Kenneth Charles Stubbs, 1923–2008

Ken Stubbs was born in Beckenham on 18^th November 1923. The September 1939 Register found him, a few couple of months short of his sixteenth birthday, living at 115 Ravenscroft Road in Bromley; he was listed as an     Engineer’s Apprentice. His obituary in the Folk Music Journal relates that

After attending the Beckenham Technical College and Art College, Ken was apprenticed in 1940 as an engraver and lettering artist to the London firm of Charles Skipper and East Ltd, a career that was terminated when he arrived one morning to find the premises had been destroyed by enemy action. Army service followed in France and Belgium, including training for the second wave of glider groups for the Arnhem landings, and he was in Palestine for two years after the war. On demobilization, he responded to the Ministry of Education’s Emergency Scheme for the Training of Teachers and qualified as a general primary school teacher. He bought a house in East Grinstead, teaching in a primary school in Gravesend, and it was in Gravesend that he regularly went to a folk song club and dances run by Fred and Reg Hall. He moved to Lingfield to teach at the primary school there, and in 1966, after attending a course at Manchester University, began teaching at the National Centre for Young People with Epilepsy, again in Lingfield, where staff remember still how much his pupils looked forward to his arts and crafts lessons. He also took a particular interest in remedial reading.

Ken’s involvement in folk music and collecting came through his membership of the Communist Party, after he had been introduced to communism by his army education officer during his time in Palestine. Communism also introduced him to his wife, Joan Durrant, whom he married in October 1953, and it was through Joan that he formed a friendship with the historian E. P. Thompson. East Grinstead had a folk club run by the Communist Party and he attended a lecture on the need to preserve the music and songs of the people, a directive he then proceeded to carry out until 1971.¹

Writing in 2013, Paul Marsh noted that

The Communist Party was seen as the only real alternative to fascism. Many of those involved in the post-war folk revival were members. It was believed music could be used as a tool of educational and cultural revolution and folk music, in all its forms, from the traditional songs passed down generations, to the protest songs of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), in which Ken was very active, gave ‘the people’ a voice.

[…]

In 1959 Ken attended a Party lecture on the need to preserve the music and songs of ‘the people’. Inspired he then proceeded to carry out this directive with great enthusiasm.²

Ken Stubbs didn’t drive, so when going out collecting he used public transport and/or a bicycle. Initially he didn’t have access to a tape recorder, so he would jot down the words of a song, and attempt to memorise the tune. The earliest entries in his Field Collection Book³ appear to date from April 1956, and are songs noted from the Sussex singer George ‘Pop’ Maynard. In an article headed ‘Prospecting for songs in South-Eastern England’ which appeared in English Dance & Song, Spring 1975, Stubbs wrote about his experience of collecting, and the article is worth quoting in full:

Nearly twenty years ago I had the good luck to meet Mervyn Plunkett who was collecting folksongs in Sussex. Through him I was able to realize my ambition to learn folksongs by the oral tradition. He instilled into me the aim of every folksinger being his own collector. Another motive I had for collecting was to help bring singing back into the bars of public houses.

A traditional singer whom I met through Mervyn was George (usually called “Pop”) Maynard, of Copthorne, who was famous on the Surrey-Sussex borders for his large repertoire of traditional and music hall songs. From him I learnt many fine complete versions of folk-songs. Before I could borrow a tape-recorder, Pop patiently dictated the words to me. Later, I recorded on tape sixty-five songs, either entire or in part. Before this, Pop had been recorded by the B.B.C. and Mervyn. Pop’s two favourite songs were ” Claudy Banks ” and ” The Old Rustic Bridge,” the latter a music hall song.

