Ivor Gurney: War Poet, musician and composer

UK Disability History month runs from 22nd November to 22nd December and the theme for 2018 is disability and music. In the centenary year of the Armistice, Alice Bennett considers the life and work of Ivor Gurney - war poet, musician and composer - and his lifelong battle with mental illness.

At the centenary of the Armistice, there has been renewed focus on the arts produced during the First World War. When thinking of arts from the war, many of us would name Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Fewer would name Ivor Gurney, a poet and composer, despite his inclusion in the memorial naming 16 poets of the Great War at Westminster Abbey’s famed poet’s corner.

The Cloisters at Gloucester Cathedral. Photograph by Michael D Beckwith. 

Although commemorated there for his poetry, Gurney was primarily a musician and composer. He served as chorister and organ scholar at Gloucester Cathedral, before winning a composition scholarship to the Royal College of Music. His first major composition was the set of Five Elizabethan Songs, produced over 1913-1914, prior to his enlistment in 1915. He turned to poetry as an artistic outlet for expression as trench life made composition increasingly difficult.

Like fellow poets Owen and Sassoon, Gurney’s war service was marked by mental illness. Unlike them, his problems with mental health were not purely precipitated by the war. Gurney had suffered a breakdown in 1913 and despite the global chaos his war years were amongst those of his greater mental stability. It has been suggested that the camaraderie of war service and the shared suffering of so many during this time helped to give Gurney a sense of stability and support, which helped his mental health. He spent time in military hospitals following a bullet wound in the spring of 1917 and after suffering a gas attack in September 1917 but remained in the army. He was eventually discharged from the army on medical grounds in October 1918, on the basis of his mental instability following a suicide attempt in June earlier that year.

Following the war, Gurney’s mental health deteriorated further, causing him to abandon his studies at the Royal College of Music which he had resumed after the war. Erratic behaviour and further suicidal episodes eventually led to a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia in September 1922 and with it to his entry to Barnwood House Asylum in Gloucester. Gurney’s state continued to decline, seeing him transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital, near Dartford in Kent only a few months later.

Despite his situation, works of Gurney’s did reach a wider audience during his time in hospital. Two song cycles, based on the works of A E Housman, Ludlow and Teme and The Western Playland, were included as part of the Carnegie Collection of British Music in 1923 and 1926, whilst small selections of poetry were also published. Gurney remained in the City of London Mental Hospital until his death. He died from tuberculosis on 26 December 1937 and was buried a few days later on 31 December in St Matthew's churchyard at Twigworth, Gloucestershire.

Gurney’s declining mental health inevitably affected his work. The music manuscripts produced during his time in hospital were cluttered and hard to decipher and only reached a wider audience through the patience and perseverance of his friend Marion Scott. Scott, a musicologist, had saved Gurney’s manuscripts and having preserved them, found editors willing to undertake the difficult task of creating a workable edition, notably Gerald Finzi, who did much to create and promote editions of Gurney’s compositions. This championing of his talent has ensured that his works not only survived but are still known today.

Ivor Gurney in uniform. Copyright The British Library. 

Gurney is often primarily considered through the lens of the First World War - recognition of the frank but moving accounts he gives of life in the trenches and a reputation cemented by his inclusion in the group of war poets commemorated at Westminster Abbey. But although the legacy of his way poetry is strong, it does not take into account his musical works or the influences and themes of his work. Gurney drew great inspiration from the natural world, writing evocatively but without sentimentality about the Gloucestershire landscapes which he loved. This rural inspiration worked across both his writing and musical composition, his choice of Housman for the libretto of his song cycles and the strong influence of Ralph Vaughan Williams on his work. Gurney looked to the Elizabethans for both literary and musical inspirations, writing in praise of Ben Jonson and resetting old English songs to his own compositions. This pre-industrial aesthetic was in part inspired by his love of the Gloucestershire countryside but was shared by composers like Vaughan Williams. It is difficult to separate his poetry and his music. Gurney set surprisingly few of his own poems to music but many more by Housman - notably in his song cycles - and also by other contemporary poets. Poetics do seem to have influenced Gurney’s musical life - few instrumental compositions survive, in contrast to a far greater number of songs, many of which were poems Gurney had set to music.

