Vaughan Williams

Illicit Emissions

The real VW Scandal

The composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams (VW to his friends) was a bit of a saucy chap. He is probably best known for The Lark Ascending, which, according to The Daily Mail (April 6th 2015) is our favourite classical tune: Ralph Vaughan William's work tops poll for second year in a row

• Topped poll after Classic FM listeners cast more than 200,000 votes
• British composer inspired by a poem of same name by George Meredith
• It found a wide audience last year when it was played as Hayley took a lethal cocktail to end her suffering on Coronation Street

But, and this might shock some, so stiff upper lip now.... Ralph (pronounced Rafe by the way) was a bit of a Rake.....

VW was born in 1872 into a well-to-do family in the Cotswolds, where his father was Vicar of All Saints Church, Down Ampney.  After his father's death, in 1875, his mother brought him to Leith Hill Place, in the Surrey Hills near Dorking, which belonged to her family, the Wedgwoods, of pottery fame.....

Leith Hill Place had also been a favourite haunt of the young Charles Darwin, who was Ralph's great-uncle. 

It might have been a slightly spooky house for the little boy, but perhaps it inspired his imagination and instilled in him a love of the woods and hills of England?

Anyway, VW was taught piano, and violin, attended Charterhouse School and the Royal School of Music and then read History and Music at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became acquainted with members of the Bloomsbury Group.

After graduating he returned to the Royal College of Music, where he became friends with Hubert Parry, Leopold Stokowski and Gustav Holst.

In 1896 VW married Adeline Fisher, a cousin of Virginia Woolf.  Although he was 41 when the First World War broke out, VW lied about his age and enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps.  His hearing was damaged by gunfire and bombardment, and as a result he became profoundly deaf.

In 1921, The Lark Ascending (which he had composed in 1914) was premiered, and in 1922 Sir Adrian Boult conducted the first performance of VW's third symphony, The Pastoral, which drew on his experiences in the battlefields of France, as well, perhaps, as harking back to his childhood on Leith Hill.

Ralph Vaughan Williams produced a great variety of work, from his nine symphonies, to choral works, arrangements of hymns (he edited The English Hymnal in 1906) and folk songs, to ballets and opera.  

As a celebrity, VW delighted in the company of women. Although he loved living in London after the war, Adeline became ill with arthritis and the couple, who had no children, moved to live outside Dorking, near where he had grown up. Adeline was not a happy lady; she wore black, from when her brother was killed in the First World War, until her own death. So, perhaps not surprisingly, VW enjoyed London society when he could. He was much admired, and a number of most respectable ladies have admitted that he turned their heads, and perhaps broke some hearts.....

His friends recounted that he was a very tactile person, too, and good company. He was a tall, imposing figure, never very tidy, despite his habit of wearing three piece suits. The singer, Robert Tear, then a student at Cambridge, met VW when rehearsing one of his works at St Bartholomew the Great in London, and described him as looking like an old sofa, with the stuffing coming out!

In 1937, he received a letter from a young woman, Ursula Wood, who offered him some of her poetry as a scenario for a ballet.  Ursula was married to an officer in the Royal Artillery, but was living with her parents.  VW took her to lunch.  In the taxi, before parting, they kissed, passionately.  Within dates... they became lovers. She was 26.  He was 65.

The affair may not have been a grand scandal.  Certainly it was not to disturb economies or to bring about resignations or corporate shame.  To start with, however, it was clandestine, and on one occasion VW and Adeline, Ursula and her husband, went together, uncomfortably perhaps, to see a performance of VW's Hugh, the Drover.  Friends in the arts, got to know of the liaison, but it never hit the headlines. Around the same time, Ursula had an abortion, telling both her husband and VW, but not knowing who had been the father.  

But then Ursula's husband died, suddenly in 1942, of a heart attack, and she became increasingly entwined with the composer, as his literary adviser and personal assistant.  She was invited to VW's home, and met Adeline, for whom she also acted as a carer.  It is possible that Adeline condoned the relationship, and one anecdote teases the idea of a ménage à trois. Late in the war, when V1 bombs were used to attack London, it is said that VW and his wife were in bed, in separate single beds, listening for the ominous cutting out of the flying bombs' engines.  Lying between them, on a palliasse on the floor, holding hands with both Adeline and Ralph, was Ursula.

