Charlie Bridger learned at least three songs from a singer he referred to as ‘Nip’ Bailey. One of these was ‘The Birds upon the tree’, which was also mentioned by Woodchurch resident Reg Pellet (1893–1986) as a song he remembered having been sung in the village in his youth. Reg said it used to be sung by a man called George Bailey, aka ‘Old Nip’, and “they did pull his leg over it”1. ‘Nip’ was described by Reg Pellett as a “good all-round farm-hand, hop dryer, hedger and ditcher”, who once claimed that if he “could put his foot on two daisies, he could get a job”.2
‘Nip’ must have been Edward George Bayley, who also appears in census records as George Edward Bayley, or simply George Bayley. He was baptised at Tenterden, St Michael & All Angels, on 5th September 1869, the son of George Bayley, a farm labourer, and Esther, née George. In 1871 the family lived at 1871 Old House Farm, Tenterden, but by 1881 had moved to Stone Bridge, Woodchurch, and they remained in the village. The 1891 census shows them living at Upper Road, Woodchurch, with 21 year old George working as an agricultural labourer. In 1901 they were at Front Road, with George, and his brothers Albert and Harry described as “Ord farm labourer”. In 1911 and 1921 George, still living with his parents, was at Lower Green, Woodchurch; his occupation in 1921 was given as “Farm Work Casual Labourer – Own Account”.
The death of his father was reported in the Kentish Express, 9th July 1927:
The funeral took place on Tuesday of Mr. George Bayley aged eighty-six years, who for over forty years was waggoner at Stonebridge Farm. He leaves a widow, five sons and one daughter. His body was conveyed from his home, at Lower Green, to the church, in the farm waggon he so often had had charge of, and by his special request two horseshoes were nailed on the coffin lid.
His mother Esther died the following year. Edward George ‘Nip’ Bayley died at the age of 67, in the first quarter of 1937.
As a young man Charlie Bridger would help ‘Nip’, who was working as a hop-drier at High House Farm, in the centre of Kenardington.
He couldn’t see very well; I used to go and level his hops for him, ’cause he couldn’t …the old driers they had a chalk mark – red charcoal mark – round the roundel, you know, so if they had so many bags of hops, or so many pokes of hops, they knew that should come up to that certain mark, see, and he couldn’t see that old mark [?] was dark, I remember an old storm lantern hanging up for a light in there. And I used to help the old boy with his hop-drying, of a night. …that was Kenardington …on the corner; not the square ones, the single one right on the corner. High House Farm.3
Charlie was born in 1913 and started work at the age of fourteen, so this would most likely have been in the late 1920s.
When asked if ‘Nip’ Bailey was well known locally as a singer, Charlie replied
No, he was known for singing ‘The Birds upon the trees’, that was all. He used to like a sing-song though, you know. Oh no, he was only known in Woodchurch really for his song ‘The Birds upon the trees’, that’s what they always used to associate him with, for his singing. My old grandfather used to say “Come on Nip”; he used to get his cornet out, my old grandfather; old Nip used to sing, and he used to play. In the pub, this was.
He may have been most closely associated with this one song, but clearly he knew others: Charlie also learned ‘The Ship that never returned’ and ‘The Zulu War’ from ‘Nip’, and he remembered another one called ‘Stick to your mother, Tom’ – “that was a nice one. But I never got that off him”.
Arthur Richard Bayley, 1889–1976
Charlie Bridger was recorded singing a patriotic song ‘Three cheers for the red, white and blue’ and said “Old Nip’s brother used to sing that. Arthur Bayley.”
Arthur was born on 3rd March 1889 and baptised at All Saints, Woodchurch on 18th April. He lived in the family home until at least 1911, and most likely until his marriage to Fanny Hyder in 1919. He would have been of an age to have fought in the First World War, but as a horseman was exempted from military service in the summer of 1916.4
Like his parents and brother George, Arthur’s address in the 1921 census was given as Lower Green, Woodchurch, but he and Fanny, with their one year old son (also Arthur), were listed as a separate household. Fanny died in 1934, and in September 1939 Arthur and his son were living at 1870 Cottages, West End, Woodchurch. His occupation was given as “Horseman & Ploughman”.
