Author: Andy Turner

Ambrose Collard

Ambrose Collard, 1885–1954

The name of Ambrose Collard was one which came up when George Frampton started researching singers with whom George Spicer would have come into contact during his years working on farms near Dover, before the Second World War.

I wish to thank you for printing an appeal to local former singers and musicians from the time before TV took over a more social entertainment.

Two people took the trouble to reply to me. Ted Baker (formerly of Alkham) told me of his grandfather, Ambrose Collard, and sent me a number of his songs. Ambrose Collard is also recalled by Ron Spicer (the son of George Spicer — started my interest) although he couldn’t quite remember what he actually performed.1

Ambrose was born on 26th September 1885. His mother Elizabeth, née Taylor, was originally from Lydden. His father Ambrose, born 1847, farmed at Wolverton Hill, Alkham, as had his father – also Ambrose. The 1891 census shows the 5 year old Ambrose as the fifth eldest of eight children; five daughters and three sons, with another son arriving the following year. At 15 years old, Ambrose was listed in the census as “Graziers son” – which presumably meant he was now working on the farm; in 1911, still at Wolverton, he was shown simply as “General labourer”.

Ambrose married Mabel Frances Byley at St Anthony the Martyr, Alkham, on 14th April 1917. At the time of the 1921 census they were recorded living at Church Alkham.   Ambrose was employed as Farm Bailiff for Francis B. Early, who farmed at Malmann Farm, Alkham. They had two children: 3 year old Ethel Mary, and 1 year old Ambrose James. At the start of the Second World War they were living at Crossroads Villa, Alkham, with Ambrose listed as “Small Holder And Skilled Farm Worker”. They must have been at this address since at least 1933 – under the heading “Milk Producers” the Dover Express for 27th January that year reported that the Dover Rural District Council Surveyor “recommended the application of Mr. Ambrose Collard, of the Cross Roads, Alkham, to be registered as a Wholesale trader and producer”. Ambrose died at the age of 68, in the second quarter of 1954.

The list of songs given below was provided by his grandson Ted, who also remembered that Ambrose used to perform a monologue about the Titanic.

Songs

Wraggle Taggle Gipsies-O (Roud 1)

The Old Armchair (Roud 1195)

Sail home as straight as an arrow (Roud 1753 )

That’s what my answer will be

Where is now the merry party I remember long ago? (Roud 24927)

  1. George Frampton, “Echoes of the folk singers”, Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald, 01 December 1994 ↩︎
0

Alf Claringbould

Alfred James Claringbould, 1894–1944

Alf Claringbould was born on 20th August 1894. His mother was Emily, née Mockett. His father Frederick, who had previously worked for the Dover coal merchants Hawksfield and Sons, had been the licensee of the Swingate Inn – on the Deal Road, a couple of miles out of Dover – since 1888, and would remain there until 1911, when his eldest son William took over the licence. On leaving the Swingate, Frederick appears to have set up as a farmer nearby, at Westcliffe Farm. The 1911 census shows Frederick and Emily living here with five sons and two servants. The sons were all employed on the farm, 16 year old Alf as “General labourer”.

In 1914 Alf married Nellie Crockett. A report on the proceedings of the Dover Rural District Tribunal in the Dover Express, 31st March 1916 stated that

Exemption was applied for by his father for Alfred James Claringbould, aged 22, married of Home Farm, Oxney, stockman, and said to be the only man on the farm.—The man himself said that he acted as stockman and also collected the refuse at the Shaft Barracks.—

It was pointed out that three single brothers were already exempted.—lt was decided to allow two months’ exemption, and the applicant was told that if more time was wanted after that one of the single brothers would have to go.

It would appear that Alf was able to remain working on the land and did not join the armed forces. However his younger brother Walter served in the Royal Navy in the final year of the war.

In 1921 Alf and Nellie were living at West Cliffe Cottages, West Cliffe, with two young sons. Alf’s occupation was shown as “Assisting Father In General Farm Work”. In September 1939 their address was Mangaton Cottage, Well Lane, St Margaret’s At Cliffe. Alf was “Farm Labourer Cable Worker”. He worked at Langdon Abbey Farm, and a 1941 newspaper report refers to him as the bailiff.1

Their daughter Kathleen, later Mrs Godwin, was one of the people from whom George Frampton was able to elicit information when researching pre-war singing practices in this area, in the 1990s. She told him that her father used to accompany himself on an accordion, and was also able to recall the names of some of the songs in his repertoire. He performed at The Rose Inn, West Langdon (where the landlord was Ike Harvey), and at local whist drives, dances and concerts. Sometimes he joined Jack Goodban at singing engagements.2 Apparently he would also dance a broom dance to the tune ‘The Cat’s Got the Measles’ (‘The Keel Row’).

The songs associated with Alf include ‘The Highwayman’, which could be any one of a number of traditional songs, the ubiquitous ‘Farmer’s Boy’, and others of comparatively recent origin, such as ‘If I was a Blackbird’ and ‘The Old Battalion Drum’. Early twentieth century folk song collectors would almost certainly have turned their noises up at the very popular ‘Grandfather’s Clock’, and would have had no time for music hall pieces like ‘Two Little Girls in Blue’. The last two songs on the list, meanwhile, were both associated with Second World War forces’ sweetheart Vera Lynn.

Alf Claringbould died at Langdon Abbey Farm in 1944 aged 49 years, and was buried in St Peter’s Churchyard cemetery in Westcliffe.