His friend Fred Holman made up three songs which Pop sang, one of which has become a folksong: “Shooting Goshen’s Cock-ups.” Garbled versions of it have been collected from Jasper Smith and other gypsies. Another song which was reputed to be based on a true incident is “The Irish Hop-pole Puller.” Pop had several Irish songs, including: “The Pride of Kildare,” “William Lenner” (the Lakes of Coolfin) and “The Brave Irish Soldier.” Of the lesser-known were: “The King and the Forester,” “The Sailor in the North Country,” “The Poacher’s Fate” and “Locks and Bolts.” Pop died in 1962 at the age of ninety. He sang without rhetoric, always maintaining pitch, and his voice possessed a soft timbre. The only singer who compared with him was Harry Cox. He worked usually as a woodcutter, but, since he was proficient in all agricultural crafts, he never was in want of work. Everything he touched he excelled in. Withal, he was modest, and loved by all who knew him.

Through Pop I came to know Jim Wilson, of Three Bridges, famed for his rendition of “The Keyhole in the Door” and “Barbara Allen.” The rasp of his voice cut through the hubbub in any public bar. Another contact in Three Bridges was Pop’s cousin and namesake, George Maynard. From him I learnt “The Bold Fisherman” and a version of “Lord Randal,” but unluckily he died before I could record him.

In search of songs I have visited clubs for old folk. At East Grinstead I recorded “Caroline and her Young Sailor bold,” “Brennan on the Moor” and a few other songs from Mrs. Fanny Pronger. It turned out that one of her grandchildren had married one of Pop’s. Where-ever I sought songs he was known.

At the old folk’s club in Smallfield I met Mrs. Phoebe Chapman. She told me that her songs were sung better by her brother-in-law, Tom Willett. He sang “I’m a Romany Rye, a real diddikai,” and he really was. In his little bungalow on the caravan site which he owned at Ashford, Middlesex, he sang fragments and nearly completed songs to me for a couple of hours one hot afternoon. Later I heard him and his two sons, Chris and Ben, when Topic Records made the record of them at Tom’s site at Queen Street, near Paddock Wood⁴. Chris’s son, then aged about six, sang a few of his father’s songs. It was heartening to hear that the singing tradition in the family was being carried on. When I told Pop of this fine singer, he said that Tom was an old mate of his who kept horses in Copthorne.

Through Mervyn I met Lewis (Scan) Tester from whom I recorded dozens of dance tunes, mostly “Olde Tyme.” Scan knew the names of few of his many polkas and schottisches, never having been told them by the men from whom he learnt them by ear. He led the Tester Imperial “Jazz” Band, which included his brother Will (on the concertina or melodeon) and his daughter Daisy (on the piano). Scan usually played the fiddle, until his arthritis became too bad, but he also played the Anglo-German concertina and clarinet. The only song which he would sing in public was “William Lenner.”

To record Ern (Rabbitty) Baxter singing “Will the Weaver,” I went to “The Stonequarry,” Chelwood Gate. I discovered that he played the tambourine there each Saturday, with Scan on the concertina. Another time there I was told that an old man present could sing, and, at length, I persuaded him to do so. He sang “While the Gamekeepers Lie Sleeping.” When he finished I announced that I had heard the song sung in the same style by a man many miles away: Tom Willett. This caused general laughter, to my astonishment, and when it had died down, I asked the cause of it. The singer told me that Tom was his (Noah’s) brother. His son (a man of about my own age) sang fragments of “The Coachman” and “In Thorneymoor Wood.”

The singer who is renowned for her singing of “The Cup of Poison” is Mrs. Louise Fuller, formerly Mrs. Saunders. She has a powerful voice, and sings popular songs of the day as well as a few traditional ones. Her singing of “Hopping down in Kent” has become popular at gatherings in public houses.

She and George Spicer are among the more important of the singers whom I have recorded, who are still alive. At 68, he is still young as folksingers go. Since I recorded him, Mike Yates discovered more of George’s songs, four of which are included in the Topic Record: “Blackberry Fold.”

My part of South-Eastern England has yielded a rich harvest of folkmusic. There is no reason to doubt that other parts of England would give a similar yield to the keen collector of traditional songs and tunes.

Stubbs was the first person to record Tom Willett and other members of the Willett Family, although it was not his recordings which appeared on the LP The Roving Journeymen (Topic, 12T84, 1962) – Topic wanted better quality recordings, and sent Bill Leader and Paul Carter to obtain them.