Posthumous diagnosis is always problematic when discussing historical figures, particularly so in mental health due to major changes in classification, diagnosis and understanding. Trying to definitively identify particular illnesses and conditions of individuals from history is tempting, it gives a feeling of more concrete connection, of better understanding of how they were. This is often the case in the study of notable historic individuals, with historians and biographers attempting to pinpoint any medical conditions.

Although some illnesses described in historical accounts and sources appear to be recognisable conditions, in many instances the information provided is too scant and vague to offer the basis of anything other than speculation. Even when the affliction appears to be identifiable, such diagnosis relies wholly upon the details provided and assumes that the symptoms recorded are both accurate and comprehensive. Similarly, any analysis of the incidence of named diseases assumes accuracy in not only the contemporary diagnosis but also classification. Ultimately, most posthumous diagnoses are theories. Some are coherent and have evidentiary support, whilst others are essentially speculation. It is extremely rare, if possible, to be able to prove the correct identification of condition suffered by an individual.

Aftermath of the Battle of the Somme. Copyright Imperial War Museum. 

This is the case with Gurney, whose experiences were recorded in a time when mental illness was still little understood, his situation exacerbated by the trauma of World War I. It was during the war that there began to be a recognition of the post traumatic stress experienced by combatants, then termed shell shock. Shell shock was first described in print by Dr Charles Myers of the British Psychological Society in 1915. The term was used during World War 1 to describe a very wide range of symptoms, for which there was no obvious physical cause. Most of these would now be understood as forms of post traumatic stress disorder, some perhaps as nervous breakdowns. There was discomfort and embarrassment about mental health generally, as well as shell shock more specifically, which was often seen as an inability to cope with warfare and even as cowardice. To the right is an image showing a shell-shocked soldier being led away, in the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme. This photograph is from the collections of the Imperial War Museum. Gurney’s fist volume of verse was entitled Severn and Somme, published in 1917, the year after the battle.

Gurney’s mental health problems during the war were attributed to shell shock, an interpretation of his illness perpetuated by Marion Scott in her championing of his poetry and musical compositions. Shell shock is still referred to in discussion of Gurney’s mental health, but whilst the trauma of the war undeniably affected him, others have suggested genetic predisposition. Diagnoses of Gurney’s state through his own lifetime. He was diagnosed with neurasthenia following his breakdown in 1913, treated for shell shock during the war, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in his own lifetime and more recently has been suggested as having had bipolar disorder. The emphasis on shell shock, during his own lifetime and to an extent afterwards, may have been partly an effort to protect Gurney’s personal and professional reputation. Perhaps it is easier to consider Gurney alongside fellow war poets suffering from shell shock, primarily damaged by the trauma of war, rather than dealing with chronic underlying conditions. In artistic terms, the place of a war poet is perhaps a more respected and celebrated reputation than that of a “mad” poet, as demonstrated by the discomfort around the interpretation and acceptance of poets like Christopher Smart.

In some sense, the Gurney’s diagnosis is immaterial - his lived experience and the art he produced are of greater interest than assigning a medical label. Gurney was a composer and poet inspired by the Gloucestershire countryside, with a deep interest in Elizabethan music and literature. He was a poet who captured life in the trenches for the ordinary soldiers of the First World War and with a gift for setting poetry - whether his own or that of other authors - to music. Gurney spent much of his life confined to hospitals but mixed in the literary and musical circles, remaining a lifelong friend of figures including Edmund Blunden, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells and Marion Scott. Just as his poetry defies easy categorisation, as Gurney shifts between pastoral poet, war poet, local poet and mad poet - so too does his life and legacy. He was never well known during his lifetime, but nor was he unknown. He has perhaps not had the artistic recognition deserved, but was never fully forgotten and his works are still known today. Gurney was a composer and musician who turned to poetry for convenience in time of war, but never abandoned the art form, who experienced greatly prolific periods of creativity but spells where he was unable to work. At its heart, Gurney’s work, both musical and literary, provides intense lyrical expression of personal experience.

To hear some of Gurney's compositions, check out our Ivor Gurney spotify playlist to accompany this blog post.