Arthur’s death was recorded in the Shepway district 1in 1976. His surname was given, as it had been in the 1939 Register, as “Bailey” rather than “Bayley”.
Songs
‘Nip’ Bayley
The Birds Upon the Tree (Roud 1863)
The Ship that never returned (Roud 775)
Stick to your mother, Tom (Roud 7380)
The Zulu War (Roud 5362)
Arthur Bayley
Three cheers for the Red, White and Blue (Roud 23522)
Adrian Russell, letter to George Frampton, 31st August 1992, referring to correspondence with Reg Pellett 1979-1981. ↩︎
Quoted in George Frampton, Charlie Bridger – Musician and Singer, Bygone Kent, Vol 15 No 1, 1993. ↩︎
Charlie Bridger, recorded at his home in Stone-in-Oxney by Andy Turner, 15th April 1983. ↩︎
Charlie Bridger, photographed in the front garden of his home in The Street, Stone-in-Oxney, circa 1984.
Charlie was born on 9th July 1913, and baptised at St Mary’s church, Kenardington, on 10th August 1913. His parents were Charles Bridger, a farm labourer, and his wife Gertrude Mabel Bridger, née Bailey (or Bayley); their residence at the time was given as Spring Cottages, Kenardington.
Charles senior had been born in 1882 at Selling. Possibly his father had got employment on a farm at Selling that year: the family were shown living at Kenardington in the 1881 and 1891 censuses, and all of Charles’ siblings were born at Warehorne or Kenardington – indeed Charles was baptised (as “Charley Bridger”) at St Matthew’s church, Warehorne on 24th December 1882. Going right back to the 1841 census, this branch of the Bridger family had consistently been recorded as living at Kenardington. Their roots before that were in Woodchurch, about 3 miles away, and a village with which the Bridgers retained close links into the twentieth century. The menfolk seem to have been, without exception, agricultural labourers, although Charlie’s grandfather Thomas was listed as “Roadman Ord Agric Labourer” in 1901, and ten years later he was working as a Road Foreman for the District Council. Charlie’s employment history followed a similar path.
At the time of the 1921 census Charlie, his sister Mabel (two years his senior), and his parents, were living at 4 Spring Cottage, Kenardington.. His father was working as a “Farm Tractor Driver”, employed by Thomas Henry Pearson at Place Farm, Kenardington. Charlie attended Warehorne Primary School, leaving at the age of fourteen to start work on the same Kenardington farm where his father worked.
I’ve done all sorts of jobs. Went to work on a farm, in 1927, I was lucky to have a job at 10 shillings a week. That was the year after the General Strike and there was hardly any work about. It was worse than what it is now. There was… a bloke [from Woodchurch] named Harry Dorman? Well he was a master bricklayer, and he was out of work and he was getting 11 shillings a week on the dole, and he’d got a family of four to feed. Lived in a council house at six and sixpence a week rent. And I got a job – he used to cut hair, at threepence a time – he said “You’re better off than I am”, he said – and I was too. I had a shilling a week pocket money and… she fed me and clothed me… I worked at Place Farm, Kenardington, for a bloke named Tom Pearson, I was there for eight years [i.e. until around 1933] and then I left and I went stone-breaking on the road. I broke the last lot of stone that came out the quarry for two shillings a cubic yard – that’s a bit of stone, a cube of stone like that. A yard wide, a yard wide, and a yard high that way, for two shillings. Break it up into little bits like that – two inches. That’s what they used to put on the roads.