Adeline died in 1951.  In 1953 Ursula and Ralph were married, and they moved to 10 Hanover Terrace, Regent's Park, where they enjoyed five years together before VW died, in 1958.  He left his ninth symphony unfinished, but is now regarded, by many, as the greatest English composer of the twentieth century, certainly the greatest symphonist..... 

Ursula lived on.  She wrote a biography of her second husband, volumes of poetry, four novels, and, in 1972 (though not published until 2002) an autobiography, Paradise Remembered.  She was president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, on the executive committee of the Musicians' Benevolent Fund, and worked, with Sir Michael Tippett, on the RVW Trust, founded by her husband in 1956, and still one of the most significant sources in the UK of funding for contemporary and recent British music.

She died on October 23rd, 2007, almost fifty years after Ralph.  

But I think she may have died with a twinkle in her eye?  

Naughty girl!

A lark.  Ascending.....

Leith Hill Place is now managed by The National Trust.

A Souvenir of Surrey

Picnic on Box Hill

My older (older? elder? the one before me, whichever...) brother reminds me of a memory.  Our grandparents (on father's side) sitting slightly stiffly on a plaid blanket on Box Hill. Surrey stretching away below.  For me it's hazy, but vaguely there, in amongst images of a maroon Standard 8 with a wind-up windscreen and our dad's Armstrong Siddeley with green leather upholstery and running boards.  I'm sure it was a lovely day.....

For reasons I won't go into I am staying in the Burford Bridge Hotel (from its origins in the 16th century until 1905 known as The Fox and Hounds). I am possibly sleeping in the very room where Lord Nelson gave Emma Hamilton his last salute before hitting the deck at Trafalgar.  

Or it could be that I share a bed with the spirit of John Keats who escaped the fetid fogs of London in 1817 to finish his Endymion here ....

There is a paly flame of hope that plays 

Where’er I look: but yet, I’ll say ’tis naught 

And here I bid it die. Have not I caught, 

Already, a more healthy countenance? 

By this the sun is setting; we may chance 

Meet some of our near-dwellers with my car.

Quite what car Keats drove I am not sure, though I like to think it might have been a thing of beauty.....

Five years old when Endymion was published

Alternatively, I could be sharing with Jane Austen, who I believe directed one of her most famous scenes on the slopes above us here.....

Emma and Chris Martin face each other.....

They had a very fine day for Box Hill; and all the other outward circumstances of arrangement, accommodation, and punctuality, were in favour of a pleasant party. Mr. Weston directed the whole, officiating safely between Hartfield and the Vicarage, and every body was in good time. Emma and Harriet went together; Miss Bates and her niece, with the Eltons; the gentlemen on horseback. Mrs. Weston remained with Mr. Woodhouse. Nothing was wanting but to be happy when they got there. Seven miles were travelled in expectation of enjoyment, and every body had a burst of admiration on first arriving.....

Jane Austen - Emma

Where the bee sucks.... Cowslips on the chalk downs

Box Hill, not to be confused with Boot Hill, despite the existentially similar names, takes its name from Box (as, confusingly, does Bexhill). The reason not being that this has anything to do with Pandora, nor indeed with Mohammed (Ali that is). No, Box is bucus sempervivens, described by Richard Mabey, in Flora Britannica, as a drab, malodorous and not especially useful shrub.....

Much maligned - some people like the smell of cat piss....

Indeed, Box Hill was a popular picnic spot as long ago as the reign of Charles II, when the diarist John Evelyn praised its yews and box trees, it seeming from these evergreens to be summer all the winter. 

To quote Richard Mabey again, The exceptional hardness of box timber made it a valuable raw material, and it was used for chessmen, rulers, rolling pins, pestles, and especially for printing blocks; the nineteenth-century engraver Thomas Bewick claimed one of his blocks was still sound after 900,000 printings......  Box wood does not float in water.  It was also used in WWII for Spitfire propeller blades...

An aged beech on the wooded slopes

There aren't so many box trees here today, but the hill is now owned and maintained by the National Trust and parts are still shaded by dense thickets of box, yew, and mixed deciduous woodland.