Find Ivor Gurney and his works in the University of York library collections:

Biography and criticism:
Michael Hurd, The ordeal of Ivor Gurney, MA 181.9 GUR/H
Daniel Hipp, The poetry of shell shock : wartime trauma and healing in Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon, MA 181 HIP
Pamela Blevins, Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: song of pain and beauty, LM 0.92 GUR/B
Ivor Gurney, War Letters: a selection, MA 181.9 GUR

Poetry:
Severn & Somme and War's embers MA 181.9 GUR
Poems of Ivor Gurney, 1890-1937 MA 181.9 GUR

Compositions:
Five Elizabethan songs: for low voice and piano, LM 43.1 GUR
Severn meadows, LM 40 BUS
Ludlow and Teme : song-cycle for tenor voice, string quartet and pianoforte, LM 43.1 GUR
The western playland (and of sorrow) : a song-cycle to poems of A.E. Housman, LM 43.13 GUR

Recordings:
Audio CD Songs CD/LM/2550
Audio CD War’s embers CD/LM/2528

Happy birthday, Mr. Eliot!

Dr Nicoletta Asciuto, Associate Lecturer in English Literature, writes about T.S Eliot who was born 129 years ago this month.

T.S Eliot in 1934.  Public Domain image by Lady Ottoline Morrell

‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.’ (I, ll. 1-3). Of Four Quartets, I have always found ‘Burnt Norton’, where these lines are taken from, the most soothing one. Written before the outbreak of World War II (1935-36), ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of the four quartets, carries the rewarding promise that our past lives, present experiences, and future hopes all merge into one fluid experience of personal time, where nothing is lost and everything redeemed, pointing to ‘one end, which is always present’ (l. 10). No other Eliot poem, I feel, expresses such fluidity in a more serene, peaceful way. Memories from his American childhood and his most recent British life mingle with preoccupations about the future, breaking through during the poet’s walk in the rose garden of Burnt Norton. He visited Cotswolds in 1934, to meet with his old friend Emily Hale, who came over from America.

This is what has made me a passionate reader and scholar of Eliot’s poetry throughout the years: how his poetry, always so very preoccupied with time, manages to be timeless yet profoundly set in history and tradition. ‘There will be time, there will be time’ (l. 26), says the poet in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, but only until ‘the taking of toast and tea’ (l. 34): after that quintessential moment of British and New England turn-of-the-century sociability, imprisoning the poet, there will be no more time to change our minds and, for him, to ever be free again.

Time and history were much on Eliot’s mind. But they are also literally accumulated and deposited in his verse, and not just as reflections of poet’s intellectual preoccupations. Writing cannot happen in a historical vacuum, and Eliot’s poetry especially engages, both directly and indirectly, with the rich poetic tradition that preceded it, whilst at the same time branding itself as new, modernist, and a breakaway from the old. Reading Eliot’s poetry does not mean simply reading the words and thoughts of an Anglophone poet living in the first half of the twentieth century; rather, it entails entering a literary time and a complex game of allusions and references, in which poets of different ages and cultures can somehow “cohabit” in one single, atemporal space. This timelessness of Eliot’s poetry has contributed to its allure, recognized by hundreds of students, scholars, and poetry readers over the last century.

This year, we not only celebrate the 129th anniversary of Eliot’s birth in St. Louis, Missouri, but also the 100th anniversary of the publication of Eliot’s first poetry collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, with the Bloomsbury-based Egoist Press, which also published works by Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Happy birthday, Mr. Eliot, and thank you for gifting us with such extraordinary, timeless poems.

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The Eliot Collection

(University of York library Rare Books Collection)

The University of York library was gifted a small number of books by and about T.S. Eliot by the library of King’s College, Cambridge in the early seventies.  This was the result of a bequest to King’s College by Eliot’s friend, John Hayward, and consisted of those books in the Hayward Collection of which King’s College already owned copies.  The collection has since been expanded, both through the acquisition of new books by gift and purchase, and through transferring to it books previously on the open shelves. It now covers such authors as W.B. Yeats, Robert Graves, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Seamus Heaney, Christopher Hill, and Paul Muldoon.  

To arrange to view items in our rare books collection please contact the Borthwick Institute

Philip Larkin’s connections to the City of Culture

Kyra Piperides, a PhD student in the Department of English and Related Literature, looks at Larkin’s connections to Hull including the recent preservation of his flat in the city by Historic England.