Just a little stone-hammer, a sledgehammer or a stone-hammer; proper stone-hammer, I still got ‘em out in the lodge there now. Goggles – you had to wear goggles. No glass in ‘em, ‘cos no compensation if you had glass in ‘em, they’d splinter you see. Just gauze. You had a little four pound sledgehammer to break bloody great lumps of rock up into that square and perhaps that thick. You wouldn’t think a little hammer would break stone like that, but it did. That’s the jar that done it. I broke one yard the first day I went – after that I got the hang of it then. I earnt more at that than I did – I averaged out forty-two shillings a week at that, and farm wages were thirty shillings a week. And I averaged out to forty-two shillings. That’s how I first saw her [indicating Lily]. She used to go biking up by, and [you] never used to see many people. I used to think: Cocky little bugger, don’t say… and I used to say “Good afternoon, miss”, and she never used to answer!1
Interviewed by George Frampton after Charlie’s death, his widow Lily confirmed that, although she would see Charlie stone-breaking, she didn’t speak to him at that point.2 They first met properly at a musical event in the village hall. In a letter to George she wrote
Funnily enough it was through him playing Hand bells and singing Country songs that I met him. My Mother organised a social evening and asked a man from Appledore to bring his team of Hand Bell ringers. Charlie was one of them. He also sang some of his songs.3
One of those songs must have been ‘Buttercup Joe’. After singing it for me in 1983 Charlie said “That’s for her benefit! [indicating Lily] That’s how I met her through singing that”.
Lilian May Gill was born at Brookland on Romney Marsh on 22nd October 1912 but, along with her parents and two sisters, she moved to Stone-in-Oxney in 1920. She and Charlie were married in October 1938, and lived in the village for the rest of their life together.
When the Second World War broke out Charlie tried to enlist with the Royal Air Force, but – according to Lily4 – was rejected for want of a Grammar School education. Besides, as an agricultural worker he was valuable on the Home Front. During the war years Charlie worked at a market garden, Asparagus Estates.
Despite its name, Lily Bridger recalled that one of Charlie’s more back-breaking jobs was to dig up parsnips in the grip of midwinter using a pick axe to break up the frozen ground. When not working, he served with the Home Guard, and only managed to see Lily at weekends. Their house was hit by a flying bomb whilst she was pregnant with their only child Christopher [born 1945]. Lily’s sister at Appledore also had a bomb land ten yards from her front door.
After the war, Charlie did odd jobs, such as cutting out hay to build haystacks for Clarks of Lenham. In one stack, he found a nest of bees, which he smoked out at night-time ‘whilst the bees were asleep’. He started work as a part-time gardener at Stone-in-Oxney in 1950, and when a new owner of the house concerned moved in, he extended Charlie’s duties to include full-time work on his farm on Romney Marsh, from harvesting to sheep-shearing. During the last eleven years of his working life, he was employed with the Southern Water Authority, maintaining the banks of the Royal Military Canal.5
In its edition of 27th October 1988 the Kentish Express reported on a meeting of Stone-cum-Ebony Women’s Institute where “Members congratulated Mrs Bridger, one of the founder members, who had just celebrated her golden wedding”. Charlie died just a few weeks later, early in November 1988. Lily lived to be 94, dying in the final quarter of 2006.
Charlie was mentioned as someone who still sang the old songs when I interviewed Albert Beale’s son Charles at Kenardington in 1983. Charlie and Charles Beale had been contemporaries at Warehorne school. I wrote to Charlie and very soon received a phone call in return – from a call box, as the Bridgers didn’t have a house phone – inviting me to pay them a visit.
My first visit to Stone-in-Oxney must have been one evening in early April 1983 and, as on many subsequent occasions, I was made very welcome by Charlie and his wife Lily. Not wishing to seem too pushy, I didn’t take my bulky tape recorder with me, but I needn’t have worried – Charlie was only too keen to have his songs recorded for posterity, and in fact had written out the words of eight songs in neat copperplate handwriting, on sheets of foolscap. These were
Three Maidens a-Milking did go
The Zulu War
That’s how you get served when you’re old
Little by little, and bit by bit
The Birds upon the Tree
The Folkestone Murder
The Veteran
A Boy’s best friend is his mother
I arranged to make a return visit, this time with a tape recorder. I went back on 15th April 1983, accompanied by my friend Adrian Russell, who shared my enthusiasm for traditional singing and who, like Charlie, had family connections with the village of Woodchurch.