Songs

  • The Highwayman
  • If I was a Blackbird (Roud 387)
  • My Grandfather’s Clock (Roud 4326)
  • The Old Battalion Drum (probably Roud 163)
  • Shall I Be an Angel, Daddy? (Roud V13923)
  • To Be a Farmer’s Boy (Roud 408)
  • Two Little Girls in Blue (Roud 2793)
  • When the Poppies Bloom Again
  • When They Sound the Last All Clear
  1. Court report, “Sheep worrying at Langdon”, Dover Express, 24 January 1941 ↩︎
  2. George Frampton, “I don’t know if this is actually a folk song”: The Life and Music of George Spicer (1906-1981), Part 2: The West Langdon Years, 1928-35, Musical Traditions, 2012, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/g_spice2.htm 
    George Frampton reports that one of Jack Goodban’s nieces, Mrs Margaret Bushell, née Goodban, “says that her mother was also a Claringbould before she married George Goodban, so it seems that Alf and Jack were brothers-in-law”. In fact Mrs Bushell’s mother Hilda came from a different branch of the Claringbould family. Her father William farmed at Oxney Court Farm, while one of her bothers, Alfred William Claringbould was licensee of the Wheatsheaf at Martin from 1947 to 1952 – another singing pub frequented by Jack Goodban and his father Tom. ↩︎
0

Fred Morris

Frederick William Morris, 1882–1960

When recorded in the 1970s, the singer George Spicer named Fred Morris of Martin Mill as his source for the song ‘I wish there was no prisons’1. Fred was born on 10th September 1882, and baptised at St Augustine’s church, East Langdon, on 29th October. His father, also Frederick, was an agricultural labourer. He had married Hannah Elizabeth Marsh – like him from the small village of East Langdon – in 1874, and the 1881 census found them living with two young children, and his 67 year old father, Henry. Frederick died at the age of 37, and was buried at St Augustine’s on 25th Jun 1883 – when young Fred was only about 9 months old.

Hannah remarried in 1888. Her new husband was Charles Goodban, again an agricultural labourer from East Langdon. He was the son of Thomas and Elizabeth Goodban, and therefore an uncle to Tom Goodban (another singer whom George Spicer remembered from the pre-war years when he worked in East Kent), and great-uncle to Jack Goodban. Subsequent census records show Charles acting as stepfather to the three children from Hannah’s first marriage, but they do not appear to have had any children of their own.

Fred was still at school at the time of the 1891 census, but Trade Union Membership Registers show that in 1900 he was working as a cleaner on the railways, and became a member of the Amalgamated Society Of Railway Servants. The 1901 census however shows that the family had relocated from East Langdon to Martin Mill (only one mile away). Charles Goodban was now working as a waggoner on a farm, and both 18 year old Fred, and his 25 year old brother Henry, were recorded as “Carter on farm”.

Charles Goodban died in 1905. The 1911 census shows his widow Hannah living with her son Fred, still at Martin. Fred had returned to working on the railway – he was now a Platelayer., and again trades union records show that he joined the National Union of Railwaymen in 1913. Mother and son continued to live at Martin. In 1921 he was working as a labourer for the South Eastern and Chatham Railway. In 1925 his membership of the National Union of Railwaymen showed his occupation as “Tuber” (presumably repairing and maintaining the tubes in locomotive boilers). The 1939 Register listed him as “Lengthman Railway”, which was classified as “Heavy Work” (although at the age of 57 he would in any case have been too old for miliary service). Fred and his mother were living at Fairview, Martin – this is on the East Langdon Road, halfway between Martin and Martin Mill.

Hannah died shortly after the end of the War, on 23rd October 1945, at the age of 92. Fred died at the age of 77, in 1960.

Songs

I wish there was no prisons (Roud 1708)

  1. Liner notes to George Spicer, Blackberry Fold, Topic 12T235 (1974). ↩︎
0

John Brune

John Brun, 1926–2001

Anatol Johannes Brun was born into a Jewish family in Austria, and came to Britain as a teenage refugee shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. He became a naturalised British citizen on 19th July 1948, at which point he was recorded as a student of Forestry living at Dartington in Devon. Advertisements in The Bookseller show John’s father Theodore Brun based in Museum Street, London WC1 (24th September 1949) and in Fulwood Place, London WC1 (10th July 1954), putting out “limited de luxe editions” of specialist books; and later (9th February 1957) offering litho printing services from Eyre Street Hill, London EC1. A contributor to the Mudcat forum in 2012 recalled that “John and his father ran a printshop some where near Holborn, the place stank of the Old Holborn Tobacco factory nearby. It was above the Chiappa fairground organ repairers which would occasionally start playing to brighten our day. I met John at a club some where, probably the York and Albion and I started working in his printshop”1.

According to Reg Hall, Brun discovered folk music when he was working on the land2. He performed at London folk clubs (according to Sing magazine in 1962, he was one of the residents at the Topical and Traditional Folk Club which met in Camden on a Sunday night), and he wrote his own songs. In terms of traditional singers he took a particular interest in gypsy and traveller musicians. Reg Hall recalls that “He was on close personal terms with Davy Stewart and his family when they were living in south London, and it was he who introduced the Stewarts of Blairgowrie to Ewan MacColl”, and he spent time with Minty, Levi and Jasper Smith. In around 1965 he recorded Jasper talking about the gypsy way of life, as well as singing and playing dance tunes on the mouth organ. Brun’s recordings of Jasper Smith can be accessed through the VWML Archive catalogue, as part of the Ken Stubbs collection, at https://archives.vwml.org/records/KS/20. Songs recorded by Brune  – in Kent, but also in Shropshire and Perthshire – were included in the “Songs of the Travelling People” chapter of Peter Kennedy’s Folksongs of Britain and Ireland (Cassell, 1975). Although he is not credited directly, Brune was probably also responsible for writing the introduction to that chapter.

John Brune was the author of several books, either self-published or put out by small publishers. These included: the autobiographical Years of the wingless Pegasus; Heaven’s Breath is Good: How Language was Sculpted, billed as Part One in a Series on Comparative Linguistics; Shoestrings & the bottom drawer, another book on comparative linguistics, co-written with his father Theodore; The rocks of Baun, 1889-1989, described as “an epic novel”; and Resonant rubbish, published by the English Folk Dance & Song Society in 1975. He  also edited In the life of a Romany gypsy, written by Kent-born Romany Gypsy Manfri Frederick Wood (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).