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Some of Larkin's poetry set up in a printing press.
(Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

As a researcher studying Philip Larkin’s poetry, I am frequently confronted with the comment: “I remember his poem about… you know… what your parents do to you!” In 2015 Professor Edwin Dawes, chair of the Philip Larkin Society, remarked that “[Larkin’s] words are quoted more frequently than those of any of his poetic contemporaries”. While the often allusively rephrased first lines of This Be The Verse roll so easily off the tongues of so many, it is the closing line of An Arundel Tomb that demonstrates the poet’s continuing relevance. A quick Twitter and Instagram search shows that #WhatWillSurviveOfUsIsLove has become associated with such diverse topics as LGBT+ rights, war and random acts of kindness. It is easy to see why Larkin became known as the country’s unofficial laureate.

Philip Larkin photographed in the
newly-completed Brynmor Jones
Library, 1969.  Photograph
by Fay Godwin. 

In 2003 Larkin was named favourite poet by the Poetry Book Society and the Poetry Library and in 2008, he topped The Times’ list of greatest British postwar writers. Despite declining the position of Poet Laureate shortly before his death, Larkin was finally memorialised in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner in December 2016. Further official recognition has come very recently, with the announcement in July 2017 that Historic England are to preserve the Hull flat in which he lived for eighteen years and wrote much of his poetry, with a Grade II listing.

While it may have taken a little longer for Westminster to officially recognise the poet, Larkin has long been celebrated in Yorkshire. From the windows of the University of Hull’s Larkin Building, you have a perfect view of the Brynmor
Jones Library, the iconic building that the poet-librarian oversaw the development and running of from 1955-1985. In the city immortalised in Here – “Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster/ Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water” – Larkin’s statue greets those arriving by train, his poems engraved below their feet. The Larkin trail guides visitors through significant points in Hull and beyond, and 40 technicolour toads graced the streets to mark 25 years since the poet’s death in 2010.

One of the technicolour toads.

CC-BY 2.0

It was the poet’s poignant words that introduced the promotional video for Hull’s successful campaign for the title of UK City of Culture 2017. The year’s celebrations have provoked all-the-more interest in Larkin, with a biographic exhibition opening in July 2017. Larkin: New Eyes Each Year features an enormous collection of the poet’s possessions, fittingly presented in the Brynmor Jones Library. Shelf after shelf of books are displayed, still in the order that the poet-librarian had them arranged, their breadth of topics highlighting his diverse interests. The words “books are a load of crap” are wittily placed, half-concealed on the shelves, behind his collection. As the complexities of the poet’s character are explored in the exhibition, visitors are given the opportunity to take a seat on a park bench, to immerse themselves in the former librarian’s poetry. Biographical interest and controversy aside, it is ultimately Larkin’s poetry that secured his place in Poet’s Corner and the title of the nation’s favourite poet.

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A statue of Philip Larkin
(Flickr CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The University of York library houses a range of Larkin’s work alongside related critical and The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin (2015), edited by Archie Burnett, contains all of Larkin’s published Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction (2008). Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993) and James Booth’s Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (2015) are engaging biographies. Audio cassettes of Larkin reading his poems are also available.
poems and a selection of unpublished pieces, complete with a comprehensive commentary. The library’s collection includes several introductions to Larkin and his poetry, as well as a selection of excellent critical works including John Osborne’s
biographical texts.

A number of Larkin’s works are held in the Poetry Society Library collection, shelved at the end of the literature section in the JB Morrell Library. This collection has over 10,000 books available to borrow, concentrating mainly on 20th century poetry in English. The Library’s rare book collection also has the Eliot collection, focusing on 20th century literature with a wide range of different authors. All the material held by the Library can be searched using the catalogue YorSearch.

Larkin: New Eyes Each Year is open until Sunday 1 October 2017, and Hull is only an hour away by train!

A Discovery in the Archives

Emily Bowles is a PhD student and part-time tutor in the Department of English and Related Literature, writing up her thesis on ‘Changing Representation of Charles Dickens, 1857-1939’. You can find her on Twitter: @EmilyBowles_.

