James Madison Carpenter, 1888–1983

Born near Booneville, Mississippi, in 1920 Carpenter enrolled at Harvard to begin a PhD in English, and it was here that he developed an interest in folk song. One of the professors in the English department was literary scholar and folklorist George Lyman Kittredge. While Kittredge’s ballad research was entirely library-based, he encouraged his graduate students to go out into the field and undertake collecting work – John Lomax had been another of his protegés. Kittredge acted as supervisor for Carpenter’s thesis, ‘Forecastle Songs and Chanties’, which earned him his doctorate in 1929. This was based in part on fieldwork conducted by Carpenter among retired sailors in North America, and on a four-month trip to the British Isles over the summer of 1928.

This 1928 trip included visits to the Royal Alfred retired seamen’s home in Belvedere – Carpenter referred to this as “The Royal Alfred, Belvedere, London”, but it was actually still part of Kent at this time (until 1965, in fact). Here he collected more than 2 dozen songs, mostly shanties, from Roderick Enderson, William ‘Paddy’ Gaul, Harry Johnson, William Prosser, a Mr. Hill, and one singer identified only as ‘The Bo’sun’.

Whereas most previous collectors had simply noted down song words and tunes on paper, Carpenter used a Dictaphone, run from a 6 volt battery, to record his singers. The Dictaphone had come out of work carried on at the laboratory set up in Washington DC by Alexander Graham Bell; it was patented by the Columbia Gramophone Company in 1907. Of course, magnetic tape had not been invented at this stage, and up until 1947 Dictaphones continued to make recordings onto wax cylinders. Carpenter’s practice was generally to make a sound recording of just a few verses of each song. He would then get the singer to recite the song words, two lines at a time, while he typed them up on a portable typewriter. The wax cylinder would then later be used to make a musical notation of the tune. Sadly – and to his subsequent regret – once he had transcribed the song, he shaved most of the cylinders from this first trip to Britain, so that the cylinders could be reused. As a result, only five audio recordings of the Belvedere singers survive.

With Kittredge’s support, Carpenter returned to Britain in 1929, and over the next six years he amassed an invaluable collection of folk song and other material. As Julia Bishop points out, Carpenter’s return visit to Britain in 1929 coincided with Maud Karpeles travelling to Newfoundland hoping to collect songs of English origin:

At the time of Karpeles’s trip, there was little active folksong collecting being carried out any longer in England or Scotland, and indeed the prevailing view in the English Folk-Song Society was that traditional singing had more or less died out. Carpenter was one of the few folksong collectors active in this country at the time, therefore, and the results of his efforts were astounding. He collected around two thousand songs and ballads, including bothy ballads, sea shanties and carols, fiddle tunes, children’s singing games, and three hundred mummers’ plays. Furthermore, not only did Carpenter record singers from whom such luminaries as Cecil Sharp and Gavin Greig had previously collected, but he also encountered a large number of prolific singers never before recorded. It is thus no exaggeration to say that in terms of quantity, quality and chronology Carpenter’s is one of the largest and most important collections of folk song and folk drama made in Britain this century. Yet the collection was never published, and its creator remained virtually unknown until, in 1972, Carpenter was traced by Alan Jabbour of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress and the collection purchased.¹

The Carpenter collection has now been digitised, and can be accessed via the VWML Archive Catalogue, at https://archives.vwml.org/records/JMC.

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1. Julia C. Bishop, ‘Dr Carpenter from the Harvard College in America’: An Introduction to James Madison
   Carpenter and His Collection, Folk Music Journal, Vol. 7, No. 4, (1998), pp. 403 ↩︎

William Leader, 1929–2026

Born in New Jersey, his parents Bill and Lou were Londoners and the family returned to the UK in 1931. Ten years later the engineering firm for whom his father worked moved to Keighley in West Yorkshire, and it was here that Bill spent his teens and early twenties. Inheriting his father’s left wing political outlook, in the 1950s Bill sang with the Workers’ Music Association in Bradford, and sold WMA records sent up from London. In 1955 he moved to London to work for Films of Poland, part of the Polish Cultural Institute:

