Reports
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October 2013
Family Charity Service
Picture, Nicky West
Every year, we support two charities from one of our regular Family Services. In April we supported Action Aid in Zimbabwe and on October 13th we supported the local Hospice - St Michael's, Hereford. (Return to top)

Their CEO, Nicky West (see picture) was going to give us an update on their progress to provide a new building to reflect the needs of today, but unfortunately she'd lost her voice, so a colleague gave her presentation for her, supported by a DVD giving a computer-generated 'walk-through' of the planned new building. She explained that they need £10m to do the work and are tantalizing close, only £1.2m short, so they hope the work will begin shortly. (Return to top)

Their current building still has some multi-bed dormitories and a lack of treatment and consulting rooms, so they may have a spare bed but not necessarily for the right gender so may have to turn that patient away. The new building will have individual bedrooms with a sitting area that opens onto a common courtyard, so you can be private in your own room or open the doors to share with others as you wish, and it will have more treatment rooms so they can give different therapies at the same time and avoid having to give some on the same staircase that others are using at the same time to go up and down between the floors of the building. (Return to top)
Ivor Gurney Film
Picture, Audience at Film
There was a treat and a disappointment at our Film and Song Recital concert on October 6th. The treat was the showing of a new 50 minute long documentary about the Dymock Poet's friend Ivor Gurney, and the disappointment was that the publicised soloist, Will Coleman, was unable to attend to sing some of Gurney's songs, due to a sudden indisposition that affected his voice. After the film and instead of the recital, our Musical Director, Bob May, read some of Gurney's poems. (Return to top)

The powerful DVD depicts Gurney's life from his youth and the First World War to the decline of his mental state and death. It made use of archive film from the First World War and interviews with people who knew Gurney, including his granddaughter. It was directed by Diana Taylor and produced by Anthea Page and stared the trained actor Tony Billington as Gurney. The film was shot in wide-screen format and shown in HD quality on an 8 ft screen. Before it began, Anthea gave a short description of its making, including a couple of amusing anecdotes. It appears that when Tony Billington was filmed on the side of a canal looking like he was going to jump in (which Gurney had attempted), a passing lorry driver shouted out 'don't jump', and when he climbed over a wall in pyjamas depicting Gurney's escape from a mental hospital, he bumped into a passing lady who wondered what was going on! (Return to top)

Gurney was born in Gloucestershire of 'ordinary folk' so enlisted in the army as a signaller in the First World War, not as an officer like his friends the other Dymock Poets. He saw active service at the front but his mental state had always been a bit fragile, so its not surprising that, although he survived the war, he was adversely affected by his experiences and ended up in mental hospitals, dying at the age of 47. (Return to top)

He wasn't just a good poet, he was also a good musician and as a lad won a scholarship under the organist at Gloucester Cathedral, going on to study composition at the Royal College of Music where he was a contemporary with several well-known musicians including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles Stanford and Ivor Novello. His tutors said they thought he was the better of the group, so his mental deterioration was a sad loss to us all. (Return to top)