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Portrait of British Writer Wilkie Collins (1824-1889).
Picture by Elliott and Fry of 55 Baker Street,
taken possibly in 1871. Library of Congress

In 2015 I was lucky enough to go to the Beinecke Library at Yale University to look at the Richard Gimbel Charles Dickens Collection, thanks in part to a Santander International Connections Award. The collection is vast (described by its cataloguer as “probably the largest accumulation anywhere of Dickensian material”), compiled over forty-five years, and the catalogue produced by John B. Podeschi is the length of a Dickens novel itself1. Incidentally, this catalogue isn’t available online and is only available in its (weighty and substantial) book form. The collection is an amazing collection of letters, images, editions; it even houses a lock of Dickens’ hair, with a certificate of authenticity from his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth. As I was only there for a limited period of time, I engaged
in a frantic process of trying to see as much of this incredible archive as possible. One of the things I looked at was a short manuscript in blessedly clear handwriting – Dickens’ handwriting has given me a lot of difficulties! – that outlined the life of Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins in his own words2.

Collins was a friend of Dickens and also collaborated with him, writing for Dickens’ journals Household Words and All The Year Round. He is perhaps best known as the father of detective fiction – his novel The Moonstone (1868) is considered the first full-length detective novel. My PhD thesis centres on representations of Dickens, in which I explore how Dickens was written about in a variety of forms including biographies, speeches and journalism. I’d done some previous work with Collins so I mentally filed it away to look up later; I’d never heard of a Collins autobiography, but didn’t know enough to identify what I was looking at.

Several months later, I put out a few feelers with people I knew to try to work out what the manuscript actually was. Thanks to the Wilkie Collins Society, I found out that the manuscript I’d looked at and put to the back of my mind was actually presumed lost for more than a hundred years. By a quirk of cataloguing, it was part of the Dickens collection rather than a Collins one: in trying to work out if other writers knew it was there, I discovered biographers of Collins had visited Yale and worked in the Beinecke Library, but hadn’t ‘discovered’ this manuscript – making it, amazingly, both ‘lost’ but also thoroughly catalogued, hidden in not-quite-plain sight.

Dickens at the Blacking Warehouse by Fred
Barnard. Published in The Leisure Hour in 1904.

This is not all that uncommon for manuscripts and autobiographical material in the Victorian period. Dickens had also written a short autobiographical piece, the contents of which were only made public after his death. This autobiographical fragment was used in the Life of Charles Dickens (1872-74) published by his lifelong friend John Forster, and it revealed for the first time Dickens’ difficult childhood and the time he spent working in a boot blacking factory (he writes of the “secret agony of [his] soul” during this time). The manuscript of this account, too, is lost; Forster, quite old and infirm by that time, is known to have cut and pasted extracts from letters into the biography manuscript, and this may be the fate that befell the autobiographical fragment. Or, then again, perhaps it is waiting in an archive to be discovered – that’s the wonderful thing about visiting libraries.

The Collins manuscript itself, only three pages long, was dictated at the breakfast table and sent to an American journalist to provide context for an article he was writing. The journalist, George Makepeace Towle, had copied verbatim some of Collins’ words for his final piece. The content of the manuscript is therefore not ‘new’ in the sense that it doesn’t tell us much about Collins’ life that we didn’t already know from the Towle article (published in Appleton’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art on 3 September 1870). It does, however, give us back Collins’ own words and expressions, and reveal how he conceived of his early years and education; where he laid the stresses in his own life, and what moments he perceived as formative – at least, the kind of narrative of his life that he wanted to give to a journalist.

So while the ‘discovery’ is not the headline-grabbing revelation that it might have been, it does show how important it is to make thorough use of library catalogues! And it leaves us with the question of how many researchers came and went without asking the archivists, the cataloguer, or the librarians, one (or several) of whom must have known it was there (but perhaps without knowing its significance). I have written about my find for the Wilkie Collins Journal, so you can read more a more thorough explanation of what the manuscript tells us in issue 14, which can be found on the Wilkie Collins Journal website.

Interested in finding out more about Wilkie Collins?  The University of York Library has many primary and secondary resources that will be of interest for teaching or research.

Cover art by Peter Whiteman. J. M. Dent & Sons,
London, 1977 reprint. Photo by John Keogh.

A first port of call is the Literature section on the second floor of the Morrell Library.  Here you will find a vast range of texts written by and criticism on Wilkie Collins.