While Wood was grateful for his help in bringing his book to publication, and Brune would no doubt have seen himself as a champion of Romany culture, his writings have not escaped scholarly criticism. In her PhD theses on English Gypsy singing, Denise Savage writes

John Brune’s contribution [to Kennedy’s Folksongs of Britain and Ireland] entitled ‘Songs of the Travelling People’ provides the opportunity to observe the ethnocentric collector at work. The philosophy that collectors should develop cultural awareness and empathy with informants to enable the observer, with certain limitations, to discern and distinguish within the boundaries of a particular culture, was evidently not shared by Brune. The commentary which accompanies the song transcriptions indicates that Brune is both uninformed and unsympathetic to the culture he has undertaken to study. He provides the reader with stereotypical and evaluative accounts which are both fruitless and a discredit to folksong collectors:

“whereas a traditional hand-carved, brightly painted wooden gipsy caravan with some well groomed horses and a group of handsome, brightly dressed gipsies doing a traditional Job rarely offended anyone, a group of dirty people pulled on to a field with their ramshackle vehicles and trailer caravans surrounded by an assortment of rusty old bicycle frames, car bodies, prams, bedsprings and other garbage is a different matter”

Paragraphs such as this lead the reader to conclude that Brune is unaware that scrap-dealing is, indeed, a traditional Gypsy occupation and conforms to the typically Gypsy tendency to fill in gaps that appear in the economy of the sedentary population. Further, that Brune is also unaware that Gypsies are most likely to have pulled on to a field because, at the time of publication, over one-third of the Gypsy population had no legal stopping place or camp-site. due to the 1968 Caravan Sites Act. This apparent lack: of empathy and cultural awareness is, unfortunately, carried over to the descriptive accounts of both singer and song:

“the voice of the singer is modified by acute bronchitis which has undoubtedly been brought on by Travellers living in over-heated caravans which they will come into and go out of in their shirt-sleeves in all weathers”

The first ten words may be accurate but the reader is subjected to his irrelevant qualifying statement. The songs are equally qualified with Brune’s own personal reference points. His observations are coloured by his value judgement. He is selective, contradictory and dismissive. Useful information is discarded because it does not conform to his preconceived models:

“Many singers tend to add simple decoration to insipid tunes… some of the best known travelling singers deviate from the general gipsy style of singing in one or more details”. Brune offers the reader no definition or detail, nor who are regarded as the best known singers, nor who regard them as such.3

 Steve Roud corresponded with Brune towards the end of his life, regarding the existence of a second volume of a publication titled The Roving Songster (Brune had put out two song collections with this title, the second of which was labelled as Volume 1; criticism of that book by Hamish Henderson meant that Volume 2 was never produced). Roud wrote

As with several others that I have met from his generation, John was quite bitter about what he saw as other people getting credit for his work. Much of our phone conversation was devoted to this topic. It was he, he claimed, who discovered the ‘Stewarts of Blair’ and told Maurice Fleming, Henderson, MacColl, etc. about them, but they froze him out. It was he who wrote the introduction to the chapter on ‘The Travelling People’ in Peter Kennedy’s Folksongs of Britain and Ireland, and so on.

With regard to Brune’s collecting work

Sometime after he died, his widow contacted Reg Hall and me to ask if we wanted his ‘folk’ materials, and we went to see her. There were a few books and LPs, which I bought, and a shoebox with six C90 cassettes. I asked her about his original tapes, but she knew nothing of them, and there was no written documentation, photographs, etc.

The cassettes turn out to be copies of his originals, as is shown by a voice (not John’s) which declares things like ‘here is the end of spool 3’. So unless the original tapes turn up somewhere, these cassettes seem to constitute what remains of the ‘John Brune collection’. They will eventually be donated to a public repository.

As with many ‘collectors’ of his generation, these tapes are not a well-organised sequential record of recording sessions, but seemingly random bits and pieces, often dubbed from other tapes, starting and stopping abruptly. There’s John’s father singing in Yiddish(?). a family child singing nursery rhymes, various tracks of revival singers (not, I think, dubbed from records), but amongst it all is a fair amount of traditional singing and talking – mainly from Scots Travellers, but some English as well. 

As I say, there is no documentation beyond a few scraps of paper slipped into the tape boxes, but a fair amount comes from Davy Stewart and other members of the Stewart Family. They are clearly at ease with him, and are friendly and co-operative. Indeed, there is a song sung by one of the Stewart women which mentions him coming to record them, as well as Ewan and Peggy. There is also the well-known interview with Jasper Smith from which Reg used some tracks for Voice of the People (another copy of which is in the Ken Stubbs collection).4

Reporting Brune’s death, in April 2001, Reg Hall noted

He had recently published a volume of his memoirs for private circulation, containing accounts of his political work on behalf of the Traveller community, with various song texts and references to people like Joe Heaney.5

A copy of this memoir does not appear to have made its way into the holdings of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

  1. Contribution by “Guest WOCKO” to the thread “John Brune FolkSong collector”, 18 February 2012, https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=103839 ↩︎
  2. Reg Hall, Musical Traditions website, 18 April 2001, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/news22.htm ↩︎
  3. Denis Savage, English Gypsy Singing ((Unpublished Doctoral thesis, City University London, 1989), pp18-21. Available from https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/7672/1/English_Gypsy_singing.pdf ↩︎
  4. Letter from Steve Roud, reproduced on the Mudcat forum, 18 November 2018, https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=103839#3962222 ↩︎
  5. Reg Hall, Musical Traditions website, 18 April 2001, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/news22.htm ↩︎
0

The Irish Lass

From Ike Harvey

Transcribed by David Harvey from a handwritten note in pencil by Ike Harvey.

George Frampton, “I don’t know if this is actually a folk song”: The Life and Music of George Spicer (1906-1981), Part 2: The West Langdon Years, 1928-35, Musical Traditions, 2012, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/g_spice2.htm

Roud 44890

The Irish Lass – Ike HarveyDownload

“I have copied this as to spelling and punctuation, more or less as Ike wrote it” – David Harvey.

Steve Gardham has identified this as a version of ‘Paddy Casey’, which appeared in various broadside printings in the 1870s.
See for example the version published by the Poet’s Box (Glasgow), 30th December 1876, at https://archives.vwml.org/songs/RoudBS/B240979

0

Ike Harvey

Isaac James Harvey, 1867–1947

The singer George Spicer, recorded in Sussex in the 1970s, learned a number of songs when working on farms in East Kent in the 1920s and 1930s. Amongst these were songs which George picked up from singers in The Rose at West Langdon, including ‘The Cunning Cobbler’ (Roud 174), which was sung by the landlord, Ike Harvey1.  Ike was also related by marriage to another singer, Jack Goodban.