Over the course of the evening I recorded just over 2 hours of singing and conversation. I knew that I should keep the tape rolling the whole time, but Charlie insisted I was “wasting tape”, and as he was more assertive than my 22 year-old self, I felt obliged to press the Pause button from time to time – unfortunately being slightly late on occasion in starting the recording again.
Charlie began by singing the eight songs which he had previously written out for me – with one other inserted in the sequence, namely ‘The Ship that never returned’ (“That’s one of my favourites that one”). Over the course of about 3 hours, and a few bottles of Guinness, Charlie sang 30 songs, and played the dance tune ‘Jenny Lind’ on his clarinet. Although he kept his handwritten lyric sheets to hand, for the most part these were an unnecessary prompt and he sang from memory. However about a third of the total – and certainly the last nine songs on my tape – were sung reading the words from various printed song books and song sheets.
The full list, in order, was as follows:
Three Maidens a-Milking Did Go
The Zulu War
That’s how you get served when you’re old
Little by little, and bit by bit
The Ship that never returned
The Birds Upon the Tree
The Folkestone Murder
The Veteran
A Boy’s best friend is his mother
Where is my wandering boy tonight?
The Farmer’s Boy
The Jolly Waggoner
In the springtime
Buttercup Joe
Old Farmer Giles
Silver Moon
The Brave Ploughboy
One bitter night in winter (The Faithful Sailor Boy)
When you and I were young, Maggie
The Death of Nelson
Wait till the clouds roll by (verses 1 and 2)
The Gipsy’s Warning
Wait till the clouds roll by (verse 3)
Jenny Lind (on clarinet)
The Mistletoe Bough
Won’t you buy my pretty Flowers
Old fashioned Mother of mine
Playing on the old banjo
O who will o’er the Downs so free?
Three cheers for the Red, White and Blue
I’ll take you home again, Kathleen
Good Old Jeff
I made many more visits down to Stone-in-Oxney, but never recorded Charlie singing again. However, about a year later, on another trip to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, the Librarian Malcolm Taylor introduced me to Mike Yates. I was very aware that my recording kit was well below par, so suggested that, if Charlie were agreeable, Mike should come down to Kent and make some decent recordings. A visit was quickly arranged, and in a fairly short recording session in April 1984, Mike recorded half a dozen of Charlie’s songs. These appeared subsequently on releases by Musical Traditions and Veteran (see the Discography below).
Charlie and Lily were both regulars at The Crown, a pub which was, in more than one sense, at the centre of the village. Between 1983 and 1987 I organised the occasional session in the pub, with Canterbury-based Oyster Morris dancing at the pub on at least one occasion. Charlie very much enjoyed hearing others sing and play tunes, and when he sang, he absolutely revelled in being the centre of attention.
Charlie Bridger at the bar of The Crown, Stone-in-Oxney, circa 1985.
I was keen for Charlie to be heard by others with an interest in traditional song, and John Heydon invited Charlie to perform at the 1985 National Folk Music Festival at Sutton Bonington. Charlie’s name was in fact on the advance publicity, but in the event ill health after an angina attack meant that he was unable to make the journey. He did, however, make an appearance at the English Country Music Weekend, which was held at Frittenden in Kent in the summer of 1986, and sang in a concert in the village hall on the Sunday afternoon.
I moved away from Kent in 1987, and saw Charlie just once after that. On a visit in July 1988, with my wife-to-be Carol, I recorded 45 minutes of conversation about his life and involvement with music. Charlie’s health had been in decline for some years, and I was sad, but not surprised, to hear of his death later that year. I was rather touched to be left Charlie’s collection of song books and sheet music (the News-Chronicle Song Book, Francis & Day’s Community Song Albums and others of a similar nature) in his will.
