The funeral of Ralph Vaughan Williams
Fifty-eight years ago today the funeral of Ralph Vaughan Williams was held at Westminster Abbey. As a close friend of the composer and his wife Ursula, Simona was a guest at the funeral and wrote about her feelings on his death and about the service. I have no idea if this has ever been published, certainly there is no evidence of it having been so in her papers, so rather than summarise her prose I've decided simply to post it as written in 1958.
On August Bank Holiday, 1958, my husband, Noel Iliff, and I bicycled across London to have tea at Hanover Terrace with Ralph and Ursula. It was a glorious day and Regent's Park was full of people sunbathing or boating on the lake. Our visit was not entirely a social event, we had gone to discuss the progress of the nativity play The First Nowell which I had talked Ralph into preparing with me for a charity matinee at Drury Lane. The vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields had persuaded the management to lend their stage for one afternoon in aid of the Ockenden Venture. We had got to the point when all the words (which I had chosen from mediaevel plays) had been put together and Ralph was making the final selection of English carols to accompany them. There was little left to do but the orchestration. Noel was involved in his capacity of director.
We spent a profitable afternoon in discussion, followed by a pleasant interlude when Ursula came in bringing tea. When the time to leave had come I went over to Ralph's armchair for the embrace expected from a honorary niece and put a hand on each of his arms to deter him from getting up. 'You are looking at me, my dear' he said, 'as if you were never going to see me again.'
I felt a shiver run through me but I pulled myself together and replied - 'I expect that's because I have to get on my bicycle and ride home through the Bank Holiday traffic.' That seemed to satisfy him and we had some conversation about the horrors of negotiating Hyde Park Corner.
In fact I did not see him again. We spoke on the phone and had some argument by letter on the vexed question of the orchestra pit at Drury Lane. The management, who were currently running the smash hit My Fair Lady, had agreed to lend the theatre on the condition that our orchestra was tailored to fit into the seating arrangement for that show. This seemed to me a reasonable request, for their musicians would be coming into their accustomed seats a very short time after ours packed up. Ralph was unaccountably bothered by the restriction. This surprised me, coming from someone who had shown himself so adaptable to the limits involved in writing for films. Nevertheless the more he worked on arranging the carols the more instruments he felt he needed. We both thought the other was being unreasonable. His last letter, with heavy underlinings, began 'Very much against my will -' and ended with a promise to try to conform, typed (by Ursula) in red.
i did not get this letter until the morning when Ursula rang us, considerably before breakfast, to tell us he had died in the night. She spent, I learnt afterwards, several hours on the telephone at dawn to break the news to as many of his friends as she had time to reach to save us the shock of hearing it on the early morning BBC bulletins - a valiant effort that must have cost much distress. Noel answered the phone and brought the message to me, with her added request that we should not let St Martin's assume the play had to be cancelled. She felt the orchestration was near enough complete and that any deficiencies could be made good by Roy Douglas, who knew the workings of RVW's musical mind almost as well as the composer did himself.
The gap between August 26th, when Ralph had died, and the funeral on 19th September seemed interminable. All his friends were shaken as well as full of grief. When he was alive I had thought of him as old - his snow white hair, which stood out in a crowd like a Persil advertisement, so you could tell at a glance whether he was in a concert audience, was enough to remind you of that fact. But one's immediate reaction to the news was - 'How could he have died so young?' There was almost a feeling of annoyance - he had no right to leave us so suddenly and when he seemed in such a creative mood. For me, life came to a standstill, for nothing could be done about The First Nowell until the funeral had taken place. London became intolerable so I took myself off to France for a week to clear my mind. I went to see my childhood music mistress and was surprised and delighted to find how well she knew RVW's music and how much she, and her musical friends shared our sense of shock.
Of the funeral itself I have subdued and misty recollections. The day was grey and drizzly, the interior of the Abbey sombre, Almost everybody had dressed in black which did not seem appropriate for Ralph. Before the service proper we had the Commemoration, a concert of music by RVW and his favourite composer, Bach. Who else but Sir Adrian Boult could possibly have conducted? After nearly three weeks we thought we had composed ourselves and would be calm and stoical. I do not know who had decided to open the proceedings with the Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus. The opening bars of that lovely and so English tune were enough to undo all our resolutions of dignity and a good many of us, despite our resolutions, dissolved into tears. I have a persistent memory of the Tallis Fantasia following, but it is not included in the Order of Service. Can I have dreamt it?
My most vivid memory of the actual funeral is of Ursula's deportment. In a simple dress of charcoal grey, hatless and carrying only a small sprig of green leaves, she led the principal mourners, following the clergy procession into the Musician's Aisle to lay his ashes near to Purcell and his teacher Stanford. The way she walked reminded me that she had been a drama student at the Old Vic; tall, holding her head proudly and, as actresses are taught, not once looking at the floor. The choir sang O Taste and See which RVW had written only five years earlier for the same abbey but a very different occasion - the Coronation. Then when the small procession had returned, we ended with the marvellously uplifting arrangement of the Old Hundredth which he had persuaded the Archbishop to allow in that same ceremony in order that the congregation could get to their feet and add their voices to those of the choir. That was precisely what was needed to send us out more happily into the grey afternoon.