Ike was born on 28th February 1867 and baptised at Ringwould on 14th April. His parents were William Quested Harvey, and Mary Ann Elizabeth Harvey, née Hopper. Their residence was given as Ringwould, but by the time of the 1871 census they were to be found at Lydden Court, Lydden. William’s occupation in 1871 was given as ‘Farm servant’. In 1861 he had been listed as a carter, and in subsequent censuses he was shown as ‘Farm servant indoor’ (1881), ‘Agricultural labourer’ (1891) and ‘Horsekeeper on farm’ (1901).

By 1881, at the age of 14, Isaac was working as a farm servant for Thomas Richards, “Farmer of 159 acres employing 5 men and 2 boys”, at Church Farm, East Langdon. Ten years later he appears to have been temporarily out of work, living with his father in a cottage at West Langdon. He married Louisa Emily Hopper in 1892, and in 1900 moved into the licensed victualling trade: a report in the Dover Express for 20th April 1900, on the previous Thursday’s County Petty Sessions, noted hat “The licence of the Rose Inn, West Langdon, was transferred from Francis Creswell to Isaac Harvey”. The next census, in 1901, listed Isaac as “Farmer & inn keeper”. He and Louisa were by now the parents of four daughters and three sons, between the ages of 0 and 7 years old. They were still running The Rose at the time of the 1911 census, when Isaac’s occupation was listed as “Farmer beer house keeper”. Louisa died in February 1919. She had given birth to another five daughters and three sons, and it is a distinct possibility that she died giving birth to the youngest of these, John.  

Their son William had been killed while serving in The Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment) in the First World War. His death was reported in the Dover Express, 14th May 1915, where it also stated that his younger brother was serving in HMS Inflexible. This younger brother was Thomas George Harvey who, happily, survived his time in the Navy, and lived until he was 59, in 1956.

The Harvey family featured in a police court case reported in the Dover Express, 12th September 1919:

SAD CASE AT WEST LANGDON.

ALLEGED THEFT BY DAUGHTER.

At a sitting of the Dover County Police Court on Monday afternoon, before Mr. A. Evanson, Matilda Mary Harvey was charged with feloniously stealing £25, the money of her father, the landlord of the ” Rose,” West Langdon.

Israel James Harvey, Landlord of the ” Rose ” beer house, West Langdon, said: On Saturday, August 31st, my daughter, who lived at my house and acted as my housekeeper, went out at 7 p.m. with a young man named Pilcher. I thought she was going as far as the next, village, but she did not return, and I did not see her again until I met her in the train to-day at Martin Mill Station. When she left on Sunday she took my child, a little baby, and also the perambulator and some baby’s clothes. On Monday, September 1st, my daughter Ruth missed the clothing, and told me. I then made a search and missed £7 from my private drawer. We then looked to see if the brewer’s money was all right, and then found about £11. 14s. gone. She had also taken some money amounting to about £4, the property of her brothers. I made enquiries, and not being able to find out anything I went to Police Constable Potter, who made further enquiries. On Thursday last I obtained a warrant for her arrest. She had had charge of the brewer’s money and of boys’ money, but had no authority to take it away.

Ruth Esther Harvey, daughter of the last witness and sister to the prisoner, said: On Sunday, August 31st, I was staying next door when my sister left. I did not know she was gone until 10 p.m. on the Sunday. I got up next morning at 7 a.m. at father’s request, and went in and helped to get the little girl up. In doing this I found some of my sister’s clothes had gone and also that some of the baby’s clothes were taken. I told my father, who then went to his private drawer and missed £7. Father then asked me to count the brewer’s money and I found only £5 6s. instead of £17.

Police Constable Harry Kingsland, K.C.C., stationed at Deal, said on Sunday, September 7th, at 3.30 p.m., he found the prisoner detained at, Oxted (Surrey) Police Station. He told her he had a warrant for her arrest on a charge of stealing £25 in money, etc. He cautioned her, and she replied. “I am innocent.” He went to her lodgings with a Mrs. Wallace at 11, Station Rd., East Oxted, and asked her to bring the child and pram to the railway station, which she did. He conveyed the prisoner to Deal on Sunday and to Dover the following day.

The prisoner was remanded till the next Petty Sessions, the father standing bail in the sum of £10 and her own bail of £10.

The following week, on 19th September, the same newspaper reported that the case against Matilda had been dismissed:

REMAND CASE, DISCHARGED.—Matilda Mary Harvey surrendered on bail in answer to an adjourned case from the Dover County Court last week, in which she was charged with stealing £25 from her father, Isaac Harvey, Landlord, of “The Rose,” West, Langdon.

Evidence was read over which showed that the girl absconded from home, where she kept house for her father, with a child of her father’s, a perambulator, and the money. The defendant was in charge of the money but had no authority to take it away. She was arrested at Oxted, Surrey.

Prisoner pleaded not guilty, and after the consideration of the case by the Bench they decided that there was insufficient evidence to send it for trial, and they discharged prisoner.

The “young man named Pilcher” with whom Matilda had stepped out was presumably John Pilcher, whom she married in the final quarter of 1919.

A report on the original hearing in the Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald, 13th September 1919, under the headline “GIRL CHARGED WITH ROBBING FATHER”, named the defendant as “Mary Harris”. The daughter in question was definitely Matilda Mary Harvey, born 1895, rather than her younger sister Mary Jane, born 1900. Matilda was still single at the time of this incident, so the surname “Harris” is possibly simply a misprint. Another possibility is that, although unmarried, she had adopted the name of Harris. Her daughter Dorothy Florence Harvey (who would marry Jack Goodban in March 1943) had been born in 1912, when Matilda was 18. In the 1921 census Dorothy’s relationship to John Pilcher is given as “Daughter (father dead)”. Might the unnamed father’s surname have been Harris?

