A Strange Refuge: Holst, Radical Faith, and the Battle for Thaxted

During the First World War, Gustav Holst found an unlikely artistic refuge in the Essex village of Thaxted, home to one of the most controversial Anglican priests of his generation. Thaxted, with its handsome church rising above the countryside, was the place where much of The Planets took shape. Yet Holst’s presence in the village, he was living in a rented cottage in Monk Street, was not without incident. Declared unfit for war service, he was nevertheless a forty‑something gentleman with the suspiciously foreign‑sounding name “von Holst,” seen wandering alone on long walks through the fields. The villagers, uneasy, reported him to the police. The local constable noted drily: “Many rumours are current about this man, but nothing can be traced against him.”

It was during this period that Holst met the redoubtable Conrad Noel, Vicar of Thaxted from 1910 until 1942. Noel was a figure of extraordinary energy who transformed the market town into a kind of pilgrimage site. He restored the church, championed Anglo-Catholic ritual, revived ancient Christian ceremonies, and filled worship with colour and light. He reinstated country customs - Morris dancing among them - and encouraged arts and crafts in the village. But this “Englishry” was only one facet of his mission. Noel was a leading voice in the Church Socialist League, and he found allies among Edward Maxton, the ‘Red Vicar’ of nearby Tilty, the militant silk weavers of Halstead, radicals in Braintree, and even H. G. Wells, the Fabian living close by. The entire enterprise was bankrolled, improbably enough, by Lady Frances “Daisy” Greville, Countess of Warwick, an aristocrat converted - up to a point - to socialist ideals.

No account of Conrad Noel can omit the ‘scandal’ of the flags. In the spring of 1921, he was given an Irish tricolour, which he promptly hung in the church beside the Red Flag and the Cross of St George. In the fraught politics of the day, this was a gesture guaranteed to ignite tempers. The Triple Alliance of miners, railwaymen, and transport workers had just collapsed; Ireland was in turmoil. Noel’s provocation enraged many locals. Rallies were held, banners appeared proclaiming: “No Bolshevism for Thaxted,” and the village squire appealed to the bishop to remove both flags and vicar. Cambridge students - then, one imagines, more to the right than the left - were brought in as a hired mob. Over a thousand people attended the street meetings; affrays and squabbles followed. Eventually a compromise was reached: the flags were taken down, but Conrad Noel remained in his living to fight another day.

Holst, for his part, retained deep affection for Thaxted and its turbulent priest. In the last year of his life, he planned to attend Christmas Mass there, though illness prevented him. He dedicated what he regarded as his finest choral work, This Have I Done for My True Love, to Conrad, along with the carol Bring Us Good Ale. The Vicar was not noted as a ‘toper’, but he actively rejected Puritanism and defended traditional English pub life and merrymaking as natural expressions of Christian joy and fellowship.