NEVER before had I seen a photograph of Sir Edward Elgar's funeral until reading the excellent new book, Elgar in Love by Malvern Wells author Kevin Allen.

The composer's funeral was supposed to be strictly private and was held "in secret" at St Wulstan's Roman Catholic Church, Little Malvern, at 10 am on February 26, 1934. Less than 20 people - family and close friends - were present.

Elgar had died three days earlier, and his daughter Mrs Carice Elgar Blake announced in Berrow's Worcester Journal: "Sir Edward frequently and also recently expressed the very definite wish that his funeral should be absolutely private and that neither the day nor the place should be named. He was anxious that there should be no mourning worn or flowers sent."

However, the national Press clearly discovered the time and place as we see from the national newspaper photograph of the funeral which Kevin Allen has found and included in his book.

In it, Elgar's coffin is seen being carried from St Wulstan's Church to the composer's burial place next to his wife in the churchyard on the side of the Malverns.

However, all this digresses from the main thrust of Kevin Allen's new book - his third with an Elgar theme, another being Elgar the Cyclist.

Elgar in Love focuses in detail on the happiness brought to the composer in the last two years of his life by young violinist Vera Hockman. He was 74 and had been a widower for 11 years, when he first set eyes on Vera, an estranged wife in her 30s with two children. She was among the violinists at a rehearsal of The Dream of Gerontius at Croydon, south London, in November 1931.

The true extent of the love affair between the Roman Catholic composer and the Jewish woman half his age is not known. Eminent Elgar biographer Michael Kennedy in his foreword to the book says: "Today the question many would ask is 'Did they go to bed together?' However, the inquisitive will find no answers here. Mrs Hockman belonged to a generation which did not advertise its private life."

Even so, he points out that Elgar came to describe Vera as "my mother, my child, my lover and my friend."

Michael Kennedy says that Elgar needed "muses" always - in other words, romantic attachments to women.

From all that I have read, the question of whether these associations were purely platonic, or much more, is just as much an enigma as the hidden theme of the famous Variations. There was his first love, Worcester High Street shopkeeper's daughter Helen Weaver and then, during his marriage, his associations with Malvern teacher Rosa Burley, family friend "Dorabella" Powell, Lady Alice Stuart-Wortley, Julia Worthington and others. These associations proved inspirational to Elgar, who enshrined most of the lady friends in themes in his works.

Even so, his wife Alice was to remain above them all in his thoughts. She was the "immovable rock of his life" until her death in 1920 - 11 years before he met Vera Hockman.

Michael Kennedy says Kevin Allen's book - "the result of scrupulous research" - gives a long overdue insight into Elgar's last love. "We are now able to understand how close that friendship was."

Kevin Allen is greatly surprised that Vera Hockman's place in Elgar's life and work has remained "so little known to the wider public." Particularly overlooked, in his view, was Vera's role in Elgar's skteches for his Third Symphony. She was enshrined in what Elgar described as the tender and passionate "V.H theme" of the sketches which have, of course, been so magnificently "elaborated" by Anthony Payne into the Elgar Third Symphony.

"Seldom can the existence of a major influence on the life and work of a great composer have been so ignored," writes Kevin Allen, whose book clearly goes a huge way towards correcting the anomaly, albeit 66 years after Elgar's death.

He is able to reveal the extent of the relationship, partly through Vera Hockman's so far unpublished written memories. I find one entry particularly evocative as a Worcester man. It was written on the day Vera first came to Worcester at Elgar's invitation. The date was December 3, 1931 - less than a month after their first meeting.

Vera wrote: "My fiddle and I went. He was waiting at the station in the car with the two dogs. It was only two minutes drive to Marl Bank - one moment in the ugly slummy part of Worcester, the next in his dear, quiet old-world house on Rainbow Hill, with the lovely old lawns seeming to slope up and up to the Cathedral tower, the base line of the Malvern Hills beyond. Not a house in sight though in reality it was in the midst of them. It was just the place for him: garden, cathedral, hills and sky. We were like two happy and rather naughty children."

Vera was to be a regular visitor to Marl Bank and, in September 1932, was among a small circle of Elgar's intimate friends who gathered to hear proof recordings of the 14 year-old Yehudi Menuhin playing the composer's Violin Concerto.

The other guests included George Bernard Shaw, his wife and "Aircraftsman Shaw" -- TE Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia - who was "hiding away" in the RAF.

Elgar's daughter Carice became a friend of Vera's and recorded in her diary one drive out they had in 1932: "Went to Broadheath for a dogs' run and saw over father's birthplace - labourer's cottage - very sweet."

The drive later took in Stonehall Common at Kempsey (close to where Elgar had lived at Napleton Grange), tea at a cottage in Castlemorton, Tewkesbury, Evesham and Pershore.

* Kevin Allen's new book Elgar in Love is available from him at 23 Benbow Close, Malvern Wells, WR14 4JJ, price £11.85 including p & p.