It was part of the cultural exchange. If you let us have a cultural institute in London, so that our folks can come and spy on you, we’ll let you have a British Council in Warsaw, so your folks can come in and spy on us, in a gentlemanly sort of way.¹

Having volunteered for the Workers’ Music Association, towards the end of 1956 Bill was appointed to a new post: production manager for Topic Records. Topic had begun life as the Topic Record Club, where WMA members would receive a monthly 78rpm disc through the post – these included music recordings of ‘The Internationale’, satirical songs (often from Unity Theatre productions) such as Paddy Ryan’s ‘The Man Who Put The Water In The Workers’ Beer’, Soviet songs performed by Russian choirs and balalaika ensembles, and both Russian and British folk songs performed by The Topic Singers. Resuming operations after the war, the WMA / Topic output featured compositions by Shostakovich, numerous recordings of choirs from Eastern Europe and China, several discs of songs performed by Paul Robeson and, from 1953 onwards, performers from the post-war British folk revival, notably Ewan MacColl. Bill Leader’s first assignment as a recording engineer was to record the singer A.L. (Bert) Lloyd, and the concertina player Alf Edwards. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Bill was responsible for recording a great number of 10 inch and 7 inch records – and eventually 12 inch LPs – for Topic Records. Early recordings featured leading artists of the time, such as Ewan MacColl, Dominic Behan, A.L. Lloyd, Louis Killen and the Ian Campbell Folk Group. At the same time Bill Leader was recording engineer on some of the first releases on Nat Joseph’s Transatlantic label, including the LPs Songs Of Love, Lust And Loose Living and Putting Out The Dustbin, both of which featured Stephen Sedley as a performer and/or arranger.

He was actually only a paid employee of Topic for a few years, as the company discovered that they could not afford to pay both Gerry Sharp, the general secretary, and Bill Leader. So Leader took a job at Collett’s record shop (a massively important part of the contemporary folk and blues scene, both as a source of records, and a meeting place for those involved in the scene), but carried on working as a sound engineer for Topic and Transatlantic on a casual, voluntary basis. This does not appear to have diminished the number of recording projects on which he worked, nor the importance of some of the records with which his name is linked. Not that these recordings were necessarily made in sophisticated surroundings – for instance The Watersons’ hugely influential Topic LP Frost And Fire was, like numerous others at this period, recorded in Bill Leader’s bedroom, while John Renbourn’s recollections of early recordings for Transatlantic had Bill “coming over to a pad I shared with Bert Jansch, setting up the tape machine in the sink and having us play in the broom cupboard”.²

He also went out with portable (or at least, transportable) recording equipment to make field recordings. These included the songs issued by Topic as The Roving Journeymen (12T84, 1962), featuring recordings of traveller Tom Willett and his sons Chris and Ben. The songs were recorded by Bill Leader and Paul Carter at Tom Willett’s home on a caravan site near Ashford, Middlesex in 1962.

In 1966 he helped the prolific collector Mike Yates make his first recordings of an English traditional singer:

Bill Leader, Topic’s recording engineer (and a man who taught me a lot about recording techniques), collected Fred en-route to my parent’s pub in Altringham.  We recorded the album -‘Songs of a Shropshire Farm Worker’, Topic 12T150 – in my bedroom over a couple of days.³

In 1969 Bill set up his own record company, and over the coming decade he released many records which have come to be recognised as classics. The Trailer label featured some of the cream of the 1970s folk revival – John Kirkpatrick, Nic Jones, Dick Gaughan, Mike and Lal Waterson, Christy Moore and Swan Arcade, to name just a few. The Leader label, meanwhile was dedicated to recordings of traditional singers and musicians. Many of these recordings were made by Bill himself. For instance: the first two LPs by Norfolk singer Walter Pardon; A Song for Every Season, the 4 disc box set  presenting the songs of the Copper family of Rottingdean in Sussex; and an LP by London Irish fiddle player Martin Byrnes, which was recorded by Bill at Reg Hall’s mum’s house in Croydon. Leader also put out LPs of other collectors’ recordings – for example, A People’s Carol, featuring Ian Russell’s recordings of carol singing in South Yorkshire pubs, and Percy Grainger’s 1908 phonograph recordings of Lincolnshire singers on the LP Unto Brigg Fair. Sadly, Bill Leader sold the labels to a company which then ran into financial difficulties and sold the business on once more. The result being that these classic LPs have been unavailable since the early 1980s; inexplicably none has ever been properly released on CD by the current owners.