The 1921 census showed Isaac as “Licenced Victualler”, still at The Rose. His daughter Mary – not the one who had stolen money from him – was employed as House Keeper. At 21 years old she was the oldest of his children still at home, and no doubt had her work cut out looking after the eight siblings who also lived at the pub. Of these, the three eldest sons were all out of work. Robert (17) had been working for a farmer by the name of A. Pain, but was currently unemployed; Charles and James (both 15) were both shown as “Pit Lad E Kent Colliery Out Of Work”. The East Kent Colliery was at Tilmanstone, about 31/2 miles away from West Langdon. The Kent coalfields had only been opened up after 1890 and, in the absence of a local workforce with experience of mining, workers were imported from more traditional mining areas including Scotland, Wales and the North of England. The incomers often met with hostility from the local population, and for the most part they remained entirely separate communities. Clearly, however, there were some employment openings for locals lads such as the Harvey brothers – perhaps the mines appeared to present a better opportunity than working on the land, although in the harsh economic climate of the 1920s few industries could guarantee employment.

The Dover Express, 18th October 1929, reported that at a sitting of the Dover Court Sessions the previous day, “The licence of “The Rose,” West Langdon, was transferred from Isaac James Harvey to Frederick George Philpott”. The Rose ceased to be a pub in 1978, and is now a private dwelling. It appears to have been a fairly modest establishment – indeed, up until at least 1889 it had been an off-licence only.2 Ike’s grandson David Harvey recalled that “The bar area was so small that fifteen to twenty customers would fill it comfortably, though I don’t think I ever saw it so full”3. 

Ike would have been 62 when he left The Rose and had a bungalow built at Maydensole Farm, about half a mile from West Langdon. Ten years on, in September 1939, he was still living here, at Romany Bungalow, Maydensole. He was now a widower, and described as “Smallholder Retired”. He had managed various plots of land while working as a landlord, and may well have continued to work these following retirement. He died on 27th June 1947, at the age of 80, and was buried in West Langdon churchyard.

George Frampton was in touch with several of Ike’s grandchildren in the 1990s, and they were able to provide details of Ike’s life, including his musical activities – he played a squeezebox as well as being a singer – and could recall the names of some of the songs which he used to sing4. David Harvey said that these were

mainly traditional and folk songs and music hall… Some of his song sheets survived for many years afterwards but, as time went by, they became torn and were disposed of …  There were two songs we were able to recall – or at least [his brother] John was – though only pieces of them.  One concerned the famous Folkestone Murder… the second is believed to be a Northumbrian song about a butcher who, on his way to market, heard a woman’s cry.  After a search, he found the woman, naked, bent over to tend her, whereupon she produced a knife and killed him.

This song would appear to have been a version of the song ‘Three Jolly Butchers’ (Roud 17). David Harvey also remembered

vividly as a boy in the 1930s, listening surreptitiously outside Ike’s door and listening to him talking to himself.  The conversation would generally go something like this: “Come on, Ike, give us a song; What would you like?  What about …? Right ho.”  He would then launch himself with gusto into song and accompany himself on his accordion. 

[…]

My grandfather was a complete countryman of Kent.  He had a largish moustache which could not escape a pint glass – in my experience, the beer at The Rose… was absolutely awful, but that was not while he was landlord.  I have a photo taken in World War I when he grew a beard because his barber went into the army, and he waited for the barber’s return to have it shaved off.  Almost until his death, he went ‘home’ to The Rose every Saturday night, and latterly it was my father’s job at 10 p.m. to collect him on one arm, and his bosom pal Jimmy Gregory, a Somerset miner, on the other, and pilot them safely back home, usually the worse for wear.  Ironically, my father was a lifelong teetotaller.

Irene Granger, Ike’s granddaughter and sister-in-law to Jack Goodban, described the protocol around singing songs in the pub: “Songs would be sung by the ‘old men’… and nobody else would dare sing another’s song – until one of them died”.

Christopher Whitcomb, another grandson, remembered: “Ike singing his ‘ditties’ to customers and family alike, then lapsing into a mock-Yorkshire accent”. He also recalled, when he was about 6 years old, hearing a song which had the line ‘Jack jumped over the barn with a bundle of sticks’, but this song has not so far been identified.

Songs

  • The Cunning Cobbler (Roud 174)
  • Blow the man down (Roud 2624)
  • The Folkestone Murder (Roud 897)
  • The Irish Lass (Roud 44890)
  • Three Jolly Butchers (Roud 17)
  1. Liner notes to George Spicer, Blackberry Fold, Topic 12T235 (1974). ↩︎
  2. “George Drew, the landlord of the “Rose” beerhouse, West Langdon, was summoned for allowing beer to be consumed on his premises, he only having an off licence. The defendant, on oath, denied the offence but the Bench fined him 10 shillings and costs” – Dover Express 22nd June 1889, quoted at http://www.dover-kent.com/Rose-Inn-West-Langdon.html ↩︎
  3. George Frampton, “I don’t know if this is actually a folk song”: The Life and Music of George Spicer (1906-1981), Part 2: The West Langdon Years, 1928-35, Musical Traditions, 2012, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/g_spice2.htm ↩︎
  4. The following quotations are all taken from George Frampton’s article “I don’t know if this is actually a folk song” cited above. ↩︎

0

Jack Goodban

John Wilfred Goodban, 1910–1988

Jack Goodban was born on 9th April 1910. His mother was Alice, née Mockett; his father Thomas was a waggoner on a farm. The family lived at Martin, near East Langdon, about 4 miles from Dover. When the Second World War began, Jack was still living with his parents and his younger brother Thomas, at “Bungalow, Martin Vale, St Margaret’s At Cliffe”. Both he and Thomas were cowmen. Jack’s sister-in-law Irene “recalled [Jack] as being a cowman at Reach Farm, St Margarets-at-Cliffe, working from the War onwards for Gilbert Mitchell”.1

Jack married Dorothy Florence Harvey2 at St. Augustine’s Church, East Langdon on 6th March 1943. She was the granddaughter of Ike Harvey, landlord of The Rose at West Langdon. By 1955 they were living at 2 The Avenue, St Margaret’s-at-Cliffe. We know the address thanks to an article which appeared in the Maidstone Telegraph, 10th June 1955:

Lament of the singing cowman

Many Kent folk songs may be forgotten

Pass by the gardens in front of 2, The Avenue. St. Margaret’s Bay, any evening and the chances are that you will hear someone singing songs that you have never heard before.

For you will hear 45-years-old Mr. Jack Goodban, who works by day as a cowman at Reach Court Farm, singing some of the hundreds of folk songs that he knows. Many of these are hundreds of years old and have never been published.

