Frederick William HarveyDCM, often known as Will Harvey, and dubbed "the Laureate of Gloucestershire", was an English poet, broadcaster and solicitor whose poetry became popular during and after World War I.
Soon after his arrival in France, Harvey began to contribute to a trench newspaper, the Fifth Gloucester Gazette. His first volume of poems, A Gloucestershire Lad At Home and Abroad, was published in September 1916, shortly after his capture. He began to write more intensively in captivity, and poems were sent back to England for publication: his second collection, Gloucestershire Friends, appeared in 1917. His time in the camps is held to be his most productive period of writing. On returning from a spell of solitary confinement at Holzminden after a failed escape attempt, he saw that a fellow prisoner had drawn a picture over his bed in chalk of ducks in a pool of water. This inspired his most celebrated poem, "Ducks".
Post-war life
Harvey returned home in 1919, married in 1921, and returned to legal practice. He became a respected and loved figure in the Forest of Dean. He worked largely as a defence solicitor, and became known as the "poor man's solicitor". His work was not financially successful, and in the 1930s he sold off his practice. In 1920 he published a memoir of his prison-camp experiences, Comrades in Captivity; and in 1921 Farewell, an acknowledgement of his intention to remove himself from the literary world. He had a brief creative union with his great friend and collaborator, Ivor Gurney. Gurney had written "After-Glow" and "To His Love" for Harvey, on hearing of his supposed death in 1916; and "Ypres-Minsterworth" as a gesture of solidarity with him in his captivity. Their reunion was cut sadly short by Gurney's mental breakdown in 1922. Harvey's gift for oration and his versatile voice and scripting led him to become a popular broadcaster at the BBC, Bristol, where he used his popularity to promote the Forest of Dean, its people and traditions. He furthered local choirs, musicians and young authors such as Leonard Clark. He was friends with Rutland Boughton and the localMP, Morgan Philips Price, who worked with him to promote the arts and the interests of Foresters.
Later years
In later life Harvey craved the comradeship he had found in the trenches and was saddened that the new social order he had expected never appeared. His later poetry of remembrance captured those feelings, but retained the essential humour of his early work and included verse in the local dialect. In 1956, in failing health, he attended the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral to hear Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, a work that had inspired his ideas about creativity and beauty some fifty years earlier. He died the following year and was buried at Minsterworth.
Personal life
In 1921 Harvey married Anne Kane, an Irish nurse. They had two children, Eileen Anne and Patrick. He led a Bohemian lifestyle, rejecting material values, and often recklessly gave away his professional services and income.
Reputation and legacy
Harvey's poems published during and immediately after World War I were highly acclaimed, and his status was acknowledged when a collection was published in 1926 in the Augustan Books of Modern Poetry series, edited by Edward Thompson. The lyricism of his poetry led to it being set to music by his friends Ivor Gurney, Herbert Howells and Sir Herbert Brewer, and others, including post-war composers such as Johnny Coppin. His work is noted particularly for its appreciation of the natural world and the landscape and traditions of West Gloucestershire. Harvey was commemorated by a slate memorial tablet in the south transept of Gloucester Cathedral in 1980. "Ducks", Harvey's best known verse, was voted one of the nation's 100 favourite poems in 1996 in a nationwide poll conducted by the BBC.
