Three Choirs Festival

Anthony Boden

An Appreciation by Simon Carpenter

One of my most prized treasures is a copy of Herbert Brewer’s memoirs signed by his successor as Gloucester organist, Herbert Sumsion.

It was given to me by Tony Boden when the then Festival Chief Executive, Alexis Paterson, and I visited him in December 2021, soon after I started volunteering in the office. He could not have been more encouraging about my efforts on behalf of the Festival’s archive and history. He was also very enthusiastic when I asked his opinion on my own ideas for a book on the Festival’s history. Ideas that subsequently bore fruit in 2025.

Tony of course wrote, what will be for ages yet to come, the definitive history of the Festival. A fact for which we all have so much to be grateful for. I bought both editions (1992 and 2016) when they first came out. And needless to say, for the past few years I have been constantly referring to one or both of them - ‘Boden’ is always my first port of call when I embark on a new piece of research for the Festival.

As readers will know, following a career in the RAF medical service for which he was awarded the Order of St John’s Officer’s Cross in 1987 in recognition of his services to military medicine, Tony was the Festival Administrator between 1989 and his retirement from this role in 1999. This was in the days before anyone was on the Festival’s payroll, so it was an enormous job. But he successfully navigated the Festival though those critical pre-millennium years, and handed it over in rude health.

As well as this work, he was a well-known writer with particular interests in music and literature. And if this wasn’t all enough, he was also in 1995 the founding Chairman of the Ivor Gurney Society, of which he was elected president in 2015. His books include ‘Stars in a dark night: the letters of Ivor Gurney to the Chapman Family’ (1986 rev 2004), ‘F W Harvey: Soldier Poet’ (1988 rev 2016), ‘The Parrys of the Golden Vale: background to genius’ (1998), ‘Thomas Tomkins: the last Elizabethan’ (2005), and with R K R Thornton ‘FW Harvey selected poems’ (2011). All essential reading for anyone at all interested in the history of local culture.