Bill Leader’s life and times (and those of contemporaries with whom he came into contact) are being documented in fascinating detail by Mike Butler, in a projected 10-volume biography, Sounding the Century⁴. Of the volumes so far published, Volume 3 The Poor Man’s Only Music has proved particularly useful when writing articles for the Kent Trad website, covering as it does the activities of folk song collectors such as Reg Hall, Peter Kennedy and Paul Carter, and the background to the recording of LPs by the Willet family and Phoebe Smith.

Bill Leader died in hospital on 31st March 2026, after a short illness.

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1. Bill Leader, quoted in Mike Butler, Sounding the Century, Volume 1, Glimpses of far off things: 1855-1956, pp180-181 ↩︎
2. John Renbourn, quoted on the Folk Blues and Beyond website, http://www.folkblues.co.uk/artistsrenbourn.htm ↩︎
3. Mike Yates, Time Has Made a Change – some reflections, Musical Traditions, 2021, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/time-change.htm ↩︎
4. See https://www.soundingthecentury.com/ ↩︎

Sir Stephen John Sedley, 1939–

Sir Stephen Sedley is a distinguished lawyer who has served as a High Court judge, a Lord Justice of Appeal (i.e. a judge of the Court of Appeal, the second highest level of judge in the courts of England and Wales), and a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Oxford. He was called to the Bar in 1964. Prior to that, having graduated from Cambridge in 1961, he worked as a musician and translator (this is according to his entry in Who’s Who, where his recreations are listed as “carpentry, music, changing the world”). During this period he collaborated with his friend Nathan Joseph, a contemporary at Queen’s College, Cambridge, who had set up the Transatlantic record company. The first releases on Transatlantic were three volumes of Live With Love, “A comprehensive guide to sexual behaviour. The facts… the problems… the answers… by Doctor Keith Cammeron; One of Britain’s foremost authorities on Marriage Guidance” (actually a pseudonym for the sex therapist Dr. Eustace Chesser). However, having met Bill Leader, Nat Joseph developed an interest in folk music, and this became Transatlantic’s speciality. Stephen Sedley was involved with several early releases on the label, beginning with Songs Of Love, Lust And Loose Living, which featured singer Isla Cameron and actor Tony Britton; Sedley had introduced Joseph to Isla Cameron, and played guitar on the LP. Subsequently he contributed “guitar, lute, and what he euphemistically calls arrangements” to Putting Out The Dustbin, a collection of songs written by Sydney Carter, performed by Carter and Sheila Hancock, and recorded on the day the Cuba missile crisis reached its climax.

Stephen was also one of the performers on a  1964 release, Vote For Us, credited to “Herbert Floog – a pseudonym which conceals 7 of Britain’s top comedians, 6 of whom are not Peter Sellers (The seventh is not Peter Sellers either)”. The LP featured songs by Leon Rosselson, Stephen Sedley and Nathan Joseph, performed by Chris Hilton, James E. Butchart, Leon Rosselson, Liane Aukin, Ralph Trainer, Sam Hutt (who later would become better known as Hank Wangford), and Stephen Sedley. The record sleeve informed the potential purchaser that “This Record is about British politics, particularly in the period before an election. Like British politics it is at times cheap, nasty and sordid, scurrilous, lunatic, unbelievable and wildly funny” and that it had been “Recorded at a safe distance from a captive audience at Olympic Studios W.1.”.

