David Stacey, 1943–
David Stacey was born in Saffron Walden, Essex in 1943. He first heard first heard recordings of traditional singers, in his late teens, on Peter Kennedy’s BBC Radio series As I Roved Out. In the mid-sixties he was involved with the Masada archaeological excavations in Israel.
I first went down to Kent for the hop/apple picking in the mid ‘60s and frequently returned over the next 20-25 years. If you were any good at picking apples, and were prepared to work hard – putting in 50-60 hour weeks for 4-6 weeks – you could make good money, cash in hand. My life developed whereby I was working in archaeology in Israel for much of the time – but, for visa reasons, had to leave Israel periodically. It became convenient for me to leave for the Kentish season where, eventually, I left an old caravan on a farm near Goudhurst to come back to. The money I could make helped subsidise my archaeological work, which, whilst totally engrossing, paid diddlysquat. At no time was I in Kent ‘collecting folk songs’!1
David worked regularly at a farm in Marden Beech, and would walk the couple of miles to the nearest pub, The White Hart at Claygate.
In the autumn of 1972, I found that the pub had become a regular watering hole for travellers. My presence was tolerated because, from the smell emanating from me, it was clear I was ‘scroubing’ (in those days I worked as hop-dryers mate, which involved being on call 20 hours a day, loading and unloading the kilns every four hours and grabbing what sleep you could between times beside the fires in the oasthouse inevitably I was permeated with the pungent aroma of hops). When it was found that I could add a song to the evening’s session I was made welcome and became privy to many evenings of chat, song and stepping that normally came to a halt if other gorgios inadvertently came into the pub. Some years before I had spent a winter with Essex travellers working in the woods, but the only old song I heard from any of them was a couple of garbled verses of Brennan on the Moor – and that was sung to me in secret, after I’d been around them six months, “because I don’t want my children to think me old-fashioned knowing these old songs.” But here, I knew, I was amongst a still-vibrant living culture.
A regular visitor was Ted Haynes, who had many songs and who listened to, and was clearly interested in, the songs I contributed. Ted was a big man and he kept his eye on me, even warning me one evening to stay by his side because there was a fight brewing. Luckily the battle, a grudge match, didn’t boil over that night although, a week or two later when I wasn’t in the pub, all hell broke loose and someone was thrown bodily through the pub’s plate glass window!
Towards the end of the season Ted, after a particularly good session, said “You like the old songs, boy, don’t yer – you ought to meet my mother, she’s a bit of a rough’un but she can sing” and he handed me his card.
Ted Haynes’ mother turned out to be the outstanding Gypsy singer, Mary Ann Haynes, from Brighton. Although David was not able to record her himself, he gave her contact details to Dave Bland, who in turn passed these on to the collector Mike Yates.
David Stacey wrote about his experiences in Kent in an article on the Musical Traditions website, A Gorgio amongst Travellers: some experiences and observations:
Over the next ten or fifteen years I became a regular pobbeler (apple-picker) although my main base shifted to Ash Farm in Horsmonden, where eventually I had my own trailer which I could leave on the farm throughout the year. The farm was, coincidentally, ideally situated for the annual Horse Fair held in September, despite local opposition, on the village green.
I can no longer recall a first meeting with Henry Ridley, a locally based traveller with a goodly repertoire of songs. We were both ‘in the neighbourhood’, we both enjoyed to sing, and it was inevitable that we would spend time together. Henry Ridley singing at Horsemonden horse fair in 1987. Henry’s paternal uncle, Nelson, had been recorded by Ewan MacColl and his maternal uncle, Levi Smith, was recorded by Mike Yates amongst others (his cousin was also married to Mary Haynes’ eldest daughter). Henry had married out and lived amongst the gorgios in a council house in Goudhurst (even though he still made a living, when I first knew him, as a timber feller and later moved into the tarmacing trade). His daughters had also married out; only his son had married a traveller girl and lived a traveller life. The old songs were particularly important to Henry (certainly more so than to uncle Levi, who, although knowing old songs, was more likely to give a rendition of a George Formby number) because they bolstered his traveller identity which he had diluted by marrying and living out.
In the mid-‘70s there were still plenty of travellers coming into the area for the harvest and enough ‘old-timers’ about that an evening in the pub often finished with a song or two. Henry would sometimes take me with him (or, for a while when he had a driving ban, ask me to drive him!) to a distant pub where he expected to meet up with members of his extended family. Apart from the mouthorgan and Henry’s own spoon playing, instrumental music was rare, although I remember one of his Smith cousins playing the accordion whilst another accompanied him by tattooing a rhythm on an empty brown ale bottle with a spanner. At the horse fair old granny Gumble still had her chair placed under the horse chestnut tree on the green opposite the King’s Arms. There she would sing and hold court, and her grandsons would put a board down, change into their studded shoes, and challenge the world to a stepping competition.
Or course you must remember that I was in Kent to earn some money (which helped subsidise my poorly paid archaeological work). You could make a few bob apple picking in those days though, to make your money, you had to put in a 10 hour day, 6 days a week and pick close on two tons a day. Consequently pub sessions were usually restricted to Saturday nights and Sunday lunchtimes and we didn’t travel far from ‘home’ turf. Johnny Mathews, a market trader from Maidstone, whilst not having a large repertoire of songs was always an appreciative audience and it was particularly for him that I learnt a version of the Folkestone Murder, a song his mother had sung. Chris Willett… though rarely persuaded to sing, was often at the Fair and sometimes at the George in Yalding which, in the ‘70s, still had a pub pianist on Saturday nights.
Through the late ‘70s and into the ‘80s fewer people were coming into the area for the hopping. Inevitably some of the older travellers were dying and the vitality of the sessions deteriorated. Local nimbys often succeeded in banning the horse fair from the green, and there were fewer pubs where singing was tolerated. Nonetheless sometime in the mid-eighties, several years after Mary Haynes had died (1977), Henry and I were in the public bar at the Vine Hotel in Goudhurst, when he took me on one side and urged me to sing one of Mary’s songs because one of her sons had just walked in. I started to sing Camden Town. Unusually, the bar became quiet. My eyes shut as I concentrated on the song and, when I opened them at its conclusion, there were tears not only in her son’s eyes, but in mine too. He took my hand, as did others with him, and briefly the silence continued.2
A CD of David’s own singing, Good Luck to the Journeyman, featuring predominantly songs which he had learned from travellers in Kent and Essex – “either by direct absorption, or by recordings made by myself with a cheap domestic tape recorder, or from recordings made by others” – was released on Musical Traditions Records in 2015.
- Booklet notes to David Stacey, Good Luck to the Journeyman, Musical Traditions, MTCD360, 2015, https://mustrad.co.uk/pdf/stacey.pdf ↩︎
- David Stacey, A Gorgio amongst Travellers, Musical Traditions Enthusiasms No 39, 2003, https://mustrad.co.uk/enth39.htm ↩︎
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