Programme Notes

In late 2017, I was asked by my friend, Alex White, to write him a piece commemorating the centenary of the Armistice that ended the First World War. Having already done a setting of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est", I was determined to create a setting of a different character: that of the grief faced by many a family, friend, and lover of those who were killed. The First World War claimed, through combat or otherwise, the lives of over 40,000,000 people around the world. This number of dead and wounded, and how many more this left bereaved, is incomprehensible, so in order to even begin to understand the emotional ruin of the time, one has to zoom in onto a particular story. One of these is that of the poet Rudyard Kipling's son, named John. John Kipling, through the influence of his father, and against medical advice regarding his myopia, joined the war as a Lieutenant in the 2nd Irish Guards. Leading an attack on German positions during the Battle of Loos on 27th September 1915, John Kipling, aged 18, was never seen again. Rudyard Kipling searched in vain for his only son, even to going as far as contacting the Germans through his Swedish connections.

In 1916, he was commissioned to write a poem after the Battle of Jutland claimed the lives of over 6000 Royal Navy sailors. He would have had vast amounts of grief to put into his new poem, entitled "My Boy Jack". Contemporaries, however, would have seen this as an epitaph for Jack Cornwell, a 16 year old sailor whose bravery at Jutland earned him a posthumous Victoria Cross.

In this setting, I have attempted to build on the sense of greivous loss that Kipling creates in his poem; a reminder of a bloodshedding that I certainly hope that humanity doesn't make again. To gain a sense of place, and make a musical link with another casualty of the war, I reference "Lovliest of Trees" from George Butterworth's "Shropshire Lad".