The Queen’s personal poet and her composer are to collaborate for the first time - on one work to salute Britain’s oldest survivor of the first world war and another to warn of the dangers of climate change.

Andrew Motion, poet laureate, and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, master of the Queen’s music, are preparing an oratorio about Harry Patch, 110, a veteran of the battle of Passchendaele in which about 500,000 soldiers on both sides died. He is the last surviving Briton to have fought in the trenches of the western front.

The cooperation may give an opportunity to prove the royal posts have public relevance.

The first work will set to music a poem Motion wrote about Patch, from Wells, Somerset, for a television tribute. It describes him as “Patch, Harry Patch, that’s a good name, Shakespearian, it might be one of Hal’s men at Agincourt . . .” The work will receive its premiere on Remembrance Sunday, November 9, at Portsmouth Cathedral with the London Mozart Players and the choir of Portsmouth grammar school, which commissioned it. Patch has been invited.

The Portsmouth school commissioned the work in part because of the city’s long naval associations.

“I’ve a lifelong fascination with the history and literature of the first world war,” said Motion. Davies believes it is important to use the arts to connect young people to the past.

The environmental work, commissioned by the Cambridge University Chorus, will be performed in Cambridge next year. Both men believe climate change is the world’s most pressing problem.

Davies, who has lived on Orkney for 35 years, has for a long time voiced concerns about climate change both in debate and in music, including a symphony about the effect on Antarctica. He will make this clear at a music conference on Wednesday, when he will say: “As creative musicians, we can make people aware of such things which threaten our future. We must bring aware-ness of that upon which the politicians turn their backs.”

Davies will argue that musicians must be engaged in politics, education, sciences and the arts.

“We must not be simply passengers in our cultural life, but a driving force,” he will say.

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