As a spin-off from these recordings Nat Joseph organised a series of one-off concerts, at the Mermaid Theatre and the Lyric, Hammersmith, and once again Sedley was involved in these. He recalls “I became involved, partly as arranger, partly as accompanist, in a series of unrepeatable concerts. The first and perhaps the most remarkable featured Robert Graves, then living in Mallorca and still vigorous and handsome”. Isla Cameron was a friend of Graves, and she persuaded him to take part in the event. He read his own poems, and was also persuaded to sing trench songs he remembered from the First World War. Other concerts promoted around this time by Nat Joseph featured Spike Milligan, the Australian comic actor Bill Kerr, Welsh writer Gwyn Thomas, and the then poet laureate Cecil Day Lewis.

In 1964 Sedley provided readers of The Observer with a critical summary of songwriters on the contemporary British folk scene in an article headed ‘The Folk Laureates’. The songwriters mentioned include Johnny Handle, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Leon Rosselson, Stan Kelly, Matt McGinn and John Foreman.¹ Sedley was also a fan of the young Bob Dylan, whom he had met in 1962 at the Troubadour on Old Brompton Road in London. He recounted this meeting in the collection Dylan at 80², summarised in this review of the book

Among the more personal recollections of and reflections on Dylan, readers can delight in Stephen Sedley’s tale of a brief encounter with Dylan at a London club in 1962, in the days of Cuban Missile Crisis, when Dylan was recognized as a new American star and asked to play. Dylan borrowed Stephen Sedley’s guitar and fell into the ongoing session. The beauty of Sedley’s account is that he confesses his memory may have added something and subtracted something else; but the memory is his, as are the youthfully old-fashioned reviews he writes about Dylan’s London concerts in 1964 and 1965.³

Not immediately apparent from the paragraphs above is Stephen Sedley’s deep interest in traditional song. However, at the same time as participating in Nat Joseph’s LPs and concerts he was researching the material which would appear in his book The Seeds of Love, a collection of traditional songs on the subject of love, published by Essex Music, in association with the EFDSS, in 1967. A successor volume, Who killed Cock Robin?, containing songs of crime and punishment, did not appear until 2021, edited jointly with Martin Carthy. In the Preface to the latter collection Sedley wrote:

It was in those early years, when I was supposed to be studying law and starting out in practice as a barrister, that my interest in folk song brought me into contact with a number of traditional and revival musicians.

[…]

In addition to library research, as a young barrister I would go to rural Kent to defend Travellers, evicted and barred from their traditional camping grounds on the commons, against repeated charges under the legislation then in force of ‘being a gypsy encamped on a highway’. Getting charges thrown out because the police initially couldn’t work out how to prove the accused was a Gypsy gave me a local status and an introduction to some fine singers. One of these, Joe Saunders, an old poacher and bird-breeder who lived mostly on Biggin Hill, turned out to have a large repertoire of prison, poaching and transportation songs, some of which, with the help of the Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder I carried in my car boot, appear in this book.

 The first field recordings which Sedley made were of Frank and Margaret Birkett, at Elterwater in the Lake District, in September 1965. The circumstances which led to him recording Joe Saunders, and other travellers in Kent, are given in a document which Sedley prepared in August 2023:

I was called to the Bar in November 1964. Within a year or so I was briefed by the solicitor Peter Kingshill⁴ to appear at Croydon Quarter Sessions on a batch of 32 appeals, to be listed together, against convictions and fines for “being a gipsy encamped on a highway”. This was a specific offence first enacted in the mid-19th century and reproduced in the 1959 Highways Act⁵. It has since been repealed.

Travellers, with no access to legal advice, used to simply take such prosecutions as a fact of life. But they were becoming more oppressive as local authorities took advantage of a power, newly created in 1962, to ditch and fence the commons on which Travellers had camped for centuries, without exercising the associated power to open properly laid-out permanent sites. Large numbers of caravans were consequently forced on to the grass verges of main roads, a danger both to traffic and to Travellers’ children, more than one of whom had been killed.

A local architect, Brian Richardson, a leading member of the NCCL, persuaded 32  recently convicted Travellers to consult Peter Kingshill. Peter obtained legal aid, gave notices of appeal, and sent me the appeal brief.

