For the last two years, I’ve been lucky enough to combine literature and the Great War by taking part in the WFA War Poets’ Tour, organised by the twin dreadnaughts Viv Whelpton of the Suffolk Branch, and legend in his own trench line, Clive Harris of Battle Honours. The trips succeed admirably in bridging the false gap that’s grown between literary and military contexts of the Great War poets; two complementary perspectives reminding us that the poets were soldiers, in many cases committed and effective ones; and that despite Michael Gove’s clunking beer-mat revisionism, the War Poets are culturally central to the public perception of the war, and are a unique artistic response to a central event in history.

This year’s trip centres on Ypres and among many names, the Gloucestershire writer Ivor Gurney. I’ve always had a fascination with Gurney, but wish I knew his work better. I was deeply touched to read Helen Thomas’s account of visiting Gurney in an asylum after the war:

‘we were met by a tall gaunt dishevelled man clad in pyjamas and dressing gown, to whom Miss Scott introduced me. He gazed with an intense stare into my face and took me silently by the hand. Then I gave him the flowers which he took with the same deeply moving intensity and silence. He then said, ‘You are Helen, Edward’s wife and Edward is dead.’ And I said, ‘Yes, let us talk of him.’

I also realised I knew very little about Gurney’s unit the 2/5th Gloucesters, and set out to find out a little more if I could. With Barnes’s battalion history on its way, I frittered time with a search of an auction site ‘just in case’.

Lo and behold…for the price of a reprint of Barnes’s book was a postcard sold as ‘2 / 5th Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment Epping July 1915'.

Duly bought, the card did indeed show nine Gloucestershire Regiment soldiers in front of a bell tent; the photographer was JW Hack of 50, Suffolk Road, Cheltenham, whose photographs of the regiment are common in the Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum. As a local photographer, he seems to have followed the 2/5th to their training camp in Essex, and taken a series of ‘pals’ photos. The card, addressed to a Mr Jeffrey of Ashburnham Road, Northampton, was clearly postmarked ‘EPPING 3 JY 15', and most helpfully signed RV Copeland…

Time for the web to do its work. Ralph Vivian Copeland was born the Orange Free State, South Africa, on the 3rd June 1896; His parents however, were Cheltenham born: his father George was born in 1868, his mother Emily Louisa (nee Winter) in the same year. Sadly George Copeland may have returned to his home town due to ill health, as he died in July 1900 aged only 32: the family home of ‘Heilbron’ on Hales Road may have had bittersweet echoes of their South African experience.

Ralph was working as an ‘office boy’ in 1911, but with the outbreak of war, he enlisted on the 16th September 1914 in Gloucester: initially he joined the 5th Reserve Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment with the service number 3143, then as Private RV Copeland 241003, of the 2/5th Battalion. Gurney, initially rejected by the 1/5th Gloucesters, eventually enlisted with the 2/5th with the serial number 241281 — 278 numbers away. Perhaps not known to each other unless by sight?

The photo, with its Epping postmark, fitted perfectly with the period in 1915 spent by the battalion in the Chelmsford area. Similar postcards in the archives of the Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum , clearly indicate what an enterprising photographer JW Hack was, ‘working’ the Epping / Chelmsford camps and recording hundreds of cheerful Gloucestershire men as yet untouched by war.

Hack was born in April 1881, in Charlton Kings, son of John Henry Hack and Mary Jane Walters. By 1901,he was already working in the photography trade in Aldershot. By 1914 he was renting a studio and house at 50 Suffolk Road: it is this address that is associated with the many hundreds of photographs Hack took of the Gloucestershire Regiment.

Another soldier photographed during July 1915 by the enterprising Hack, was Ivor Gurney. He appears in a photograph very similar to the one above, which can be seen on the excellent website of the Ivor Gurney Society. Did he know Copeland? Impossible to say. A small clue to their proximity is provided by the tiny negative numbers painted onto the plates: Copeland’s tent photo is clearly numbered ‘3045'….

…while Gurney’s tent is either ‘3041' or more likely ‘3061', probably taken on the same bright summer day when the light is good and the subjects willing. The centres on a relaxed Copeland, staring directly at the camera. Did he commission the photograph?

Ivor Gurney’s war record is well known, and parallel to Copland’s. Poet and office boy both crossed to France on the 24th May 1916. Where Gurney’s physical war ended in autumn 1917, by summer 1917 Copeland appears in a Cheltenham newspaper as a Lance Corporal: