Well known and loved for his wonderful novels: A Room with a View, A Passage to India and Howards End, Edward Morgan Forster moved to other forms of writing in his later years and one of his most interesting projects was his collaboration with Benjamin Britten over Billy Budd. Their friendship began in 1941. Forster had broadcast a talk, followed up by an article in The Listener, about the Aldeburgh poet, Crabbe. His article so inspired Britten and Pears that they decided to return home from America so that Britten could start work on an opera based on Crabbe’s Peter Grimes.

Britten and Forster met for the first time in 1942 and in 1945 attended the first performance of Britten’s opera Peter Grimes. Whilst he thought the music ‘marvellous’ he was no so impressed by the libretto. In 1948 Forster gave a talk about the Crabbe’s poem, Britten’s opera and Aldeburgh and wondered aloud what he might have done had he written the libretto. Britten took the hint and in 1949 Forster was invited to Aldeburgh to work on the libretto of Billy Budd.

Staying and working in Gallery Cottage, the home of Billy Burrell, an Aldeburgh fisherman and friend of Britten’s, Forster worked on the libretto of Billy Budd throughout March, returning in August when “we went through each scene word by word, line by line, testing, strengthening, compressing.”

During his stay he went sailing with Britten and Pears, took walks across the marshes and even relaxed on the beach. It is obvious from Forster’s essay in The Aldeburgh Anthology that he was much taken with Aldeburgh and its environs describing “a special atmosphere which does not exist elsewhere in these islands: nothing overwhelming, but something that is its own”. As for the town itself Forster says “There is a sense of space, of unfussiness, and in the midst of the gentle area, in the midst of the shingle and the windswept grasses, rises a tiny Elizabethan Moot Hall. North and south of the town stretch marshlands, which prevent it from expanding, and the southern lands are intersected by the river Alde. .....how happy I was.”

Forster describes the journey from Aldeburgh to Orford and his delight at seeing the brightly painted cottages and barns, “a pub bright with flowers in front, roofs being thatched .... gleaming angles and surfaces of whitish gold.”
Aldeburgh has changed a little in the half century since Forster wrote these words, yet birds still flock to the marshlands and foreshore where shingle flowers bloom in spring, its timeless beauty and mystery an inspiration for artists, composers and writers.

Contact Suffolk Cottage Holidays to arrange a stay at Gallery Cottage Aldeburgh.