Walford Davies

I typed Walford Davies into "youtube" to find that there are on the first page only two versions of his most famous work, "Solemn Melody". They always played it at the remembrance service but the trouble was that when you turned on the TV to watch, Richard Dimbleby would speak over it in his solemn tones. The full army band playing it is wonderful, gives it the depth of feeling it needs for the occasion; the two versions on "youtube" are not so good: the first is fine though - Julian Lloyd Webber with the orchestra of St Martins in the Field, very moving and "English" - and the second is good in its way - an organ version, loud and lacking in feeling. Give me the brass band version every time.
When my father was a young man in the 1920's he was a member of the Workers Education Association (WEA) in Blackwood; they used to have guest speakers at some meetings and one of these, he told me, was Walford Davies. Probably he was then a professor of music at Aberystwyth University. He used to get to Blackwood by train from Newport. When he got to the meeting he would speak first of the beauty of the Welsh valley he had just travelled up and of how he could understand how music was so important to Welsh people and how well they performed it in the light of the beauty of their landscape. (Not like Sir Thomas Beecham who, later, after WW2, said that "there is no music in Wales" which caused a bit of a furore in the press).
Another speaker at the WEA meetings was the poet Walter de la Mere. My father spoke proudly of how he had shaken his hand.
Who reads him now?

THE MOTH.
"Isled in the midnight air,
Musked with the dark's faint bloom,
Out into glooming and secret haunts
The flame cries, "Come!"