This letter was received some time ago, and is shown unedited. It was a reply to an email sent to Mr Carson. The italic areas are quotes from the original email. Please enjoy one mans' reminiscences of the Old Choir School.

Dear Jeremy,

Please also accept mine for the somewhat long delay. We have been moving house and, for several months, computers have been in storage. Believe me, your e-mail was a delight, set like a jewel in a sea of 1123 spams. I have since installed a filter.

I do not know whether it was mentioned in my entry, but I was never a chorister in the choir at Chester. My nostalgia is born of three years at the King's School, two of which were spent in the "cathedral buildings" (Barclays Bank) and one at the "new"

Wrexham Road site. Chester was so much more romantic than any other place I was educated that I have fond memories.

I think that I was trying to get permission to publish rather a touching poem by one of the Chester choristers which appeared in the school/choir magazine, one copy of which I seem to have acquired. It was only for "temporary" publication on a choral enthusiasts' Yahoo Group. I did use it in the end and everyone was delighted to read it.

The days of the small school are long gone, I think. St. Paul's, in London, held on for quite a while and Westminster Abbey still does but surely it must be the last.

I came up to visit in 2002 and met Mr. Poulter. I am passionate about the psalms and, it seems, so is he - so I was very impressed. I wrote an account of my musical journey, lasting a week and a few days. It began at St John's Cambridge and, via nine cathedrals, ended at Hereford. We managed evensong at seven of them. I will bore you with the section which includes Chester.

"On arrival in Chester, Martin and I decide to walk around the walls of the city. Martin suffers, with resolute patience, my frequent pangs of nostalgia. The swans are gone from the canal, the drama of steam has no place now on the railway and the blazered children who scurried up and down the walls are but misty wraiths. However, the places themselves are unchanged; the Bluecoat School where we took our lunch, the turrets where we hid from wandering 'beaks'

and, above all, the cathedral. My school, alas abandoned its cathedral buildings to Barclay's Bank and expanded on an out-of-town site.

I don't think I have ever forgiven it.

"As we explore the cloisters, red-cassocked choristers mingle with visitors as all prepare for evensong. Chester Cathedral is reconstructing part of its monastic buildings for use as a song school. Until that is complete, the boys must use the library as a vestry and scuttle through the cloisters. Chester is a small, snug cathedral and you could believe that its red sandstone walls would warm you in the winter but actually it is now heated by underfloor pipes. Here and there, however, are the grand, black Victorian stoves, bearing the Queen's crown, and manufactured by the Gurney Warming and Ventilating Company.

All but one stand dark and cold. That one has been converted to burn gas; but when I was warming my little snow-balling fingers beside them in the winter of 1959 they were coke-fired.

"A poet by the name of S. J. Forrest penned some humorous lines back in 1962. They were ecclesiastical in content and one, from "Orders in Orbit", was inspired by the suggestion that the "Easter Egg might have proved a more suitable emblem of Christianity than the Cross". The poem begins by describing the inside of the new oviform church, the processional egg and the totally bald-headed choir.

Verse three offers an olfactory ode:

"Though incense is sternly prohibited here,
Or fragrance of foliage gay,
The boiler diffuses a sulphurous fume,
Like an egg that has finished its day."

"Even as a sixteen-year-old reading this, I was wrenched back to those Chester Gurneys knowing exactly the experience of the poet.

A later verse continues:

"The egg, he considered an emblem supreme,
For modern and sceptical thought;
Requiring no more than the slightest of change,
To make it the sign of the nought."

"This egg fixation recalls yet another echo from the past, a poem from the St. Paul's "Choristers' Magazine" of June 1892, written by Henry Scott Holland and entitled "The Song of Paul's Children".

One day I shall subject you to the whole of it - but I will only hit you when you are down and unlikely to retaliate. Here I shall quote just the second stanza which refers to the previously mentioned "blessed dome" of St. Paul's.

"That is the egg that hatched us,
Hung up there in the sky;
We where the happy White-birds
Baked in the big blue pie!
We hummed away and buzzed there,
Like bees in a blue hive,
And honey we shall find there
As long as we shall live.
And oh! to be at home again!
Beneath the blessed dome again!
And suck the honeycomb again,
And buzz and hum at home again,
Under the big blue dome."

"Now clearly St. Paul's may not always have been able to boast a Paul Phoenix or a Connor Burrowes but 'hum and buzz'?