Having moved from Lingfield to Edenbridge, Stubbs met singers and musicians from the Hever Road Gypsy site – notably Bill and Frank Smith – in the public bar of The Crown. He had previously (in 1965) recorded songs from the Romany Gypsies Jasper Smith at Epsom, and his brother Levy Smith at Edenbridge.

As he wrote in the ED&S article quoted above, one of his motives for collecting “was to help bring singing back into the bars of public houses”, and he did his best to encourage this.

Many of the people from whom he collected songs and tunes attended his own ‘Folk Music Parties’, as he liked to call them, which he organized in pubs on the Sussex, Surrey, and Kent borders: The Cherry Tree at Copthorne, The Plough at Three Bridges, and The Crown at Edenbridge. These evenings attracted local performers such as Scan Tester, Ernie Baxter, George ‘Pop’ Maynard, George Spicer, Louise Fuller, Toby Hayward, Jim Wilson, and Brick Harber. Ken would send out postcards, handwritten in his fine calligraphic style, to announce the dates and venues. These he organized until he went to live in the United States in 1980, the last being held at The Queen’s Arms at Cowden Pound, familiarly known as ‘Elsie’s’, which is still active today and surely must be one of the longest-running folk evenings in Kent.⁵

The session at the Queen’s Head was named after Elsie Maynard the landlady (who famously refused to serve lager in her pub!). Although Stubbs did no more collecting after 1971, he continued to organise his folk music parties; when he moved to the USA, Chris and Jean Addison took over the running of the Elsie’s sessions for the next 25 years. Stubbs also passed his of reel-to-reel tape collection to Chris Addison:

Before he left Ken gave his tapes to Chris, knowing they would be in safe hands, with the wish that he should make the recordings available. He also gave Chris copyright to the recordings, in writing, should he wish to issue any of them in the future.

Chris let people know that he had Ken’s collection, hoping more would be issued from it, but was surprised and disappointed to discover there was little interest in doing so.

A few of his peers did not get on with Ken. They actively avoided him and dismissed his recordings as “of little worth”. There is still a widely-held belief that Ken’s recordings were such poor quality they just weren’t worth bothering with, although most people have never heard all of them.

Ken was a genuine enthusiast, who did his utmost to continue the tradition and the memory of the singers he had known, by singing the old songs he had collected from them. A kind-hearted, generous, unassuming man, Ken was always willing to share his recordings and was hurt by the comments some people made about them.⁶

A few of his recordings had appeared on LP and CDs – on The Boscastle Breakdown (Topic 12T240, 1974), on the George Maynard LP Ye Subjects of England (Topic 12T286, 1976), and on various volumes of Topic’s Voice of the People series. With Stubbs’ blessing, Paul Marsh undertook to digitise the entire collection, planning to release some tracks on his Forest Tracks label, and ultimately to make the entire collection available on the internet. In May 2008 he took possession of 21 reels of 4 track recordings, on 5 inch and 7 inch reels.

Ken’s collection has taken a lot of sorting out. I’ve worked from his hand-written book in which he lists the tapes by song title and performer, and his card-index of recordings in his collection, which gives some dates and locations. Ken did his best to answer any questions as they came up, but he was very ill and his memory was fading.⁷

The first release from the collection was A-Swinging Down The Lane, a two CD set presenting Ken Stubbs’ recordings of the Willett Family, all previously unreleased, which appeared in September 2013. Sadly Ken Stubbs did not live to see this album released, and there were no further releases on the Forest Tracks label as Paul Marsh also died, in April 2018. However Stubbs’ sound recordings can be accessed via the VWML Archive Catalogue, at https://archives.vwml.org/records/KS.

The recording equipment which Stubbs had access to was not always of the highest quality, and the recordings which he made in pubs often have loud background noise. Paul Marsh, who clearly had an intimate knowledge of Ken Stubbs’ collection, described it thus:

The contents of Ken Stubbs’ surviving tapes is of a miscellaneous character, containing field recordings made by him and others in Sussex, Kent, and Surrey, radio programmes recorded off-air, dubs from commercial records, and other related material. He copied, and re-copied tracks for various purposes, and individual performances can appear in several places in the collection, often in fragmentary form.

