THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

[Late June 1916]

Dear V.

I should v. much like to have news of you – I wish I c^d write you an interesting letter – but one is hardly allowed to say anything.¹ However I am very well & enjoy my work – all parades & such things cease. I am “Wagon orderly” and go up the line every night to bring back wounded & sick on a motor ambulance – this all takes place at night – except an occasional day journey for urgent cases.
Write & let me know all the news – I hear from my wife that all Thaxted is still singing Bach.²
Did you see that Rutland Boughton applied for exemption on the grounds that he was doing work of national importance at Glastonbury!³
I suppose I shall make you very angry with what I am going to say and I can’t put it just as I mean – but I feel strongly that what you are doing at Thaxted is the real thing of which Boughton’s vapourings at Glastonbury are the sham imitation – you know the slosh that Buckley talked in his book about an “artistic community”⁴ – well like all rotten ideas it is the sham of something real – and this is what I believe you’ve got – amen.
Yrs

RVW

1. VW was in France serving as a medical orderly in the war.
2. Holst had taken a group of his pupils from St Paul Girls’ School and Morley College to Thaxted for the Whitsuntide weekend on 10-12 June for a weekend of music, formal and informal. This included Bach’s Mass in A. For a full account see Short, Gustav Holst: the man and his music,  pp.138-9.
3. Boughton, with Reginald Buckley and Christine Walshe, had founded the Glastonbury Festival in 1914 with the idea of creating a commune of artists around the performance of ‘choral drama’ written by him. The best-known was The Immortal Hour. The Festival lasted until 1927, but Boughton did not escape military service.
4. VW is referring to Buckley’s The Shakespeare Revival (1911), chapters 5 and 8.