I stayed in touch with Lily Bridger after Charlie’s death via Christmas cards and the odd letter, but did not see her again. However, not long after I moved away from Kent, George Frampton moved into the county and set about researching its customs and vernacular music-making practices. I put him in touch with Lily, and in July 1993 George interviewed her, plus Harry Bush the landlord of The Crown, and another regular in the pub, Len Hamilton. George also corresponded by letter with Charles Beale, and was assiduous in his researches in the County Council’s Centre for Kentish Studies at Maidstone. Some of the fruits of George’s research appeared at the time as articles in the local history magazine Bygone Kent. George has generously shared all of his notes with me, for which I am extremely grateful, as he was able to uncover a great deal of information which had passed me by while Charlie was alive.
For pretty much the whole of his life Charlie played in wind and brass bands and, as we shall see, some of his song repertoire came from older band members.
A photograph taken in the early 1920s shows Charlie aged about 9, sitting cross-legged in uniform, holding his clarinet, at the front of the Tenterden Town Band. His father and grandfather were members of the same band, and are also in the photograph.
Tenterden Town Band at Badlesmere, circa 1924. A young Charlie Bridger is sitting in the centre, at the front, holding a clarinet. Photograph supplied to George Frampton by Lily Bridger.
An earlier photograph again shows both Thomas and Charles Bridger senior, this time rather less formally attired, with fellow members of the Woodchurch Brass Band (all of the musicians in the photograph were manual labourers, and as Charlie put it “Old hobnailed boots, and bowler ‘ats. Well they couldn’t afford any other clothes”). The Bridgers did not live in Woodchurch, and on practice night walked the 3 miles or more over the fields from Kenardington, and then home again at the end of the evening.
Woodchurch Brass Band, possibly early 1900s. Left to right: Charlie Bridger (Charlie’s father), Tom Sampson, Alfred “Absolom” Ditton, Francis “Stump” King, Thomas Bridger (Charlie’s grandfather), bandmaster William “Bucky” Ditton. From a copy of the photo provided to me by Charlie Bridger.
The Woodchurch Brass Band had been active since 18616, and there was a long tradition of music-making in the Bridger family.
My great grandfather… I never did know my great grandfather Bridger, he was a flute player, used to play in the old church orchestra [presumably St Mary’s Church, Kenardington]. They reckoned if he heard a piece of music once, he knew it. How true it was I don’t know. I can’t vouch for it ‘cos, I say, I never knew him. That’s what other people…
My grandfather he bought a clarinet when he was 15 years old. And that was in 1879. And it cost him five pounds. And that was a lot of money. That was more than five weeks’ wages – he never had a pound a week wages then. He had about twelve and six a week then… lucky if he got that. And yet, they used to pay for these things. Course they used to smoke as well, most of ‘em. I know my father said, when they was kids he lived at Warehorne and the old parson there, they used to send him down all their used tea. To make tea with, after they’d finished with it. Yeah that’s right.
While his grandfather learned to play by ear first, only later learning to read music, Charlie’s father learned from a printed tutor or gamut.
He taught himself to play the clarinet ‘cos he had that gamut…. Well it was a picture of a clarinet with all the keys on it and all the holes and all the different notes you can play, see. Called a gamut.
My father taught me. He actually wrote me out a C scale for a start, then a G scale. I had to learn all that and then… I had an old flute tutor… and I had to learn the rest off that. Myself.
My father started learning her [Charlie’s sister] to play on the clarinet… I started learning on the flute. But she never got on very well with it so my father put me on the clarinet and took me off the flute. One of the first bits of music I actually played was the William Tell Galopede.
Charlie remembered that the band would always go out busking on Boxing Day. Woodchurch man Reg Pellett (1893-1986) in his ‘Some Old Memories of Woodchurch’ wrote that
For about two weeks around Christmas, they (the band) used to play at the outlying farms, and then on Boxing Day play in the village … The bandsmen got plenty of drinks given them, and they would let us (boys) have a sip out of their glasses. The band used to play on the Green on goal running nights and there were always quite a lot of people there.
