A long-lost novel by a famous World War One soldier and poet has been discovered in a garage and turned into a play which is soon to be performed in the South West, thanks a student from Exeter.
The writer F W Harvey was best known for his poetry and came to be seen as the voice of the Gloucestershire soldier and later of the prisoner of war.
His wartime publications sold well and for a time he was much better known than now familiar contemporaries such as Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden and Isaac Rosenberg.
A brown envelope found in a garage revealed what promised to be a novel by Harvey, who it was believed had only written one prose book, a memoir of his captivity in German POW camps.
The exciting find was handed over by the F W Harvey Society to University of Exeter PhD student Grant Repshire, whose research at the Gloucestershire Archives involved cataloguing and making Harvey's collection accessible.
The family of F W Harvey were particularly keen to support the preservation of the papers and ensure his legacy.
Mr Repshire found more pages for the unpublished novel distributed among other papers in the collection that, when added to what was already identified, made the novel complete.
The novel tells the fictionalised tale of Will Harvey and his journey from a rural Gloucestershire childhood to the frontline trenches of the First World War.
It is a sentimental story of a young boy finding love for the first time and being separated from it and is a tale of how war changes men forever.
Harvey's preface states that he wrote the book to encourage people to remember the war and to try to understand it; claiming that, in his words, 'until the sacrifice is understood and justified our hands are unclean'.
War Romance: F W Harvey's Lost Novel is being published to coincide with performances of the play Will Harvey's War at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham this summer.
Roger Deeks, chairman of the F W Harvey Society said: "We think the play is of national importance in that it is a play about ordinary soldiers, their aspirations and experiences.
"It is particularly important as it deals with the PoW experience. It also contains some highly imaginative scenes that are used to illustrate redemption, and how good can triumph."