Appeals to quarter sessions were conducted as a full rehearing. With my agreement the prosecuting counsel, Neil Dennison (a decent man, later to be Common Serjeant at the Old Bailey) took a single case, I think that of Abraham Cooper, and called evidence simply that Abe was living in a caravan on the grass verge of the A21. I submitted that there was no evidence that Abe was a gipsy, whether that was taken to signify an ethnic origin or a way of life. The court agreed and allowed the appeal. Dennison thereupon conceded the other 31, and I became an undeserving local hero.

The privilege this earned me was a welcome in any caravan in the Edenbridge area. Abe introduced me to his parents, Joe and Lena Cooper, who readily talked and sang for me as I ran the Uher.

Sedley recorded not just songs from Joe and Lena Cooper, but reminiscences about their lives – notably, Joe’s vivid but unsentimental memories of his time in active service during the First World War.

The Coopers were insistent that I should record their kinsman Joe Saunders . Joe’s caravan, which he shared with his grown-up daughter Liza, was stationed on farmland on Biggin Hill with the agreement of a friendly farmer. I visited him there at least twice in 1965-7.

Sedley recorded 20 songs from Joe Saunders – “Joe wouldn’t sing a note without a quart of cider, but once this was provided he was unstoppable”. The collection The Seeds of Love was largely completed by the time he met Joe, but Sedley was able to include his tune for the song  ‘Love is pleasing’, while there are seven songs from Joe’s repertoire in Who Killed Cock Robin?

The original court case which gained Sedley access to the Kentish gypsies’ camps was reported thus in the Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, 17^th June 1966:

‘GIPSY’ ON HIGHWAY CASE IS DISMISSED

Sevenoaks Magistrates dismissed a charge against a 40-year old man that, he being a gipsy, illegally camped on the highway at Dunton Green, when his case came before the court for a second time on Friday.

Earlier, the case, involving Abraham Cooper of a caravan at No Man’s Land, Dane Bottom, Dunton Green, was adjourned to consider a submission by defending counsel, Mr. Stephen Sedley, that Cooper had already been proved not to be a gipsy.

When the case was resumed on Friday the Magistrates upheld his submission and dismissed the charge of camping at Dane Bottom on March 30.

A further charge of obstructing the highway at the same place. with his caravan, on April 22, was upheld, but Cooper was given an absolute discharge in view of “mitigating circumstances”.

‘Impossible’

Prosecuting in the latter case, Mr. A. C. Staples said Cooper had parked his caravan on a triangle of grass and had been there since late last year.

Defending counsel. Mr. Sedley suggested that this piece of land could not be considered to be part of the highway.

A member of the Sevenoaks Gipsy Resettlement Committee, Mr. Brian Richardson of Greenways, Knockholt, told the court, “It is absolutely impossible for these people to find anywhere to go. It is hopeless.”

Cooper said, “I had nowhere else to go. Whatever district we are in the police tell us to go back where the others are.”

It was explained in court that the Kent County Council had towed several caravans on to the grass there, but Cooper had not been among these.

Sedley’s successful defence in this case did not end the harassment which gypsies faced:

After the initial group of successful appeals, the police resorted to ordinary highway obstruction summonses, with occasional forays into establishing gipsy status (“I have known the accused for x years, your worships. He lives in a caravan and follows a peripatetic way of life.”) To keep the fines down we would plead guilty and hope that the Sevenoaks bench was going to be chaired that day by the decent magistrate who imposed moderate fines and not the choleric colonel who behaved as if he was conducting a court martial.

On one occasion, Sedley called Pastor John Lywood as a defence witness, although he came to regret this. Lywood, born to affluence, had joined the RAF in World War II and flown 49 missions as a bomb aimer, mostly in Wellington bombers. After the war he managed two hundred Whitbread pubs in Kent, which provided him with “more money than I could spend” – although he tried his best, buying race horses and fast cars. However, having undergone a religious experience in 1953, he set up his Evangelical Free Church, holding meetings initially in Goudhurst and Brenchley village halls. After a while his middle-class congregation began to drift away, and he set his sights on the Romany community. Despite his posh accent, he attracted quite a following among the Kent gypsies.

