Will Harvey was one of that extraordinary group of gifted people who gathered around Gloucester just before the First World War, a group that includes Ivor Novello, Ivor Gurney and Hubert Howells. Ivor Novello and Hubert Howells went off to distinction in different forms of music, Ivor Gurney was cruelly confined to a mental institution for the rest of his life after the end of the war, and Will Harvey was captured by the Germans and spent the last few years of the war in a German prisoner of war camp, where he wrote ‘Ducks’ . There’s apparently no connection with the Dymock poets, who flourished independently but briefly in those literary Forest pre-first world war years. Will Harvey, alone of those pre-war literati, continued as the Forest poet for the rest of his life.

Will Harvey was a well known pub man with a deep religious sense that was not in the least pious. He denounced those who disapproved of his refreshingly humane take on religion, labelling them as ‘a crowd of holy, bloated, shiny hatted, grave, frock-coated and damnably obedient’. This insult is included in is his ‘Apologia for a merry rogue’, and if you disapprove of any reference to pubs in this column, could I please refer you to this poem.

His God was not a severe bearded Old Testament autocrat sitting on a high seat in heavenly mist, dispensing well-deserved punishment on miscreants. His God was a genial, unreligious figure with a great sense of humour, characterised by the wonderful quirky ducks that Will observed during his long exile as a prisoner of war in Germany, comical, in case the minds of men should become ‘dull, humourless and glum’.

He declares in his verse ‘To Certain Persons’ that he would rather see England free than sober’, as I was particularly delighted to discover a wonderful little poem of his entitled ‘A Curse’. This was written when, after a long country walk, he found himself stranded in a village in which the local Lord of the Manor would not permit a pub, probably on religious grounds.A few lines will give you the flavour of his ‘Curse’:

‘For the Lord of Soddington, who grudges men their beer,

let Satan hound him swift to hell, with hot and pointed spear’.

The curses get more and more diabolical, as the poem progresses, in a mediaeval sort of way, but you get the general idea. It’s great fun, but I don’t think that he really meant it.

This gloriously subversive view of religion is along the same lines as the humanist dialogue in the great and rich satire about the Second World War, ‘Catch 22’ by Joseph Heller. Yossarian, the anti-hero of the book, an unreligious person, confronts someone who is cursing God for the War. The curser reminds Yossarian that he doesn’t believe in God. Yossarian responds: ‘But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be’.

I think Will Harvey might have understood this.