Jack Goodban learnt them, as a boy, from his father, Mr. Tom Goodban, and many of them have strong local influences, like “Murder at Folkstone,” a narrative song, which recounts the shocking murder, long ago, of two young girls at Folkestone.

But, nowadays, Tom Goodban finds that he cannot remember many of the folksongs he once knew so well.

There is little or no opportunity to sing them to anyone, and, because he has no children, Jack fears that many of the songs handed down through his family will pass into oblivion.

Some time ago, Peter Kennedy, of the B.B.C. folk song unit, was in touch with Mr. Goodban, but nothing has materialised to date.

Peter Kennedy was the presenter of the BBC radio programme As I Roved Out between 1953 and 1958, and it may well be that Jack Goodban or his father listened to this programme, and wrote to Kennedy suggesting that he come to St Margaret’s to record Tom’s songs. Kennedy’s failure to follow up on this lead has to go down as one more lost opportunity to document the stock of songs sung in Kent. In the event, it would be August 1975 before a folk song collector visited Jack. This was Mike Yates, who was following up on names given to him by George Spicer – a singer who had lived in Sussex since the 1940s, but who was born at Little Chart and, as a young man, had worked as a cowman at Abbey Farm, West Langdon from 1928 to 1935, and had learned a significant part of his repertoire in this part of Kent.

There was obviously once quite a tradition of pub-singing in the villages just inland from Dover and Deal and George was only too happy to give me a list of singers who used to sing there.  Sadly, only Jack Goodban was still alive, and his repertoire, though extremely interesting, was small.  When we first met, Jack was helping a neighbour put up fence poles in a field that bordered the top of the famous White Cliffs.  When I mentioned old songs, Jack asked me if I was from the BBC, adding that they had written to him in the ’50s to say that they would like to record him.  Sadly though, they never turned up!  To begin with, Jack denied knowing any songs at all and it was only as I turned to leave that he said, “You mean those old historical songs…  like The Shannon Frigate?” If anything was guaranteed to stop me dead in my tracks, then it was a comment such as that.

Jack, like George and so many other singers that I have known, was a keen gardener and these recordings were made in the kitchen as his wife sat quietly salting runner beans into large earthenware pots.  Jack, it turned out, had also sung in The Wheatsheaf at Martin, where his father sang and taught him The Shannon Frigate and The Aylesbury Girl, a song that was also sung by a couple of brothers called Wood.3

‘The Aylesbury Girl’ and the rarely collected ‘The Shannon Frigate’ were in fact the only songs which Mike Yates was able to record from Jack. Sadly, the rest of his and his father’s repertoire were thus lost. However George Frampton conducted a considerable amount of research into the singers with whom George Spicer had mixed in his West Langdon days, and was able to elicit further information from several of the singers’ surviving relations. The following quotations are taken from George’s article on George Spicer on the Musical Traditions website:

Jack’s sister4 was Irene Granger of Shepherdswell, near Dover.  She recalled her brother as being a cowman at Reach Farm, St Margarets-at-Cliffe, working from the War onwards for Gilbert Mitchell.  However, although acknowledging his renown as a singer, could only recall him performing Paddy McGinty’s Goat, adding that he ‘would also be in demand at weddings and parties on account of this.’ 

[…]

Tommy’s son Tom [i.e. Jack’s older brother] was a shepherd on the cliffs between Dover and St Margaret-at-Cliffe, adding that ‘Uncle Jack was a cowman.  Jack was always singing the old songs…

[…]

A second letter from Mrs Bushell [Mrs Margaret Bushell, née Goodban, of East Studdal, Jack’s niece] added: ‘My mother can remember Uncle Jack singing Don’t Let your braces dingle dangle.  Poor old sports, he got caught and dragged through the mangle.  I think it is the chorus.  And the other one, The Ring my Mother Wore.’5


[…]

Mrs Jennifer Fletcher of St Margarets-at-Cliffe told me “Jack Goodban was my grandmother’s brother …  I know he appeared on Down Your Way on radio6…  He used to sing at local flower shows and gatherings, such as family weddings and parties.  He worked as a farm labourer and then as a gardener at an Old Peoples’ Home.

Jack Goodban died at his home in The Avenue, St Margaret’s-at-Cliffe in April 1988, four years after the his wife Dorothy had passed away.

Thomas Charles Goodban, 1871–1945

Jack’s father Tom was born at East Langdon on 10th November 1871, the son of Edward Goodban, and Eliz, née Pilcher. In the 1871 census their surnames had been recorded as Goodburn rather than Goodban, and their address simply as “East Langdon”. Edward was employed as a Miller’s labourer. At the time of the 1881 census, the family were living at “W Oaks Cottage, Ripple, Eastry” – this was probably Winkland Oaks Cottages, which is actually closer to the village of Sutton. Edward’s occupation was now Farm labourer.

While Edward, Eliza and family were still living at “W’Oaks Cottage” in 1891, 19 year old Thomas is not listed at that residence, and I’ve been unable to trace him elsewhere. However, the following year he got married, on 15th October 1892, at St Margaret’s, St Margaret At Cliffe. His bride – like Thomas, 21 years old – was Alice Louisa Mockett.  

In both the 1901 and 1911 censuses, Thomas, Alice and their growing family were living at Martin, near East Langdon, about 4 miles from Dover. Thomas worked as a carter, or waggoner, on a farm. They were still living at Martin in 1921, with Thomas’ occupation now shown as Agricultural Worker, working for the Mitchell family, at Martin Lodge Farm. The 1939 Register listed him as “Farm Waggoner Retired”, living with Alice, and two of his five sons, Jack and Thomas, at “Bungalow, Martin Vale, St Margaret’s At Cliffe”. The next entry on the Register was for Martin Vale farm in Station Road, and it seems likely that this had been the farm where he had ended his working life. He died on 26th March 1945, and was buried in St Augustine’s Churchyard, East Langdon.