In their lorries and carts they drove to Lywood’s church and he baptised them one by one in a rusting bath, clad in a large white nightshirt. “Borned again”, as the Romanies termed it, had to mean more, however, than Bible readings and prayers. They had to give up fortune-telling and putting curses on those who would not cross a palm with silver. Walking in the paths of righteousness proved difficult for some who, with limited educational opportunities, often had to turn to their minister for help with letters to social workers, the police and courts, and for prison visits. They continued to be impressed by what they saw as his healing powers. Once he had appeared to have saved the life of a Romany who was in the final stages of cancer, the legendary status of the man they called “Pastor Eyewood” was assured among them.⁶

Lywood continued his ministry until 1995, although gypsies continued to consult him even when, because of Parkinson’s disease, he had to move into a care home. His obituary records that on at least one occasion his appearance in court did succeed in reducing a gypsy’s sentence. However this was not the case when Stephen Sedley invited him into the witness box:

On one occasion Peter [Kingshill] arrived at court in high spirits: “I’ve got a clergyman who’s prepared to give evidence in mitigation.” It was Pastor Lywood. Being inexperienced, I put him in the witness box without any prior discussion and asked him what he could tell the court about the circumstances of the defendants.

Lywood didn’t hesitate. He launched into a sermon about the flames of torment that awaited magistrates who oppressed the poor. Neither the chairman nor I could stop him or distract him. The fines were colossal.

Some time later one of the old hands at Croydon quarter sessions said to me: “Didn’t anybody tell you, my boy? There are two iron rules: never call the solicitor, never call the parson.”

The relevant case would appear to be this one, described in the Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, 24^th February 1967 when Sedley was defending Levi Smith, and in fact, not one but two clergymen spoke up for the defendants: 

Vicar speaks in gipsies’ defence

The Vicar of Riverhead, the Rev. G. K. St. John Potter, appeared as a defence witness at Sevenoaks on Tuesday when three gipsies were found guilty of a total 80 obstruction offences.

In court were 23-year-old George Ripley, Tom Smith, 28, and Levi Smith, 50, who pleaded not guilty to the charges.

P-c. Harris told the court he had seen two caravans parked on the grass verge at Croydon Road, Westerham, on November 29. He spoke to one of the owners, Levi Smith, who refused to move when asked.

On a subsequent visit he interviewed another caravan owner, Tom Smith, who was also parked on the verge. Smith told the constable: “If I had somewhere to go, I would.”

Later P-c. Harris saw the third man, George Ripley, who said: “There is nowhere we can go. We have come from Dartford and it’s dangerous there.”

At a further interview with the caravan owners, Tom Smith commented: “They ought to get a gun and shoot us all.”

NO ALTERNATIVE

Questioned by defence counsel, Mr. Stephen Sedley, Mr. Potter said he knew Levi Smith and in his opinion he had broken the law because he had no alternative.

“I am quite sure he would be willing to accept an alternative if one was available,” he said.

A Free Church minister from Goudhurst, Mr. Charles Lywood, told the court he knew all three men. “It is only through necessity that they are there. I am sure they would be prepared to pay rent if a proper site was available to them.”

Asked by acting chairman Mr. K. Ritchie if this was witness’s own opinion or an impression given by the defendants, Mr. Lywood said: “My work takes me into contact with caravan dwellers of every kind.

Ripley was fined £13 on 26 charges, Tom Smith and Levi Smith were each fined £13 10s. of 27 charges.

Sedley continued to represent gypsies in court cases. For example the Kent Messenger, 8^th November 1968 reported on that week’s Kent Sessions:

THE CHAIRMAN (Mr. Montague Berryman Q.C.), reserved judgment in an appeal by 71-year-old Mrs. Rose Ripley, mother of 14, who lives in a caravan at the side of the A2, Watling Street, at Stone, near Dartford.

Mrs. Ripley appealed against her conviction by Dartford magistrates for encamping on the highway.

Mr. Stephen Sedley, for Mrs. Ripley, submitted that she had “lawful excuse” to be there. Her caravan had been towed there three years ago by a local authority. She had no method of being towed away and literally had nowhere else to go.

