First, some facts. Ivor Gurney was born in Gloucester on 28 August 1890, the second of four children. His sisterWinifred had been born in 1886, Ronald followed in 1894, and Dorothy six years later. Their father, David Gurney, was a tailor who ran his own shop, and his wife, born Florence Lugg, and older than her husband by five years, who was also trained in tailoring, helped with needle and thread when domestic chores allowed. According to Michael Hurd, ‘David Gurney was a Severn Valley man, from the low-lying fields around Maisemore. Florence Lugg came from Bisley, high in the hills above Stroud. He was gentle, placid, ruminative. Her temperament was much chillier, and given to anxious storms.’

Hurd goes on to remark that in 1896 the Gurneys, who seem to have enjoyed music, bought a pianoforte, ‘a sign of increasing respectability’. But many working-class families owned pianos. They weren't so much signs of respectability as evidence of people's ability to find pleasure and entertainment through music. All the Gurney children were given music lessons. This, too, was common enough. And still more commonly they heard and enjoyed the music provided in their local church. For the Gurneys this was All Saints, where Ivor Gurney was soon to become one of the curate's, Alfred Cheesman's, ‘boys’. Cheesman was, so Hurd suggests, homoerotic rather than homosexual, an adherent of what Paul Fussell has called in his chapter on ‘Soldier Boys’ in The Great War and Modern Memory, ‘mutual affection, protection, and admiration’. This was after all the period of that ‘Uranianism’ which can be in large measure traced to Oxford, of which Cheesman was a graduate. And Uranianism was characterized, again to use Fussell 's words, by ‘the attractions and usually the impeccable morality of boy love’.

The friendship with Cheesman lasted into Gurney's adulthood. Indeed, Cheesman was to officiate at Gurney's funeral. And for all that Gurney may be accounted one of the awkward squad, he never lacked for friends of both sexes. In 1900 he won a place in the Gloucester Cathedral choir and at King's School. A few years later, when he began to write music, he was encouraged not merely by Cheesman but by Emily Hunt. Fifteen years older than Gurney, she was one of two sisters, a violinist and woman of modest but independent means, who met Gurney through Cheesman's good offices.