Where they ever that strange? Although the poet seems to have lost the plot, and metamorphosed his happy birds into contented bees, he does return during the last stanza . . .

"And other chicks are hatched there,
And sing so fair and fine,
The songs that once we sang there
In days of ' . . . . . . . . . . '.

"I will leave you to finish that for yourselves, for I am acutely aware that I have left you standing in the north transept of Chester Cathedral while I have gone wandering down Memory Lane yet again. It is nearly time for evensong and we must take our seats in the choir stalls where Messrs. Batsfood and Fly once again take up the tale:

"The woodwork of the choir . . . is the cathedral's chief glory, and the stalls are among the very finest in England." "It was erected in 1380, some ten years after the stallwork at Lincoln on which it is an improvement. The stalls retain their superb series of misericords, illustrating fables, scriptural scenes, and incidents from the mediæval Bestiaries." However we can not lift our seats to inspect these wonders for the choir is approaching us through the screen.

"The Head Chorister, in his full-length red cloak, does not take his place among them, and before Evensong begins we understand why.

Today we are to witness the creation of a new chorister.

The probationer stands between his Head Chorister and his Choir Master at the Sanctuary step. Facing him stands the priest.

The Choir Master tells the priest that the probationer has demonstrated his suitability, in all ways, to be a Chorister. The priest reminds the boy of his obligations, both in and out of the choir, then blesses him.

The Head Chorister produces a clean white surplice from beneath his cloak and prepares to vest the new Chorister. It is at this point that some difficulty is encountered. Perhaps he did not rehearse opening the voluminous white garment while impeded by his cloak.

After a valiant but abortive attempt, he is assisted by the verger, and between them they eventually make the proud new Chorister neat and tidy for his procession and installation.

"So the service begins. I would like to say some words about the canticles by Purcell in G minor, or the anthem, by the same composer, "My beloved spake" but I am so moved by the psalm singing that all else pales into insignificance. To begin with, we are treated to the proper psalm for the day and that is becoming a rarity.

Psalm 37 - Fret not thyself because of the ungodly

"Part way through, the chant changes to Gauntlet in A flat and I am in seventh heaven again, for this same chant, written by the composer of "Once in Royal David's City", was the one used by Canterbury on my first tape-recording, also on the seventh day of the month.

I understand that Anglican chanting is appreciated by only a few and so will leave this topic, except to say that, as with Canterbury, I will hear again and again this masterly performance, but in this case without the aid of a recording.

"As we leave the stalls I am moved to speak to the mother of the new chorister and, as an enthusiast, thank her for allowing her son to sing in the choir. At first she is surprised, pointing out that it is her boy's commitment not her own. More experienced choir parents will know otherwise. We hurry out to catch David Poulter, and I express our appreciation of today's music, and especially of the outstanding psalm. He seems pleased and this is confirmed by a nearby priest who tells us that the chanting of the psalms is very special to Mr. Poulter.

The Organist uses this as an opportunity to suggest that the choir make a recording of Anglican chant, an idea about which I enthuse.

It is he, of course, who suggests that starting our week's musical journey with St John's Cambridge as a benchmark was not really fair.

I beg to disagree!

"The afternoon is just merging into evening when we leave the City, sparing just a few moments to walk through the ancient double-decker streets knows as the "Rows". As it is Sunday, nearly all the shops are closed, though here and there window-dressers and stock-takers are quietly active and, on the wide 'window-ledges', local youths are boisterously inactive. The country of the 'Three Choirs' is, by English standards far to the south and we must make some useful headway tonight.

"Unable to cast down the Gauntlet, I end this section in A flat as the chant appropriately changes at the words: "I have been young and now am old"."

Lucky man!

Our Head was, I suspect, though his part in my school life was minimal, Rev. Leslie Francis Harvey. I feel sure he was "Harvey" and I plucked this name out of someone else's reminiscences. Our Head was a canon.

I have that record, VPS 1008, as part of my collection, which includes most recordings made by English cathedral choirs since 1914. I see three Joneses in the choir - Charles, Christopher and Nicholas - any siblings there?

My mentioning St Paul's in the passage taken from my tour is because I used to sing in the former "Evening Service Choir" there, which included cathedral choristers and voluntary men. I believe another of the gentlemen of that choir may have recorded VPS 1008. Michael Smythe, who died too young of cancer, was the Vista recording engineer. It may have been his company.

Thanks for your time (and submission to boredom).

Best wishes,

Martin Carson

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Martin Carson

Norfolk UK