The original site of 230 acres was given to the NT in 1914, by Leopold Salomons, one of the founders of the Employers' Liability Assurance Association (1880) which vestigially still exists, after many transmutations, as Aviva, which covers, amongst many other lesser things, my wife's car insurance (so I guess I owe Leo respect.....)

The Burford Spur

From the hotel I escape the spirits (with their exorbitant prices) to climb the Burford Spur.  As I begin to puff a little, I look thirstily down across Denbies Wine Estate (the largest single estate vineyard in England, established in 1986 - though first planted by the Romans a little earlier).  The North Downs Way, which here coincides with the Pilgrims' Way from Winchester to Canterbury, passes through nearby, crossing the river Mole and climbing past Westhumble to Ranmore Common.  At the same time, behind me on the Zig-Zag road, I hear the whizz and whirr of Olympian bicycles....

I walk up, past the upside-down grave of eccentric Major Peter Labilliere, who was buried near here in June 1800, to the National Trust tea room, and then to the Salomons Memorial, with the same stunning view that my grandparents enjoyed all those years ago.....  I pause briefly to record a scene with my palette knife.....

Towards Polesden Lacey

The scenery is heavy with the England I love.  I think of my grandparents, Great War scarred, connecting the centuries.  I think of myself (sometimes) as part Dad's Army and part Postman Pat, but they were part Queen Victoria and part Battenberg; Little Nell and Far From the Madding Crowd. This is the scenery of H G Wells, and of Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose house, at Leith Hill Place, once belonged to Josiah Wedgwood (whose grandson Charles Darwin experimented in the garden).  From Box Hill you can make out Leith Hill, with its Tower, about six miles south (and slightly west) of Dorking.....  I can hear larks ascending.....

And on the way down I meet a traveller (from an antique land).  He has walked through the night, and aims to reach Farnham before dusk. He has been eating ramsons and tells me that last night he was spooked by catching twelve pairs of red eyes in his head torch as he surprised a family of deer on his walk.  (I really must try the ramsons.....)

Ramsons - wild garlic

He is a young man on the Pilgrim's Way, a walking metaphor in this time of political uncertainty. His wandering is salutary. Together we admire the world about us, 

Bluebells and Ramsons - an unusual combination

then he accelerates across the Stepping Stones (dedicated in 1946 by Clement Atlee) leaving me wobbling on the first stone, unsure of my balance...

This is a beautiful spot.  The river Mole (quite possibly named after a Roman mill - mola) is tranquil, though it wasn't on Christmas Eve 2013 when it burst through the ground floor of the Burford Bridge Hotel, and guests had to be evacuated (and not readmitted until September, a policy that seems still to affect service at the hotel)....

I wander along through Burford Meadow, catching a flash of bright rust and cobalt as a Kingfisher dashes for cover.  I stand, still, to glimpse it again, then another bolts across the surface of the water and into a bush.  I have the wrong camera to shoot them, but doubt that I would have the skill to frame one at that speed anyway.... I content myself with a snap of their nesting site in the clay bank cut by the river, and imagine that sharp, feisty bird posing for me in his (or her) tropical glory....

Above the river, but carved by it over time, rise the Whites. The North Downs chalk gleams amidst the dark box and yew, freckled with fresh young beech and sycamore leaves. A breeze flutters across the grass and up the hill.  Another memory stirs within the archives of my mind. A few days after my grandfather died I woke suddenly in the warm summer night.  My curtain billowed like a spinnaker and a cool air filled the room.  My grandfather had come to say good-bye.  

Perhaps he is here now, picnicking on Box Hill in the ever after? I sense Dora and him gently reposing on a blanket of gossamer, sipping cowslip wine, as he reads Jane Austen in gentle voice....

Even Emma grew tired at last of flattery and merriment, and wished herself rather walking quietly about with any of the others, or sitting almost alone, and quite unattended to, in tranquil observation of the beautiful views beneath her.

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/box-hill/things-to-see-and-do/walks/


http://www.ldwa.org.uk/ldp/members/show_path.php?menu_type=S&path_name=Pilgrim%27s+Way