You can also access a range of electronic resources off campus.  This list of primary and secondary resources is from our Subject Guides page where you can find information of our 19th century collections for English and Related Literatures.

Finally,  we have a copy of The Moonstone in the Milner-White collection.  The Very Revd Eric Milner-White, Dean of York from 1941 until his death in 1963, was a member of the University Promotion Committee, which was responsible for the original planning of the University of York. One of his many interests was book collecting, and his collection of English detective fiction came to the Library after his death.  The Moonstone is widely considered to be the first full length detective novel in the English language including ‘red herrings’, a reconstruction of the crime, false suspects and a final twist in the plot.

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1. John B. Podeschi, Dickens and Dickensiana: A Catalogue of the Richard Gimbel Collection in the Yale University Library. New Haven: Yale University Library, 1980. Print. ix.

2. Wilkie Collins, Autobiographical Sketch. MS. Gimbel-Dickens. Beinecke Library, Yale University. H1239.

The Battle of the Somme: part 2

Our understanding of the First World War has been shaped by the numerous artists, poets, writers and composers who recorded their experiences of the fighting. In the second of two posts, Ilka Heale highlights some of the men who fought in the Battle of the Somme (1st July - 19th November 1916).

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Image of Robert Graves: [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

Poet and novelist, Robert Graves (1895-1985) is probably best known for the I, Claudius novels. In the First World War he fought alongside another war poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967).

During the Battle of the Somme, Graves was struck by an exploding shell a few days before his 21st birthday leaving him so badly injured that he was reported dead by his commanding officer. However, by the time his obituary appeared in the British press, Graves had miraculously recovered. He was soon well enough to return to the front a few months later. Surviving the war, he went on to live until the age of 90.

William Noel Hodgson (1893-1916) was also a poet. Known as 'Smiler' to his friends due to his sunny disposition, he volunteered on the outbreak of the war in 1914. This poem Before Action was written in the weeks leading up to the Battle of the Somme. His battalion was ordered to advance across the downward slope of a hill, in full view of German trenches on three sides. They knew how slender their chances were. On 1 July 1916, Hodgson was killed in the opening minutes of the advance.

Taken from William Noel Hodgson: the gentle poet by Jack Medomsley.

Seen as a plea for courage in the face of death, this poem was originally published on 29 June 1916 in the weekly paper The New Witness. Hodgson died two days later. Hodgson's posthumous volume Verse and Prose in Peace and War, published in 1917, was so popular it ran into three editions.

John Buchan (1875-1940) was the author of the Thirty-nine steps, one of the most famous and influential adventure stories of the 20th century. During the First World War, Buchan worked at the War and Foreign Offices and was appointed Director of Information making a major contribution with the innovative use of propaganda. Published in 1916, Buchan wrote The Battle of the Somme, First Phase claiming that the battle was so successful that it marked the end of trench warfare. However he failed to inform his readers that of the 110,000 British soldiers who fought in the Battle, over 57,000 became casualties and 20,000 were killed on the first day of fighting.

Starting in 1914, Buchan also wrote the extensive Nelson's 'History of the war' published as a monthly magazine. This book, published in 1917, was intended to be a companion to the monthly volumes of 'History of the war' as it contained sketch maps illustrating the battles.

Herbert Ward (1863-1919) was a British sculptor, illustrator, writer and explorer. As Ward was too old to enlist in the army, he served with the British Ambulance Committee. Wounded at the front and mentioned in dispatches in 1915, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his work removing wounded soldiers whilst under bombardment. He died, partly as a result of his injuries, in August 1919.

Image from Mr Poilu by Herbert Ward

Mr. Poilu: notes and sketches with the fighting French was published in December 1916 as a tribute to the French as worthy allies. As described by Ward in chapter 1, Poilu was a nickname given to French soldiers. The illustrations, chiefly monochrome, depict not victory but land despoiled and soldiers standing alone, their faces all aged by a war which must inescapably be fought despite the losses already incurred.

British Composer George Butterworth (1885-1916) was best known for The Banks of Green Willow and his musical settings for the poems of A.E Housman.

