Ivor Gurney

Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) was an English poet and composer, born in Gloucester and a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral, who studied music at the Royal College of Music under Stanford. His work is bound up with the Severn valley and the Gloucestershire countryside.

He served as a private with the 2/5th Gloucesters on the Western Front, was wounded and gassed, and published two books of poems in his lifetime, Severn and Somme (1917) and War’s Embers (1919). He suffered a long mental illness and spent his last fifteen years in an asylum, where he went on writing.