Anne Geddes Gilchrist, 1863-1954
Born in Manchester of Scottish descent, the majority of Gilchrist’s song collecting work took place in Lancashire. However in the 1890s and 1900s her brother William was Presbyterian minister at Blackham in Sussex, and on visits to stay with her brother she took the opportunity to collect songs and children’s games in the local area. Blackham is very close to the border with Kent, and a few of the singers she encountered had been born and brought up in Kent: agricultural labourer Thomas Coomber and William Ford the blacksmith both came originally from Penshurst, while William’s wife Agnes was from Cowden; Mrs Matilda Jenner was still living in Kent, at Ashurst, but once again, was originally from Penshurst.
Like Anne, William Gilchrist had an interest in folk song and, knowing the local area and the local population, he helped her plan her collecting visits. Indeed William noted down at least one song – ‘A box on her head’ sung by Thomas Coomber’s wife Elizabeth – and sent the words to his sister.
As she approached her eightieth birthday, Gilchrist recalled how she had first become interested in folk songs in an article in English Dance and Song entitled ‘Let Us Remember …’:
I began to “collect” folk-songs more than seventy years ago. From my very earliest years I inherited a quick ear for music and a love of TUNES, and I might claim that my interest in folk-song began while I was still illiterate (which some collectors seem to think an advantage in a folk-singer). Our mother came of a musical family and sang often in the nursery, generally with the latest baby on her knee. She had a charming and sympathetic voice, and sang with a fine feeling for rhythm and great spirit, being also an admirable player of dance music. I have lived with tunes ever since those early days.
At the age of six I began to store folk tunes in my mind, beginning with singing-games learnt during Christmas revels in our grandfather’s house in Cheshire, when we young ones played with the maids in the kitchen, with its gaily decked “kissing-bush,” formed of crossed hoops covered with coloured paper frills and hung with oranges, apples, and jumping toys on elastic, and suspended from the ceiling just inside the door, where its mistletoe spray might trap the unwary. “Rise, Sally Waters” is the game I remember best.
A little later, Saturday afternoons in our nursery were enlivened by the visits of Harriet, a jolly Manchester mill-girl, who had been our nursemaid in our infancy, and who taught us “Four jolly Fishermen,” “The Rantin’, tearin’, Hielan’man” and other folk and singing games. From a young Welsh nurse, illiterate when she came to us, I learnt Welsh folk-songs (parrot-wise, as I had no idea of their meaning) which she would have me to sing to her Welsh friends, to their evident amusement. “Hob y derry dando” was one.
Later again, I became familiar with old Scotch traditional songs sung by my father and mother. One favourite of my father’s had a fascinating refrain of “Sing yarrady airrum, dairrum, daddy, Sing yarrady airrum day!” sung with a strong “burr.” This was, I think, the first tune I ever noted from a singer. But by this time, having made the acquaintance of the modern major and minor modes, I lost for the time being my early innocence of ear, falling foul of the unsharpened seventh of my father’s tune, and suggesting that the note should surely be sharp, not natural. “No, no, no,” he replied, with a vigorous shake of the head, adhering with conviction to his “flattened” note. (His tune, had I then known, was really in the scale of the Scotch bag-pipe. I was to learn later in Helmholtz’s Sensations of Tone, of the existence of Scottish folk-modes, afterwards evolving a schedule of my own to fit Frances Tolmie’s Gaelic songs from Skye). So I conceded the “flat seventh,” and learnt to note tunes as I heard them — “My version, right or wrong!”
Oddly enough, the first time I ever heard a folk-song in public was at a Brasenose college concert in Eight Weeks, nearly fifty years ago. It was sung by F. W. Bussell, a fellow of the college and one of Baring Gould’s collaborators in collecting the songs shortly afterwards published as Songs of the West. Mr. (afterwards Dr.) Bussell was already a Personality in his deacon days. I recall his monocle, knee-breeches and yellow kid gloves. As a male alto he sat among the contraltos at vocal concerts, but on this occasion he sang — to the delight of the undergraduates — from a music-stand placed in front of him on the platform, his selections being “Dinah Doe” and a “Chimney Sweeper’s Song” which he had noted from a Devonshire miller and arranged himself. Though not exactly a folk-song in the sense of being of folk origin, it was a quaint eighteenth-century ditty which pleased his audience as something new and strange, and on the recommendation of a friend I acquired a copy of Songs of the West (1895) in which it is No. 20.