[…]

The field recordings are mainly of two types – domestic recordings made in people’s homes, under relatively controlled conditions, and those made in pubs. The latter, in particular, are often difficult to listen to, as conditions were rarely conducive to good recording practice. The microphone was rarely in the best place, the background noise is often overpowering, performances are often fragmentary, and the starts of the songs routinely missed. Technically, Ken was not particularly skilled in making recordings, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that in the ‘collecting’ situation he was more concerned with making the event successful than with making ‘good recordings’. He was usually involved as organiser, singer and musician, rather than as a professional recordist. Nor was his equipment of good quality, and the tapes as they have survived are all ‘four-track’, which is far from ideal, but was highly economical at the time. In this system, four separate tracks are squeezed onto a quarter-inch tape, and a small difference in alignment of the tape-recorder heads at recording, playing back, copying, or digitisation, results in two tracks being heard at the same time (often with one of them playing backwards). Where possible, this has been eliminated at digitisation stage, but in some cases nothing can be done, and listening is severely compromised.

With all its technical limitations, Ken Stubbs’ collection is extremely valuable as a record of singing and playing in the period, and much pleasure and information can be gained from it. It includes recordings of well-known performers such as Pop Maynard and Scan Tester, useful as comparative performances. The domestic recordings of ordinary people are undeniably valuable in documenting repertoires and styles which would otherwise have been lost to us.⁸

Ken Stubbs’ article ‘The Life and Songs of George Maynard’ was published in the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society in 1963, and he served on the Board of the Journal (renamed the Folk Music Journal in 1965) from 1964 to 1974. The Life of a Man: English Folk Songs from the Home Counties, a selection of songs collected by Stubbs, was published by the EFDSS in 1970.

When he emigrated to the United States in 1980, it was to work on an organic smallholding. He spent five years there before returning to the UK, settling in Norwich, where he died on 3^rd November 2008. David Nuttalls, an old friend who had gone with Stubbs to play and sing in country pubs in the 1960s, ended his Folk Music Journal obituary as follows:

The community aspect of music-making was just one of Ken’s many interests. It was a part of his overall vision of life as he would have it lived, through self-sufficiency, conservation, and the proper management of resources. Bees got into his beard, his goat kept the grass down in the graveyard in Lingfield, and he was an early member of one of the first organic gardening organizations, the Henry Doubleday Research Association. The Labour Party and, later, the Green Party, Friends of the Earth, CND, and the Theosophical Society all benefited from his support. In later years, he regularly attended the High Anglican services at the church of Saint George, Tombland, Norwich.

Although he did no further collecting after 1971, he continued to support and perform at folk events during his time in the United States and, on his return, in Norwich. Acute arthritis later put a stop to his melodeon and fiddle playing, but he could still manage a tune on the mouth organ and, of course, in a direct link with the traditional performers he so admired, he could always sing their songs. He made the contents of his collection freely available to all who appreciated what it contained. Re-establishing folk music in his area of Kent was what he had set out to do, and the result of that work is his legacy to us all.⁹

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1. David Nuttall, ‘Ken Stubbs (1923–2008)’, Folk Music Journal, Vol. 9, No. 5 (2010), pp. 859-861, accessed from https://www.jstor.org/stable/25654235 ↩︎
2. Paul Marsh, booklet for The Willett Family, A-Swinging Down The Lane, Forest Tracks, FT2CDKS1 (2013) ↩︎
3. Actually it’s Field Collection Book 2, implying that there was an earlier Book 1. Scanned images of Book 2 can be accessed via https://sussextraditions.org/ and Books 2 – 8 are indexed in the Roud Index https://archives.vwml.org/search/roud. ↩︎
4. According to the LP notes, the recordings were made by Bill Leader and Paul Carter at Tom Willett’s home on a caravan site near Ashford, Middlesex. ↩︎
5. David Nuttall, ‘Ken Stubbs (1923–2008)’, Folk Music Journal, Vol. 9, No. 5 (2010), pp. 859-861, accessed from https://www.jstor.org/stable/25654235. Sadly the Elsie’s session is no more. ↩︎
6. Paul Marsh, booklet for The Willett Family, A-Swinging Down The Lane. ↩︎
7. Paul Marsh, booklet for The Willett Family, A-Swinging Down The Lane. ↩︎
8. Paul Marsh, booklet for The Willett Family, A-Swinging Down The Lane. ↩︎
9. David Nuttall, ‘Ken Stubbs (1923–2008)’, Folk Music Journal, Vol. 9, No. 5 (2010), pp. 859-861, accessed from https://www.jstor.org/stable/25654235 ↩︎