The website of the St Margaret’s History Society records that Thomas was one of 13 children, although only ten of these survived to adulthood. Two of his younger brothers, Edward and Charles, ran a boot and shoe shop in Chapel Lane, which also acted as the premises for Goodban Bros. Cycle Agents, offering new bicycles to purchase, plus repairs of cycles and prams.7

In the 1970s, when Mike Yates recorded the singer George Spicer – by then a long time Sussex resident, but who had worked at West Langdon before the Second World War – George recalled the names of other singers from whom he had learned songs while living and working in the area. One of these was “Tommy Goodburn, a regular at The Wheatsheaf Inn, Martin, who used to sing Henry, My Son”8. Actually, this must have been Tom Goodban – as we’ve seen, the Goodban surname was sometimes recorded as ‘Goodburn’.

According to the 1955 newspaper article quoted above, Jack Goodban learned many songs from his father, but no songs were collected directly from Tom.

Alice Louisa Goodban, née Mockett, 1872–1958

In a letter to George Frampton from Jack Goodban’s sister Irene Granger, she mentions that her mother used to sing ‘The Faithful Sailor Boy’ (Roud 376) with the chorus “Farewell, farewell, my own true love, such parting brings me pain”. This is the only known reference to Alice as a singer.9

Alice was born on 1st November 1871, and baptised at St Margaret-at-Cliffe on 31st December; her mother’s name was given as Elizabeth Mockett. No name was recorded for her father, and subsequent records do not really clarify the situation. The log books of the Church of England School in St Margaret-at-Cliffe for 1879 and 1884 have “George Mockett” as the only parental name to be recorded – but might this actually have been her grandfather, agricultural labourer George Finnis? The 1881 census shows Alice living with her grandparents George and Mary Finnis in a cottage in St Margaret-at-Cliffe. These were most likely Alice’s father’s parents, as they do not appear to have had any daughters.

When Alice married Thomas Goodban in 1892 the marriage records give her father’s name as “Charles Mockett”, but census records cast no light on who this might have been. As Alice Goodban she lived with her husband at Martin until at least 1921, subsequently returning to St Margaret-at-Cliffe. Alice died on 9th February 1958, and was buried in the Churchyard of St Augustine, East Langdon.

Songs

Recorded by Mike Yates, 27th August 1975:

  • The Aylesbury Girl (Roud 364)
  • The Shannon Frigate (Roud 963)

Both songs appear on Green Grow the Laurels, Topic LP 12TS 285 (1976), and on Up in the North and Down in the South, Musical Traditions MT CD 311-2 (2001).

Other songs known to have been in Jack Goodban’s repertoire:

  • Don’t let your braces dingle dangle (Roud 27923)
  • Murder at Folkstone (Roud 897)
  • Paddy McGinty’s Goat (Roud 18235)
  • The Ring my Mother Wore (Roud 7372)
  1. George Frampton, “I don’t know if this is actually a folk song”: The Life and Music of George Spicer (1906-1981), Part 2: The West Langdon Years, 1928-35, Musical Traditions, 2012, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/g_spice2.htm ↩︎
  2. A wedding notice in the Dover Express, 26th March 1943 is headed GOODBAN—HARVEY but Dorothy is listed as “eldest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. J. Pilcher, of Langdon Abbey”. The 1921 census shows John and Matilda Pilcher residing in East Langdon with their 1 year old son, Albert, and 9 year old daughter, Dorothy Florence Harvey. She is recorded as “Daughter (father dead)”. She had presumably been born out of wedlock. ↩︎
  3. Mike Yates, booklet notes for Up in the North, Down in the South, Musical Traditions (MT CD 311-2), https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/yates.htm ↩︎
  4. Actually Jack’s sister-in-law. Born Irene Pilcher in 1924, Jack’s wife Dorothy was her half-sister. ↩︎
  5. George Frampton, “I don’t know if this is actually a folk song”: The Life and Music of George Spicer (1906-1981), Part 2: The West Langdon Years, 1928-35, Musical Traditions, 2012, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/g_spice2.htm ↩︎
  6. The popular radio programme Down Your Way was broadcast on the Home Service / Radio 4 between 1946 and 1992. ↩︎
  7. Goodban’s Cycle Shop, Chapel Lane, St Margaret’s Village History website, https://www.stmargaretshistory.org.uk/catalogue_item/goodbans-cycle-shop-chapel-lane-with-advertisements-from-local-papers ↩︎
  8. Mike Yates, booklet notes for Up in the North, Down in the South: songs and tunes from the Mike Yates collection 1964-2000, Musical Traditions, 2001, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/yates.htm ↩︎
  9. George Frampton, “I don’t know if this is actually a folk song”: The Life and Music of George Spicer (1906-1981), Part 2: The West Langdon Years, 1928-35, Musical Traditions, 2012, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/g_spice2.htm ↩︎

0

A sailor coming home on leave

From “an old seaman”

Collected by Derek Sarjeant in a Chatham pub

Sing 7:4 (Jan/Feb 1963) p.44

Roud 60

A sailor coming home on leaveDownload

When printed in Sing, the accompanying note said “Collected by Derek Sarjeant in a Chatham pub, the tune is surely one of the most persistent found in oral tradition. And so is much of the lyric too”.

Derek Serjeant recorded this song on his Man of Kent EP (Oak, 1963), where the liner notes say “Derek collected this song from an old seaman in one of the Medway Towns”.

0

Derek Sarjeant

Derek Stanley William Sarjeant, 1930–2018

Born and brought up in Chatham, Derek Sarjeant started playing the trumpet at the age of 15. He played with various jazz bands in Kent and formed a group called the Golden Gate Jazzmen. He was then swept up in the skiffle craze of the 1950s, took up the guitar, and started singing in a skiffle group. He started the first folk club in Kent, at Chatham, in 1956. In the early 1960s, he moved to Surbiton in Surrey to take up a management post for the South Eastern Electricity Board. Here he set up the very successful Surbiton and Kingston Folk Club, which ran weekly from January 1962 until the mid 1970s.

In an obituary tribute on Mudcat, his one-time musical partner Graham Bradshaw recalled that the folk club

reflected the interest in the folk boom of Greenwich Village at the time, and Derek booked many American artists that were making the trip over to the UK at the time. Doc Watson, Paul Simon, Tom Paxton and Julie Felix were just some of the names.

The club was famous for its eclectic policy – Bluegrass, blues, trad jazz, traditional folk from all parts of the British Isles could all be seen. Derek was responsible for bringing over some of the Blues greats – Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee (already mentioned), Rev Gary Davis and Jesse Fuller (who made his farewell appearance at Surbiton when people like Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Donovan were in the audience to see the great man). I also remember a very young Scottish lad called Rod Stewart who was brought along by Long John Baldrey one night.

