn Meadows".

Ivor Gurney had a preference for setting dark ballads, as Schubert, Loewe and Brahms had before him, and "knew his Brahms and Schumann backwards, as his piano pieces testify".

Deliberately unrhetorical in his poetic tone, and writing as a ranker, not an officer, Ivor Gurney offered a complex, wry, unheroic view of the soldierly world of the Western Front: presenting not a large statement, but an individual experience.