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 19^th 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 (24^th September 1949) and in Fulwood Place, London WC1 (10^th July 1954), putting out “limited de luxe editions” of specialist books; and later (9^th 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.

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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 ↩︎

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.

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

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 ↩︎

Paul Carter, 1932–2012

As an 18 year old, Paul Carter worked on the door of Mick Mulligan’s jazz club in North Cheam. By the late 1950s he had developed an interest in folk song as well as jazz and, with Scotsman Bruce Dunnet (a follower of Ewan MacColl), was running a folk club, Folksong Unlimited, in a central London pub. Having worked for a while in Collector Records, a record shop in Charing Cross Road, he progressed to supervising recordings for the shop’s associated record label. Collector Records specialised in jazz, folk and blues, and put out just a few records each year. Between 1959 and 1964 Carter was involved in recording EPs by traditional Irish and Scots singers such as Joe Heaney and Jeannie Robertson, as well as figures from the folk revival, including Robin Hall, A.L. Lloyd, Shirley Collins, and Bob Davenport and The Rakes, in what was their first ever collaboration. In 1960 Reg Hall of The Rakes (and an important figure in the “discovery” and exposure of rural singers and musicians such as Scan Tester in Sussex, and Walter and Daisy Bulwer in Norfolk) took Carter to a music and song session in Sussex. These sessions, organised by Mervyn Plunkett, but with a major input from Reg Hall, were regular events at the time. Subsequently recordings made by Plunkett were edited by Carter for a Collector EP titled 4 Sussex Singers (Collector Records, JEB 7, March 1961). One of those singers was George Spicer, singing ‘I Wish There Were No Prisons’.

Soon he was also making recordings on behalf of Topic Records. It was Ken Stubbs who initially located and recorded a Romany gypsy family, the Willetts, and brought them to the attention of Topic. They sent Bill Leader and Paul Carter (who had access to better recording equipment than Stubbs) to record them on a caravan site near Ashford in Middlesex, in late 1961. These recordings, of Tom Willett and his sons Chris and Ben, were made available on the Topic LP The Roving Journeymen (12T84, 1962) – a landmark album, as it was the first long-playing record ever released of English traditional singers.

In the autumn of 1962 he went out in company with Ken Stubbs and Steve Pennells, looking for Gypsy singers or musicians to record. The following accounts are reproduced from Philip Heath-Coleman’s notes to the CD Boshamengro (Musical Traditions, MTCD373, 2017):

On Sunday 7 October 1962 Henry Lee – as he is generally remembered by his family and other travellers – was encamped at a favourite stopping place on Marden Plain, near Paddock Wood in Kent, as was his wont at hopping time, as much, apparently, for the occasion as for the work. With him in two unassuming caravans were members of his extended family, including grandchildren and his father-in-law Albert ‘Bullbred’  Smith: some of them at least are said to have travelled from Essex for the season. Returning home at closing time that Sunday afternoon, the men had settled down around the fire with a cup of tea, and Harry may already have taken out his fiddle to entertain the assembled company.

[…]

It was in search of Romany musicians that the collector Ken Stubbs and fiddler Steve Pennells had visited nearby Horsmonden that same Sunday, accompanied by Paul Carter who was there on behalf of Topic Records at Ken Stubbs’s invitation to record any music they found. On another day they might have run into the singers and musicians Minty, Jasper and Levi Smith, cousins of Harry’s wife Sarah Ann – usually known as Sary Ann – or possibly Minty’s husband, the fiddler Frank Smith.