He also tells of the reaction of a landlord at the Bonny Cravat in Woodchurch who, in his first Christmas season, found himself expected to provide largesse to the glee singers, bell ringers, and then the band: “First, there was the ringers, and then there was the singers, and then there was the bloody Band! How many more?”7
A great deal of alcohol could be consumed by the bandsmen over the Christmas period. One of Charlie’s stories concerned a particularly boozy Boxing Day engagement at Hengherst, one of the big houses in the area.
Went up Old Tommy Webb’s. He promised us a pound, if we went up there. So we went up there and we was up there I don’t know how many hours. And we had all the beer we wanted – I got four quart bottles in my pocket! When I come away they was pouring it on the flower beds and everything else. We never did have the pound…
One of the guests staying at the house – no doubt also somewhat the worse for drink – offered to take the drummer and his bass drum in his motor car. However they ended up in the ditch.
The Woodchurch Band never went out any more after that!
That would have been around 1934. Certainly, according to Lily Bridger, both the Tenterden and Woodchurch bands had finished by the time she met Charlie in the late 1930s. After the War, however, he played with the Rye and Peasmarsh brass bands; then some time later joined the Cranbrook Band. He played with them until ill health forced him to retire in 1984. Having stopped playing, Charlie gave away all of his instruments.
Charlie’s early involvement with the Woodchurch Band introduced him to some of the songs which would later feature in his repertoire. Band members would retire to the pub after rehearsals and, although Charlie was officially too young to go in the pub, a quiet corner was found for him to sit in, and thus he heard any songs sung by the older men. In particular, Frank Samson (1870-1956) sang ‘Won’t You Buy my Pretty Flowers?’ and would play it on his tenor horn as he walked home through the cornfields. Or he’d play ‘The Mistletoe Bough’ – a piece which is remembered as having been in the band’s repertoire – on his way home. “Oh dear, he’s drunk again!” was apparently his wife’s reaction on hearing Frank’s approach.
The sources of Charlie’s other songs also tended to be a lot older than him. When I asked him if there were any other singers he knew of from his own generation, he replied “No – there’s no singing much at all”.
Lily commented “Actually, you mixed with older people”.
Charlie: I did? Well, I used to go drinking with my uncle Harold and old Jesse Goodsall and old Jack Goodsall.
Lily: Well, that’s the thing you see, people ten years older than you… mostly gone. I mean, a lot of ‘em you mixed with, got those old songs from, they were a lot older than you.
Which Charlie couldn’t really argue with, although – always liking to have the last word – he countered with “You didn’t know who I mixed with!”
Over in Sussex, Bob and Ron Copper – roughly the same age as Charlie – found that their contemporaries were at best indifferent to the old family songs. It’s quite likely that the same applied in rural Kent. Or it could simply be that Charlie felt at home with the older generation, and found that she shared their musical taste.
He learned several songs including ‘The Birds upon the Tree’, ‘The Ship that never returned’ and ‘The Zulu War’ from an older man he referred to as ‘Nip’ Bayley. ‘Nip’ worked in an oast, and Charlie would help him out at night.
That’s right, he was the old hop-drier. He couldn’t see very well; I used to go and level his hops for him, ’cause he couldn’t …the old driers they had a chalk mark – red charcoal mark – round the roundel, you know, so if they had so many bags of hops, or so many pokes of hops, they knew that should come up to that certain mark, see, and he couldn’t see that old mark [?] was dark, I remember an old storm lantern hanging up for a light in there. And I used to help the old boy with his hop-drying, of a night. …that was Kenardington …on the corner; not the square ones, the single one right on the corner. High House Farm.
When asked if he was well known locally as a singer, Charlie replied
No, he was known for singing ‘The Birds upon the trees’, that was all. He used to like a sing-song though, you know. Oh no, he was only known in Woodchurch really for his song ‘The Birds upon the trees’, that’s what they always used to associate him with, for his singing. My old grandfather used to say “Come on Nip”; he used to get his cornet out, my old grandfather; old Nip used to sing, and he used to play. In the pub, this was.