A few weeks later, he was once again representing Levi Smith, this time with his brother Jasper. The following report appeared in the Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, 6^th December 1968:

GIPSIES FACE 58 CHARGES

Two gipsies, defended by counsel at a nominal fee from an anonymous person faced a total of 58 charges of obstructing the free passage of the highway when they appeared at Sevenoaks magistrates’ court on Friday.

They are Levi and Jasper Smith of no fixed abode, both living in caravans on Croydon Road near Westerham.

They pleaded not guilty, but were found guilty on all charges and fined 15s. per charge, a total of £43 10s.

Levi Smith faced 48 charges, Jasper 10. Their counsel was Mr. Stephen Sedley.

At the conclusion of the case the magistrates, headed by Mr. E. Comer allowed a certificate of legal aid, and made no order as to costs.

Stephen Sedley’s father Bill (1910-1985), a lifelong communist, had operated a legal advice service in the East End of London. He was particularly known for his defence of tenants’ rights in the late 1930s, and for providing support for squatters’ rights and mortgage strikes after the Second World War. Stephen also took on cases where he represented tenants’ rights, for instance on behalf of the North Kensington Law Centre.

When the Law Centre was founded in 1970, I had been a barrister for little more than five years. But because my father, Bill Sedley, had been what was called a Poor Man’s Lawyer in Bow in the 1930s and was one of the few people who understood the Rent Acts, it was assumed by Peter Kandler and his colleagues that by some form of osmosis I could be trusted to handle the Centre’s landlord and tenant work. My chambers clerk didn’t like the sound of it at all, but it was better than nothing.[6]

Like his father, Stephen Sedley was a member of the Communist party, from 1958 until the early 1980s, leaving the party – perhaps not coincidentally – a year or two before being appointed a Queen‘s Counsel. His appointment as a High Court judge was reported in The Times (15^th September 1992) under the headline “Left-wing barrister joins bench”:

In a clear signal that politics is no bar to judicial appointment, the Lord Chancellor’s department announced yesterday that the leading left-wing barrister Stephen Sedley, QC, has been made a High Court judge.

Mr Sedley, 52, a committed socialist, is a member of Liberty, formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties. He is thought to be the most left-wing Queen’s Counsel to reach the senior ranks of the judiciary.

Widely respected, he has a long record of high-profile cases including the Blair Peach case, the Carl Bridgwater murder trial, the Helen Smith inquest and the Stefan Kisko appeal.

Unsurprisingly, his judgments have not always been well received in some sections of the popular press. For example, in 1995 the Daily Express (always inclined to take umbrage at judicial decisions with which it does not agree) published an opinion piece under the headline “Judges are a law unto themselves”, attacking a recent case where Sedley had judged that Home Secretary Michael Howard’s decision to ban the Moonie leader Sun Myung Moon from Britain was unlawful. Moreover,

Three months ago, in another landmark ruling, he gave gypsies and travellers squatting on local authority land partial protection against the anti-trespass measures contained in the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill. And yesterday, fellow judge, Mr Justice Latham used that ruling to curb the right of local authorities wishing to use planning laws to evict gypsies or travellers from unauthorised campsites.

Both judges base their decisions on what they call “the human factor” (Latham) and “considerations of common humanity” (Sedley). All well and good. Except that such words are not in the relevant Acts.

These judges are, in effect, summarily ammending (sic) legislation passed by Parliament. This is happening more and more: and is both wrong and dangerous.⁷

Sedley has sometimes been able to make use of his legal expertise in the sphere of folk song. For instance, each section of the book Who killed Cock Robin? is prefaced with a brief introduction which provides the legal, historical and social context, and considers whether the sympathies expressed in traditional song were in tune with, or at odds with, the law (in the case of sexual assault, the editors make the telling point that “folk song displays much the same ambivalence, much the same moralism and much the same hypocrisy as are encountered in modern societies”). Each song also has notes, which frequently highlight a legal dimension of the crime in question – for example, does McCaffery’s shooting of his colonel instead of his captain offer him any defence in law? might Lord Barnard receive a reduced sentence under Scots law because he was provoked by his wife’s infidelity with Little Musgrave?