Written in 1913, The Banks of Green Willow is a short pastoral idyll. It has become almost a symbol of that long-lost halcyon Edwardian age, as if Butterworth were transcribing the disappearing world around him.
 Butterworth had joined up at the outbreak of war and during the Battle of the Somme was awarded the Military Cross for capturing a series of trenches near Pozières. On 4th August 1916, his unit was ordered to attack a communications trench and despite successfully capturing it, he was shot by a German sniper and died on 5th August.

There is an exhibition of items from the University Library's collections on the ground floor of the Fairhurst Building. To find material on First World War, search YorSearch, our Library catalogue.

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The photographs of the books in the University Library's collections were taken by the University photographer, Paul Shields.

Swedish children's books in the University Library

Ilka Heale browses some of the children's books held in our collections.

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Whilst searching through our Literature section, I came across a collection of children's books written in Swedish. Four of the authors were born and lived in Sweden, and the fifth also wrote in Swedish (although she was Finnish).

Why do we have them? Well, the short answer is that I don't know! The Library has over a million books, the majority of which have been bought for teaching and research. However, we also have many books that have been donated over the years and these may have been part of a gift.

Now, I can't read Swedish, but I have read some of these stories by Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson in translation both as a child and as an adult.

Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002) was a writer of fiction and screenplays but she also wrote children's books. Her most famous creation is Pippi Longstocking, a nine-year-old girl who has superhuman strength!

Photograph of an illustration from Pippi Långstrump by Astrid Lindgren

Pippi was named by Lindgren's then nine-year-old daughter, Karin, who requested a get-well story from her mother one day when she was home sick from school. This interview with Karin in 2015, explains how her mother came up with the stories.

Front cover of Mumintrollet no. 4 by Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson (1914– 2001) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish novelist, painter, illustrator and comic strip author. She is best known as the author of the Moomin books for children. The first book in the series, The Moomins and the Great Flood, appeared in 1945; however it was the next two books, Comet in Moominland (1946) and Finn Family Moomintroll (1948) that brought her fame.

In 1951 Finn Family Moomintroll was translated into English. The book's success caught the attention of Charles Sutton, a London agent who offered Jansson a lucrative deal to produce a Moomin comic strip for London's Evening News newspaper. Jansson agreed to produce six strips a week for seven years, starting in 1954. It was an instant hit, reaching up to 20 million readers daily in over 40 countries.

Along with books on the Moomins in Swedish we also have two biographies, The sculptor's daughter: a childhood memoir and Tove Jansson: life, art, words: the authorised biography.

Extract from Mumintrollet by Tove Jansson

Maria Gripe (1923-2007) was an author of books for children and young adults. Although she wrote stories as a child, Gripe did not publish her first book until she was 31. Her first notable success came in the 1960s with a trilogy of books about two school friends, Hugo and Josephine. Over the course of her career, Gripe wrote 38 books, translated into 30 different languages.

Elsa Beskow (1874–1953) was both an author and an illustrator of children's books. As a child, Beskow loved fairy tales and her stories would combine reality with elements of fantasy from fairy tales. Known as the Beatrix Potter of Scandinavia, her illustrations take the reader back to an idyllic, rural Sweden at the turn of the 20th century.

Photograph of the front cover of Sagan om den lilla lilla gumman by Elsa Beskow

Paul Lennart Hellsing (1919–2015) was a writer and translator, particularly known for his nonsense rhymes and word plays. In his books written for children, he experimented with language, playing with words and verb forms. During his career, Hellsing wrote over a hundred books for children and translated and interpreted nearly as many, especially from English.

Photograph of an illustration from Krakel spektakel boken by Lennart Hellsing

To find more books by these authors, along with other material on children's books and illustration, search YorSearch, our Library catalogue.

There is also a small collection of children's literature In the Morrell building. The Peggy Janiurek collection can be found on the first floor, at the end of the Education section. The collection was assembled originally in collaboration with the University's Department of Educational Studies, and named in memory of a former student.

The Library's Special Collections also holds a number of late 18th and 19th century children's literature including books illustrated by Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane among others.

Photograph of the title page of The Golden Staircase : poems and verses for children

Items from the Special Collections can be consulted in the Borthwick Institute for Archives.

The Library has many texts in languages other than English. To find them, search on our Library catalogue and choose the language facets on the left hand side.

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All photographs have been taken by Paul Shields, University photographer.