The travellers would usually be in the area for a month or so around the Horse Fair which was held at Horsmonden on the second Sunday in September, to coincide with the hopping season. On the occasion in question Ken and Steve had failed to find any musicians at Horsmonden, but another traveller suggested that they should visit Harry Lee, who was encamped nearby, and persuaded his teenaged son to show them the way.

Carter was able to record 17 tracks in total of Harry Lee playing tunes on the fiddle. Two of these were included on the 1974 Topic LP, Boscastle Breakdown (12T240), and all of the recordings can be found 0n the Musical Traditions CD Boshamengro. Harry Lee is the only Romany fiddler of whom any significant number of recordings exists.

With his wife Angela – also a keen folk singer and musician, and later to become an acclaimed novelist – Paul Carter moved to Bristol and took up a teaching post at the Technical College. He continued to do work for both Collector and Topic – the latter paid him a modest stipend, and he would edit tapes for Topic in his front room. The Carters also started up and ran a couple of folk clubs in Bristol. The second of these, the Folk Song and Ballads club at the Lansdown, pursued a definite policy of favouring traditional songs performed in a traditional manner.

Paul had heard Phoebe Smith sing at Cecil Sharp House in London, and “felt she should be represented in the Topic catalogue. I knew that Frank Purslow knew her quite well and was familiar with her repertoire, so an arrangement was made for Frank and I to visit her. I picked up Frank from Bampton. Frank had decided what Phoebe should be asked to sing. We went to Woodbridge the next day. I was there to press the buttons on my Uher portable, and that’s about all. I’ve no recollection of the visit, but there were things on my mind at the time. It turned out that I had picked up the wrong tape boxes, and what I had was not virgin tape but stuff for recycling. So although these songs played fine on my Uher and on the bigger machine I used for editing, when they got to London the previous recording on them showed through”.¹

This was  in early 1969. Topic decided that the recordings were unusable, so Carter and Purslow went back to Suffolk to record Phoebe again. These recordings were released on Once I Had a True Love, (Topic Records, 12T193, 1970). The LP met a decidedly unfavourable reception in some quarters, with the result that Carter asked Topic to remove his name from the credits. His marriage to Angela Carter had broken down by this point (they divorced in 1972) and Once I Had a True Love appears to have been the last work he did for Topic, or any other recording company. He did however return to taking part in traditional singing events in the years before his death in 2012.

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1. Paul Carter, quoted in Mike Butler, Sounding the Century: Bill Leader & Co. Vol. 3, Troubador, 2023, p172-173 ↩︎

Frank Purslow, né Chapman, 1926–2007

Born in Edgbaston, Frank’s early interest in folk song was reawakened when he moved to London after the Second World War – in particular by the singing of Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd, and their Ballads and Blues folk club. It was here that he heard his first traditional singer, Phoebe Smith, whom he subsequently recorded for Topic Records with Paul Carter.

Frank regularly attended events at the EFDSS headquarters Cecil Sharp House, and volunteered in the Society’s Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. It was in the library that he encountered the songs which he recorded with guitarist John Pearse for a 1960 LP entitled Rap-A-Tap-Tap: English Folk Songs Miss Pringle Never Taught Us (when released in the United States the LP was retitled Unexpurgated Songs Of Erotica, although this was presumably a marketing ploy, rather than an indication that the songs on the album are at all shocking). More importantly, it was VWML librarian Sara Jackson who introduced Frank to the manuscript song collections made by Henry and Robert Hammond, mainly in Dorset, and by George Gardiner in Hampshire. Frank indexed these collections, and songs from them were made available – in singable versions – in four very popular and influential songbooks, beginning with Marrow Bones in 1965. Long out of print, these have all now been republished.

Frank moved to Bampton in Oxfordshire in the early 1960s. He fooled, danced and played with two of the village’s three morris sides, and played for almost 30 years in the popular Bampton Barn Dance Band. He died shortly before he was due to receive the EFDSS Gold Badge award; this was presented to his half-brother after the funeral.