I first got into touch with other folk-song collectors through sending my father’s song — which was about a girl who ‘listed as a soldier to follow her lover to the war —to Baring Gould. I think it was too Scotch for him, for he passed me on to Frank Kidson, and so began a friendship with that helpful and generous Yorkshireman which lasted till his death. His unrivalled knowledge of eighteenth-century vocal music and operas and his collector’s library were ever at the service of enquirers, and his Traditional Tunes (1891) was a pioneer collection of north-country ballads and songs noted by himself. He belonged in spirit so nearly to the folk that, like nobody else, he could patch a hole or a bad piece in an old song, if required for performance, so that the new was hardly distinguishable from the old. His valuable researches and various published books were recognised by the honorary degree of M.A. conferred on him by Leeds University.
English County Songs (1893) and an early number of the Folk-Song Journal opened up a correspondence with Lucy Broadwood, and here again a close friendship was formed during the years, in which we collaborated in editing various issues of the Journal. About the time (1906 or 1907) I first met Miss Broadwood, Cecil Sharp, with whom also I had been corresponding, invited me to visit him and be present at the first public performance of morris dances taught to the girls of the Esperance Club by the old morris men themselves. He was then writing English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions. At his house I met Dr. Vaughan Williams, and later at Miss Broadwood’s, Frederick Keel. In 1906 I was invited to join the editorial board of the Folk-Song Journal, and from this period was launched upon the comparative study of folk-songs, while continuing to collect them. Though less in bulk than some other collections, mine was at least a catholic one. As opportunity offered, singing games, Lancashire rush-cart and morris tunes, pace-egging and other “custom” songs, sailors’ shanties (the first ever printed in the Journal) ballads, carols, cumulative, nursery and cradle songs were all fish for my net. Many of them have appeared in the Journal from 1906 onwards, though the rush-cart and other dances were contributed to the Folk Dance Journal during W. D. Croft’s editorship. To me, as to the true folk singer, tune and words are interdependent — texts without tunes are deaf, and tunes without texts, blind.
I was soon on friendly terms with all my singers — of whom I could tell many stories — and only once did I fail to get a song from the old man who possessed it. His wife — a sweet old lady, singer of “The Banks of the Sweet Primroses” and “Green Bushes” — had told me that her old man knew a song called “The Lost Lady found” with which he would jokingly greet her when coming to meet her on her way home from market. But he sat as mute as an oyster, though not without an “I-could-an-I-would” twinkle in his eye as we tried in vain to induce him to “oblige” (I knew versions, but wanted his). On the other hand, my old sailor at Southport, from whom I took down shanties and sea songs in a dark little cave of a shop hung with stalactites of rope and twine and encrusted with dog-collars and tools and gadgets of all kinds, was always ready to search his memory for songs.
Once he stopped halfway through a verse. Had he forgotten the rest? I asked. “It isn’t that,” he said solemnly “I’m trying to think of something that’ll do instead!” He found it and all was well.
The three finds I prize most are a beautiful Lancashire version of “The Unquiet Grave,” a Sussex form of “l prythee go fetch me my little foot-page,” and a very curious survival of “The Cruel Mother” which I found amongst little girls as a dramatic singing-game to a gay tune with a double refrain, and called “The Lady drest in Green.”1
The prized find from Sussex referred to in the final paragraph must surely be the song ‘Mother, mother, make my bed’ which she noted from Mrs Agnes Ford at Blackham in 1906.
The Leeds-based collector and researcher Frank Kidson was a major influence on Gilchrist as she began to collect folk songs, and it was at his urging that she joined the Folk-Song Society in 1905. She became a member of the Society’s Editorial Board the following year – a role she continued for nearly fifty years – and was thereafter a regular contributor to the Society’s Journal. Although her song collecting ended with the outbreak of the First World War, the research work which she carried out, allied to her prodigious knowledge of tunes and willingness to share her knowledge with other researchers, meant that she made a major contribution to folk music studies in the first half of the twentieth century.
You can read more about Anne Gilchrist and her collecting work on the VWML website: Anne Geddes Gilchrist Papers; and in this article by Peter Snape: In Search of Folk Song: The Story of Anne Geddes Gilchrist. A full account of Gilchrist’s life can be found in Peter Snape’s biography Anne Geddes Gilchrist: Folk Song Scholar and Collector (The Ballad Partners, 2026).
- Anne G. Gilchrist, ‘Let Us Remember …’, English Dance & Song, Vol. 54 No. 3, Autumn 1992. Originally published in ED&S Vol. VI No. 6, July-August 1942 ↩︎
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