Adrian Russell, whose parents hailed from Woodchurch, had exchanged a number of letters with the previously mentioned Reg Pellett between 1979 and 1981. Reg wrote out the words of a small number of songs which he remembered having been sung in Woodchurch in his youth. These included ‘The Dying Soldier’, ‘The Faithful Sailor Boy’ and ‘The Birds upon the tree’. Of the latter, Reg said it used to be sung by a man called George Bailey, aka ‘Old Nip’, and “they did pull his leg over it”. ‘Nip’ was described by Reg Pellett as a “good all-round farm-hand, hop dryer, hedger and ditcher”, who once claimed that if he “could put his foot on two daisies, he could get a job”.8
Charlie’s statement that ‘Nip’ was only known for singing ‘The Birds upon the tree’ is somewhat contradicted by the fact that he learned at least two other songs from him. Also
There was another one he used to sing, but I never got that one off him. I only remember the chorus, and that was “Stick to your mother, Tom”, and that was a nice one. But I never got that off him.
Having been recorded singing the song ‘Three cheers for the red, white and blue’ Charlie said “Old Nip’s brother used to sing that. Arthur Bayley.”
‘Nip’ was most likely Edward George Bayley (1870-1937), whose brother was Arthur Richard Bayley (1889-1976). Despite sharing the same surname, they do not appear to have been closely related to Charlie’s mother, Gertrude Bayley.
Another of Charlie’s sources was Billy King, who taught him ‘Three Maidens a-Milking did go’.
I learnt that off an old man, old Billy King. I gave him a pint of beer. And you got it for nothing – 4d, that was a lot of money then. He taught me The Folkestone Murder too.
Where did he live? Well, he originally came from Woodchurch. A Woodchurch man. Don’t think there’s any Kings there now. He was only a little old short bloke.
In 1983, Adrian Russell had asked Charlie if there was a particular pub in the area that was known as a singing pub. Charlie’s response didn’t answer that directly, but perhaps implied that people were pretty much restricted to the pubs in their village:
Well, people never went very far in those days, you see, ‘cos they hadn’t got much transport, only pushbikes and walking. There weren’t many people that had got a bike even, not then. And, a pony and trap. No, it was something pretty wonderful to have a pushbike then.
When I interviewed Charlie in 1988 I revisited the question of where he would go to sing, and that led on to discussion of his involvement in other musical activities.
They used to have these smoking concerts at the old pub every so often, and you had to sing a song, say a recitation or stand a gallon of beer… yeah, if you didn’t sing a song or say a recitation, you had to buy a gallon of beer. Well, you used to have a beery evening, you know, they called it a smoking concert, and, I know one old man, he only knew one song, well if you can call it a song, he used to sing:
I had a wheelbarrow and the front wheel went round I had a wheelbarrow and the front wheel went round I had a wheelbarrow and the front wheel was narrow I had a wheelbarrow and the front wheel went round
And that used to get him out of buying a gallon of beer you see. That’s all it was, that’s all there was to it. It used to save him buying a gallon of beer though. And I mean, all these old boys, they had their own song, you know, and they didn’t half use to get wild if somebody got up and sang their blinking song, ‘cos they hadn’t got another one, a lot of ‘em. They used to say, well that’s old so-and-so’s song you know. I mean, they used to get really wild if you sang their song, ‘cos they hadn’t got another one.
The following is reproduced verbatim from an interview with Charlie (CB) and Lily (LB) at their home, 2nd July 1988.
AT: So was that in the pubs in Woodchurch?
CB: In the pubs. Anywhere round the country, round about here, they used to have ‘em. That was a regular old thing in the pub. Same sort of thing as a dart match really. ‘Cos there wasn’t the dart matches about, not that time like there is now. It was just a way of getting a few customers.
AT: Was it all men?
CB: Oh, all men in the smoking concerts. Women didn’t use to go in the pubs, not in them days, only in private really.
AT: In smoking concerts, were there people of your age? Or were they older?
CB: A lot of ‘em was older – old men, 70, 80, something like that some of ‘em, real old men. Weren’t no age limit.
AT: I wondered whether they were mainly older people, or people of your generation who were learning the songs?
