THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The White Gates
Dorking

May 11 [1942]

Dear Harold
Yes I listened – & it came through very well.¹  I felt that perhaps listening for the first bit for the first time and with no previous knowledge would get a clear idea if (a) the story (b) the words (c) the tunes.  I thought all were good, & the Loreley (by the way she is Mrs Stanford Robinson!) sang the tunes clearly & without wobble (you could tell what note she was on) , but she spoiled “here on my throne”.²  I should love to come & see you one day.  I am usually up & down for C^tees about once a week or so.
By the way would you feel inclined to write some words for a tune – it is the prelude to some more I wrote for “49^th //^e” – & I believe it might make a good community song for some high falutin words about Canada or Freedom or Federal Union or something (its rather a high falutin tune) – I tried my pet poetesses hand on it (Ursula Wood), but she can’t high falute in the right way some how – she can’t be impersonal enough.  I know enough for a big popular (good sense) song.  Would you do it?  If so I would send you the tune & a nonsense verse which I wrote to show the metre & rhyme scheme, which are very important to the tune.³
Yrs
R. Vaughan Williams

1. A broadcast of Hugh the Drover on the BBC Home Service, 6 May 1942, with Lorely Dyer/Robinson singing Mary.
2.  ‘Here on my throne’ was also issued separately as one of the songs from Hugh the Drover, Catalogue of Works 1924/2, p.102. In CD liner notes to The Sky Shall Be Our Roof, Stephen Connock notes this became ‘Here, queen uncrown’d’ in the final version of the opera.
3. Harold Child agreed and the result was The New Commonwealth.