Brensham Village

Like its predecessor ( John Moore’s Portrait of Elmbury), Brensham Village is a lightly disguised picture of a part of England Moore knew well: the countryside surrounding the old market town of Tewkesbury, which Moore calls Elmbury, where he was born in 1907 – a lush and fertile area of market gardens and apple orchards, with the river Severn winding through. Brensham, Moore tells us, is a synthesis of several villages whose fields he roamed as a boy and whose pubs he drank in as a young man. In Portrait of Elmbury (SFE no. 26) he drew a vivid picture of growing up in a colourful and self-sufficient English country town in the years after the First World War. In Brensham Village, set in the 1930s, change is creeping in. There is still cricket on the village green and darts in the village pub, Moore and his friends still go fishing and ferreting and bird’s-nesting and hunting for moths. But mannerless weekenders are beginning to arrive in the village, along with a shady ‘Syndicate’ of developers, an ugly petrol station and a local cinema.