Diz Disley was a regular at the club and when he persuaded Stephane Grapelli out of retirement to re-form the Hot Club de Paris group, it was Surbiton where they made their debut, before going on to tour the world’s concert halls.1

Sarjeant was also a popular performer on the folk club scene. He recorded four EPs between 1962 and 1963, including Man of Kent, which included ‘A sailor coming home on leave’, a song he had collected “from an old seaman in one of the Medway Towns”. His album Derek Sarjeant Sings English Folk was released in 1970, followed the following year by the eponymous The Derek Sarjeant Folk Trio LP, with Graham Bradshaw and Hazel King. Derek and Hazel subsequently performed as a folk duo, and they married in 1977. Derek retired to Bridport in Dorset, and died in April 2018.

  1. Graham Bradshaw, Mudcat, 21 April 2018, https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=163988 ↩︎

0

Nip Bayley

Edward George Bayley, 1870–1937

Charlie Bridger learned at least three songs from a singer he referred to as ‘Nip’ Bailey. One of these was ‘The Birds upon the tree’, which was also mentioned by Woodchurch resident Reg Pellet (1893–1986) as a song he remembered having been sung in the village in his youth. Reg said it used to be sung by a man called George Bailey, aka ‘Old Nip’, and “they did pull his leg over it”1. ‘Nip’ was described by Reg Pellett as a “good all-round farm-hand, hop dryer, hedger and ditcher”, who once claimed that if he “could put his foot on two daisies, he could get a job”.2

‘Nip’ must have been Edward George Bayley, who also appears in census records as George Edward Bayley, or simply George Bayley. He was baptised at Tenterden, St Michael & All Angels, on 5th September 1869, the son of George Bayley, a farm labourer, and Esther, née George. In 1871 the family lived at 1871 Old House Farm, Tenterden, but by 1881 had moved to Stone Bridge, Woodchurch, and they remained in the village. The 1891 census shows them living at Upper Road, Woodchurch, with 21 year old George working as an agricultural labourer. In 1901 they were at Front Road, with George, and his brothers Albert and Harry described as “Ord farm labourer”. In 1911 and 1921 George, still living with his parents, was at Lower Green, Woodchurch; his occupation in 1921 was given as “Farm Work Casual Labourer – Own Account”.

The death of his father was reported in the Kentish Express, 9th July 1927:

The funeral took place on Tuesday of Mr. George Bayley aged eighty-six years, who for over forty years was waggoner at Stonebridge Farm. He leaves a widow, five sons and one daughter. His body was conveyed from his home, at Lower Green, to the church, in the farm waggon he so often had had charge of, and by his special request two horseshoes were nailed on the coffin lid.

His mother Esther died the following year. Edward George ‘Nip’ Bayley died at the age of 67, in the first quarter of 1937.

As a young man Charlie Bridger would help ‘Nip’, who was working as a hop-drier at High House Farm, in the centre of Kenardington.

He couldn’t see very well; I used to go and level his hops for him, ’cause he couldn’t …the old driers they had a chalk mark – red charcoal mark – round the roundel, you know, so if they had so many bags of hops, or so many pokes of hops, they knew that should come up to that certain mark, see, and he couldn’t see that old mark [?] was dark, I remember an old storm lantern hanging up for a light in there. And I used to help the old boy with his hop-drying, of a night. …that was Kenardington …on the corner; not the square ones, the single one right on the corner. High House Farm.3

Charlie was born in 1913 and started work at the age of fourteen, so this would most likely have been in the late 1920s.

When asked if ‘Nip’ Bailey was well known locally as a singer, Charlie replied

No, he was known for singing ‘The Birds upon the trees’, that was all. He used to like a sing-song though, you know. Oh no, he was only known in Woodchurch really for his song ‘The Birds upon the trees’, that’s what they always used to associate him with, for his singing. My old grandfather used to say “Come on Nip”; he used to get his cornet out, my old grandfather; old Nip used to sing, and he used to play. In the pub, this was.

He may have been most closely associated with this one song, but clearly he knew others: Charlie also learned  ‘The Ship that never returned’ and ‘The Zulu War’ from ‘Nip’, and he remembered another one called ‘Stick to your mother, Tom’ – “that was a nice one. But I never got that off him”.

Arthur Richard Bayley, 1889–1976

Charlie Bridger was recorded singing a patriotic song ‘Three cheers for the red, white and blue’ and said “Old Nip’s brother used to sing that. Arthur Bayley.”

Arthur was born on 3rd March 1889 and baptised at All Saints, Woodchurch on 18th April. He lived in the family home until at least 1911, and most likely until his marriage to Fanny Hyder in 1919. He would have been of an age to have fought in the First World War, but as a horseman was exempted from military service in the summer of 1916.4

Like his parents and brother George, Arthur’s address in the 1921 census was given as Lower Green, Woodchurch, but he and Fanny, with their one year old son (also Arthur), were listed as a separate household. Fanny died in 1934, and in September 1939 Arthur and his son were living at 1870 Cottages, West End, Woodchurch. His occupation was given as “Horseman & Ploughman”.

Arthur’s death was recorded in the Shepway district 1in 1976. His surname was given, as it had been in the 1939 Register, as “Bailey” rather than “Bayley”.

Songs

‘Nip’ Bayley

  • The Birds Upon the Tree  (Roud 1863)
  • The Ship that never returned (Roud 775)
  • Stick to your mother, Tom (Roud 7380)
  • The Zulu War (Roud 5362)

Arthur Bayley

  • Three cheers for the Red, White and Blue (Roud 23522)
  1. Adrian Russell, letter to George Frampton, 31st August 1992, referring to correspondence with Reg Pellett 1979-1981. ↩︎
  2. Quoted in George Frampton, Charlie Bridger – Musician and Singer, Bygone Kent, Vol 15 No 1, 1993. ↩︎
  3. Charlie Bridger, recorded at his home in Stone-in-Oxney by Andy Turner, 15th April 1983. ↩︎
  4. Kentish Express, 12 August 1916 ↩︎
0

Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.

Up ↑