The Divinity School at the Bodleian library was the setting for the Clutag Press‘s 10th birthday party celebrations this evening. Several of Clutag’s authors from down the years convened to read excerpts of their work to a large public audience.
Andrew Motion was the star attraction, although you wouldn’t have known that from his unassuming manner. Motion read two items from his recent collection of war poems, Laurels and Donkeys, in honour of Armistice Day. The first related to Private Harry Patch, the last British veteran of the Trenches to die. The second was inspired by the death of Lt. Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, who was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan two and half years ago. Both were intensely moving without being melodramatic; and the audience showed its appreciation with sombre applause.
Other prominent authors read from their work published in Clutag’s Archipelago magazine. Alan Jenkins, Bernard O’Donoghue and Peter McDonald, among others, declaimed some of their verse, while Katherine Rundell and James Macdonald Lockhart recited passages from their essays.
The audience was receptive and generous to all; but it was affected by the most poignant performance of the night. Singer Philip Lancaster sang unaccompanied to two Ivor Gurney songs. First, Lancaster burst out singing Gurney’s unpublished setting of Siegfried Sassoon’s poem, ‘Everyone Sang’. Then he ended Clutag’s birthday party with Gurney’s setting of his own poem ‘Severn Meadows’. The Divinity School was rapt as Lancaster’s voice ascended.
Lancaster gave a reason for this rather daring solo act. Gurney wrote those tunes and verses on the Western Front, where he and his men sang them as an unsupported choir: there being no pianos on the Messines Ridge in 1917.
Eminence and invention aside, the evening’s chief success was to showcase the British Isles’ expressive regional accents. Soft Scotch burrs crossed with thick Yorkshire inflections, and the Celtic fringe’s gentle lilts sounded throughout. The lyricism of the speakers and their writing will have struck tin-eared southerners, dulled by RP and its atonal subcultures.
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