In the 1960s he examined the question of copyright and folk song. An article titled ‘Who Owns Folksong?’ was published in Books: The Journal of the National Book League, No. 358, March-April 1965, pp44-52. And in a 1974 interview with the singer and researcher A.L. Lloyd, Lloyd mentions that a committee had been established by the English Folk Dance and Song Society looking into the question of copyright, with Sedley as one of the members.

What happened was that some three years ago, partly as a result of Topic Records wanting some legal clarification about responsibility for rights on traditional material because so many people were claiming copyright fees on traditional material.  Partly as a result of that, Stephen Sedley and myself began to look into the matter and to see if we could sort out some sort of code, as it were, on which the thing might operate.  And we thought it might be a good idea if, indeed, musical folklore, words and melodies, were subject to copyright control but that the fees accruing from that control – or at least the greater proportion of the fees – should go into a common fund – into a national fund if you like – for research and such.

And, at an annual general meeting of the EFDSS, Stephen and I both put this to the meeting quite formally.  A number of people spoke against it, especially Maud Karpeles, as Sharp’s executor – Sharp’s principal executor, because she felt that it was too dangerous to go out of the hands of executors and such.  And she felt that the law as it stood, vague as it was, did give protection to the people who had already devoted time and money to folkmusic collecting.  She spoke against it – the thing ended in stalemate then, but has constantly nagged at some people on the executive of the EFDSS.

And so, the executive asked for this matter to be revived and for a committee to be formed who can make recommendations, which can then be presented to parliament to see whether it can’t become statutory.  And that is what we are working towards.  And we intend ultimately to draw up a document, which can go to parliament.⁸

Dave Arthur summarises the outcome of this work in his very readable biography of Lloyd:

The EFDSS deliberations on copyright were forwarded to the Whitford Committee, which finally presented The Report of the Committee to Consider the Law on Copyright and Designs to Parliament in March 1977.The EFDSS wanted the law clarified or amended to ensure that ‘it is not possible fort any private individual to, in effect, appropriate for himself or itself what is in its collective and communal property’. The Committee agreed that the mere transcribing of a work [song] should have no protection under copyright law unless the transcriber’s [collector’s] version involves sufficient skill and/or labour to qualify as an original work. Despite such rulings, copyright can still be a legal minefield.⁹

Sedley has been clear that he does not believe that a collector has any copyright in the songs which he or she has collected. Digital copies of his own field recordings have been deposited with both the British Library and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

I met Stephen Sedley at a very early stage of my work on the Kent Trad project. I would like to express my gratitude for his generosity in devoting time to my enquiries, for the informative – and often very entertaining – notes which he has sent me, and for providing me with access to digital copies of his field recordings.

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1. Stephen Sedley. ‘The Folk Laureates’, The Observer Weekend Review, 05 July 1964, p29. ↩︎
2. Dylan at 80: It Used to Go like That, and Now It Goes like This, edited by Gary Browning and Constantine Sandis, Imprint Academic (2021) ↩︎
3. Anne-Marie Mai, review of Dylan at 80, in Dylan Review 4.1 (Spring/Summer 2022), p14 https://thedylanreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Dylan-Review-Vol-4.1-2022-1.pdf ↩︎
4. Peter Kingshill was a Sevenoaks solicitor who represented Gypsies and Travellers regularly over the course of a long career. In a footnote Sedley writes “Getting to know Peter, who had come to Britain as a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany, was one of the bonuses of my work at the Bar. He was the best and kindest of men”. ↩︎
5.  Section 127 of the Highways Act, 1959 laid down that “If, without lawful authority or excuse… (c) a hawker or other itinerant trader or a gipsy pitches a booth, stall or stand, or encamps, on a highway, he shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable in respect thereof to a fine not exceeding forty shillings”. ↩︎
6. John Lywood, obituary, The Times, 17^th December 2007 ↩︎
7. Daily Express, 7^th November 1995 ↩︎
8. Some Reflections: a 1974 interview with Bert Lloyd by Barry Taylor, Musical Traditions, 2019, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/lloyd2.htm ↩︎
9. Dave Arthur, Bert: The life and times of A.L. Lloyd, Pluto Press, 2012, pp246-247 ↩︎