Skip to main content

Down Ampney

As a former boss of mine used to say, there's a time and a place for spontaneity. My visit to Down Ampney wasn't planned: I had been in Droitwich (in Elgar country) for a family gathering, and a look at the map showed me that with only a slight detour I would be able to pass through Down Ampney, birthplace of Ralph Vaughan Williams. I seized the day.

It was June, only a few days from the solstice. Not a scorching hot day, but warm and mostly sunny. Almost as soon as you enter the village of Down Ampney there is a sign beckoning you towards the historic church. It is down quite a long track, set amid fields where sheep were grazing beneath green trees. Peter Warlock infamously (and inaccurately) described Vaughan Williams’ music as ‘just a little too much like a cow looking over a gate'; and here in Down Ampney it is easy to imagine where that facet of his rich musical personality came from.

All Saints Church, Down Ampney, Gloucestershire

Pronunciation and punctuation

Ralph Vaughan Williams' first name is pronounced Rafe (to rhyme with ‘safe'); any other pronunciation used to annoy him. His surname was Vaughan Williams, without a hyphen: Vaughan-Williams is incorrect, and it is also wrong to list him as ‘Williams, Ralph Vaughan'.

There seems to be some doubt about how to say Down Ampney. My visit in June was on a Sunday morning, and I arrived just as a service was ending. The curate greeted me, and in the course of our conversation I asked what the correct pronunciation should be. She told me it was ‘Amney', with a silent p; but she confessed that she was not a native, and in the rest of her conversation she pronounced it ‘Ampney'. 

One of my correspondents has stated that the p is ‘not exactly silent'. It is not quite absent, but not quite there: think of Stepney as pronounced by someone who lives there.


Vaughan Williams’ birthplace

The Old Vicarage, where Vaughan Williams was born in 1872, is now a private house. It is a surprisingly long way from the church, set back slightly from the road and protected behind a gate. Unlike the church, which has a small exhibition about the composer’s life, there is no obvious memorial to him on the house which is visible to the general public. I would imagine the current owners discourage tourists like myself from gawping at their home, and who can blame them?


Come down, O love divine

The tune DOWN AMPNEY was written by Vaughan Williams for the hymn Come down, O love divine. Here it is being sung by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge:



The tune first appeared in The English Hymnal, a collection of hymns for which Vaughan Williams was the music editor. Most of the ‘new’ tunes that he provided for this book were adapted from existing melodies - mostly folk-songs like The Ploughboy’s Dream (FOREST GREEN) and Our Captain calls all hands (MONKS GATE). Only three tunes in The English Hymnal were completely original compositions by Vaughan Williams; of these, DOWN AMPNEY is arguably the most beautiful - in fact it is one of the most beautiful of all hymn-tunes. By giving this tune the name of his idyllic birthplace the composer seems to be giving it his personal seal of approval; though I also guess that the words of the hymn (Come DOWN, O love divine) may have given him the idea of choosing this name.


Comments

  1. Mark Browse4 October 2016 at 20:24

    John Francis of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society believes that the composer chose the name DOWN AMPNEY as a tribute to his father, who died when Ralph was a very young boy.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sussex hymn-tunes - Part II: KINGSFOLD

A while back I started to write about hymn-tunes that are named after Sussex place-names. Having been briefly diverted by an expedition to Suffolk and Essex, I am now back home and ready to think again about the tunes that grew near where I live. The first instalment of my post on Sussex hymn-tunes  focused mainly on tunes that Ralph Vaughan Williams collected from Harriet and Peter Verrall in Monks Gate, just outside Horsham. Vaughan Williams lived not far away, in Surrey, and many of the folk-songs that he adapted for use as hymn-tunes were collected in Sussex. So if you will indulge me, I will stay with RVW in this entry too. I live in Warnham, a village just outside Horsham, diametrically opposite from Monks Gate. There is a hymn-tune called WARNHAM, but only because I wrote it myself. It was my entry for a competition run by the Royal School of Church Music to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Hymns Ancient & Modern . The competition challenged composers to
Post a Comment
Read more

Forest Green

FOREST GREEN is the name of the tune sung (in the UK, at least) to O little town of Bethlehem . Since this is the carol from which I have taken the title for my book (and this blog) I thought I should look into it. The tune is a folk-song called The Ploughboy's Dream , which Ralph Vaughan Williams 'collected' in 1903. Vaughan Williams noted that the singer from whom he learnt this song, Mr Garman of Forest Green, was a native of Sussex but living in Surrey. Thanks to Mr Simon Coombs of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society , I have learnt that RVW collected this song at a place called Broadmoor in Surrey, and that he also heard songs sung by one Isaac Longhurst on the same occasion. Here's a map showing Broadmoor: View Larger Map I have tried to find out some more about Mr Garman of Forest Green. Vaughan Williams estimated his age to be about 60. By consulting the census records I have discovered the following: There is only one adult Mr Garman reco
4 comments
Read more

Bunessan

On the southern edge of the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides there is an arm of land, the Ross of Mull, that reaches out westwards towards the holy island of Iona. On the map, the end of this peninsula looks a little like a hand wearing mittens, or perhaps a cat’s paw reaching towards a mouse. The inlet between the hand and the thumb is Loch na Làthaich, and on the shores of the loch sits the village of Bunessan. This is a landscape defined by the brown-green of the hills and the grey-blue of the sky and sea. It is a beautiful landscape but also a harsh one, where crofters scraped out a precarious living. Bunessan village viewed from Lower Ardtun © JaneMcArtney [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Just outside Bunessan is a stone monument commemorating a woman named Mary MacDonald. In some ways Mary’s life was unremarkable: in outline it was the same as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other women who li
Post a Comment
Read more