THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The White Gates,
Westcott Road,
Dorking.

14 JUL 34

Dear Imogen
 It entirely depends whether you are going to have a tablet as well – I very much hope you are going to have a tablet & was going to write to you whether I c^dnt start a movement to get one put up – as a gift say from Paulinas & Morleyites¹ – what do you think of the idea?
 If you have the tablet I think “Gustav Holst composer” (and the dates).  Perhaps even without the tablet that w^d be enough – though I should have liked a few bars of “Over the tree tops waft me a song”.² I don’t like “Maker of music” and I don’t expect you do either.³

Love from
Uncle Ralph

Sorry for specially bad writing – I am in bed with a poisoned leg isn’t it stupid!

1. i.e. former pupils of Holst at Morley College and old girls of St Pauls Girls School.
2. A passage from Holst’s Ode to Death, op.38, shortly after fig.12. Ode to Death was a work which VW greatly admired – he had conducted the first London performance on 19th December 1923. See VWL539.
3. A memorial tablet was placed in the floor of Chichester Cathedral – four diamond shaped stones with the simple inscription: ‘1874 Gustav Holst 1934’. Illustrated in Imogen Holst (compiler), A scrap-book for the Holst Birthplace Museum (East Bergholt, 1978), p.108.