Dick Brice

Very sad news that Dick Brice has passed away. A talented and much-loved poet, songwriter, and performer he started his musical career as a teenager playing the ukulele, performing George Formby songs with a school friend around local youth clubs. Dick qualified as a teacher and work took him away from the Forest for a while, but he later returned to the area. By then Dick and wife Di were singing in a four-part harmony group, performing traditional English songs, touring around pubs and clubs. Dick would occasionally write music for old broadsheet verses and stories to turn them into song. With the demands of family life making touring for the couple more challenging Dick began to perform on his own, and in the early 1980s he was asked to appear alongside local writers Winifred Foley, Harry Beddington, and Keith Morgan on the iconic Forest Talk album. Dick cited this as the beginning of him writing songs in dialect and about the Forest. Several solo albums followed. Whilst his songs about the landscape, people, places, and culture of the Forest, both comical and more serious, were hugely popular locally and further afield, Dick’s material was far from limited to local topics. Having the pleasure of seeing Dick perform you might just as easily hear his musical rendition of a W. B. Yeats poem as you would hear him sing about one his great loves: sailing. When Dick took early retirement as a schoolteacher, he taught evening classes in sailing and navigation. He would also occasionally deliver yachts by sailing them to their new owners. In 2021 Dick had his first collection of poems published by local imprint Yorkley Press. The collection featured some of his most popular songs in verse form, such as perhaps his most loved local ‘anthem’ The Land Between Two Rivers. There were new poems too, and Dick continued to write more following the book’s publication. As Dick made clear, he was by then in his ‘90th decade’ so perhaps inevitably several of the poems were reflections on mortality. Dick has left us with a treasure-trove of music, songs and poetry that encapsulate so much of what we love, laugh about and sometimes lament on losing, about the Forest of Dean. He was a much loved, and hugely talented man, a Forester who will be deeply, deeply missed. 
 
The video is a recording of Dick reading his poem The Turn of the Tide. Dikc very kindly contributed to our last series of podcasts and you can hear him discussing his career and writing over on the podcast pages here.