Matthew Arnold's Field

Album: Hendra (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • Ben Watt's father, Tommy Watt, was a Scottish Jazz musician who was one of the better-known British bandleaders of the 1950s, winning an Ivor Novello Award for the song "Overdrive."

    Tommy Watt stopped playing jazz in the 1970s and became an interior decorator. He died in 2006 and his son recalls here scattering his father's ashes.
  • Matthew Arnold Field is a woodland and grassland site with terrific views over Oxford and the surrounding countryside. It is named after the Victorian poet and school's inspector Matthew Arnold whose best-known poems, The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis are said to have been inspired by this site.

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