Mike Yates, 1943–

Mike Yates is one of the most important post-war collectors. He has recorded singers and musicians in Yorkshire, Scotland and, following in the footsteps of Cecil Sharp, in the Appalachian Mountains of the USA. But the majority of his recordings were made in Southern England, particularly among gypsies and travellers, and while he recorded relatively few singers in Kent itself, he made numerous recordings of singers with Kentish connections.

Mike has written about how he came to be a collector in an article entitled ‘Time Has Made a Change – some reflections’ (Musical Traditions, 2021, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/time-change.htm). His interest in folk music was initially sparked by BBC schools radio programmes, the songs sung by his father and grandfather, Peter Kennedy’s As I roved out radio broadcasts, James Reeves’ anthology of folk song words The Idiom of the People, then skiffle and blues. He borrowed a tape recorder, and made his first recordings, while doing Voluntary Service Overseas in the Solomon Islands. On his return to the UK in 1963 he worked in the Sound Library at Cecil Sharp House, the headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, as an assistant to Peter Kennedy.  His parents bought him a Uher tape recorder in 1964, and he used it to make his first recordings of an English singer:

One of my first song collecting trips was to Shropshire, to visit Fred Jordan.  Fred had previously been recorded for the radio program ‘As I Roved Out’ and had sung in quite a number of folk clubs and festivals.  He was quite used to singing into a microphone and was quite happy for me to record many of his songs.  Shortly afterwards I contacted Topic Records in London and asked if they might like to issue an album.  Gerry Sharp, then Topic’s managing director, liked the idea and 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.  

In the mid-1970s numerous LPs of Mike’s field recordings were issued on Topic Records. One of the first of these was the 1974 album Blackberry Fold, which presented a selection from the repertoire of George Spicer (long resident in Sussex, but born and brought up in Little Chart) and several compilation LPs featuring multiple Southern English singers. Among these compilations were Green grow the laurels (two tracks recorded at St Margarets at Cliffe from Jack Goodban), and Songs of the open road and The Travelling Songster, which featured songs and dance tunes recorded from English gypsies. The singers on these albums included  Joe Jones and Bill Ellson (both recorded in Kent), Phoebe Smith (recorded in Suffolk, but born and raised in East Kent), and the siblings Minty, Levi and Jasper Smith, who had spent their lives travelling through Kent and Surrey.

Jasper Smith, Bill Ellson and Joe Jones also appeared on the 1985 Topic album, Travellers, as well as Chris Willett, four of whose songs had appeared on the influential 1962 LP of the Willett Family, The Roving Journeymen. Mike wrote of that earlier LP

This was the album that introduced me to the singing of English Gypsies.  When I started collecting songs from English singers, I quickly remembered this album and, to start with, I used to take it with me to Gypsy camps, playing the tracks to any Gypsy who was interested in listening.  It was a good way of finding out if any of the listeners knew any songs themselves, because they were soon singing along with the Willets.¹

In 1984, on a visit to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, the then librarian Malcolm Taylor introduced me to Mike Yates, and I arranged for him to come down to Stone-in-Oxney to record Charlie Bridger. These recordings appeared initially on Veteran Tapes releases, but subsequently – like a lot of Mike’s field recordings from the 1960s, 70s and 80s – have been available via releases on the Musical Traditions label. Copies of Mike’s entire sound recording archive are deposited with the British Library and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

Mike was editor of the Folk Music Journal from 1972 to 1980. The 1975 issue was devoted to music of the travelling people, and included an article by Mike, ‘English Gypsy Songs’, in which he provided transcriptions of “a very small percentage of the songs that I have recorded from gypsies in southern England during the period 1972-75”. These included two songs apiece from Levi Smith and Joe Jones. In more recent years he has contributed regularly to the Musical Traditions website, contributing articles on ballads, blues, collectors, and singers and musicians from Britain and North America. In particular he has written about the links between British and American traditions, compiling several CDs featuring British songs recorded from American singers, and songs of American origin which entered the repertoires of British singers.

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1. Mike Yates, Ten Records that Changed my Life, Musical Traditions, 2006, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/ten.htm ↩︎