Artists' rifles and artistic licence: Edward Dent's war

Abstract

In the years before 1914, Edward Dent had devoted his youth to establishing music as an academic subject, and the performing arts and literature as essential elements of ordinary life. He built up a creative nexus in pre-war Cambridge, and the young men in his circle, many of them homosexual, began to take the unprecedented step of becoming professional musicians and artists. When the first crop of his carefully nurtured and highly talented students went off to war he was at first devastated. But his practical side took over, and he spent the rest of the war engaged in writing and translating for the pacifist Cambridge Magazine. In an atmosphere of increased stifling of any form of dissent, he built up a new circle of like-minded young men, mostly through a vast correspondence, which became a kind of forum for ideas kept alive in the direst circumstances. When the war ended, Dent and his circle were able to carry on where they had left off, establishing theatre, music and opera for all. This paper focuses on how music in particular was kept alive through Dent himself, and his correspondence with Arthur and Kennard Bliss, Denis Browne, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Clive Carey, Rupert Brooke and J.B. Trend.