CB: They didn’t used to go to learn the songs, they used to go to sing and get some free beer if somebody couldn’t sing one.
AT: When did that die out?
CB: Oh in the twenties, late twenties. I never known a smoking concert since the war. They gradually died out when people started going dancing, and playing darts, then more.
LB: They got more of these village halls – billiards and things like that.
CB: The wireless came too, and that stopped them going to the pub a lot of ‘em when they had the radio. You see, never had the radio much until after the First World War, hardly anybody did until the twenties. I know old Beaney at Appledore, the old banker, he had a wireless set, and he was inviting everybody to go and listen to it. You had to have earphones, you know. I know we walked all the way from Kenardington over to Appledore just to listen to this bloody radio set! You had to have whatever there was on; you had about five minutes listening to it and then somebody else had a listen. Only got two sets of earphones. But people was happier then than what they are now. Made your own entertainment. Used to have village concerts, and everybody used to do some – well, I say everybody – most people, anybody that had got a bit of talent used to do something. I know my old father and me, we played – I got a little old Eb clarinet then and he’d got a Bb – and we played couple of tunes out of one of the old Woodchurch Band books, at one of them concerts.
AT: What about dances?
CB: Used to have what we called a tanner hop – sixpence. You had about couple of hours’ dancing, 8 till 10. And you paid your sixpence, and that’s where you sort of learnt your dances.
AT: Who played for those?
CB: Oh, you’d have a local band, local orchestra mixed up. I used to play in one. I used to know a lot, nearly all the old dance tunes at one time, ‘cos you could buy what they called an album. You paid so much a year, well we used to have Campbell Nellie’s [Campbell Connelly’s], Lawrence Wright’s, Keith Prowse and one other – we used to pay for albums every year, and they used to send you all the hits they had. Mind you, you had to chuck half of it out ‘cos it weren’t no good. You usually got one good one amongst it, see, and that was all the rage then. You used to get all the old things, all the latest things then – oh, Francis Day and Hunter, that’s one we used to – that was one of the most popular ones. I don’t know what you used to pay, about 5 or 6 bob a year, something like that, and they used to send you all this music for a complete band, like. Course then you’d get a piano, couple or three violins, Eb saxophone, drums. You’d get five or six different parts, you know, the complete lot.
AT: Would there be someone who would be the band leader, and ask other people to play in his band?
CB: Oh yeah, he’d ask you, if he knew anybody who could play the fiddle, or anything like that, flute – we got up a little orchestra, we used to play classical stuff for a start, with a couple of flutes, and my father and me on clarinets, and about three or four fiddles, and he was on the piano. Alex Stutchbury he was on the drums. That’s, well he’s dead now, that’s Stutchbury’s the coal people. He was a good flautist and drummer too.
Old Sid Harry from Hamstreet he used to play flute, and old Billy Knowle he was a fiddle player. Used to practise Sunday afternoons. Then it gradually got – used to pay – well I never paid sixpence a week ‘cos I hadn’t left school when I started – but they paid sixpence a week, and it gradually fell through, you know, someone dropped out. It got down so that we just had the dance band in the end, five of us.
AT: How often did you go out playing for dances?
CB: Once a fortnight. Then they thought they’d do better have it once a week and charge a shilling. It dropped off then.
LB: That Warehorne?
CB: Yeah. Dropped off when you put the price up and that, and tried to get it every week. They lost money actually, putting the price up. Used to get hell of a lot of people there, tanner hops, sixpence a week. About two, two and a half hours. Used to go to the pub, down the Woolpack and get half a bucket of coal. Old Wally ‘Orton from Hamstreet he got up on the billiard table and started taking his clothes off… They were playing billiards and all at the old tanner hops, all at the same time. They didn’t stop playing ‘cos, see, it was the Red Triangle Club, you paid so much a year, to belong to it. It was open every night except Sunday nights. I forget what the subscription was – wasn’t a lot really.
AT: Were there many people had squeezeboxes?
CB: Well a lot of the old people used to have an old accordion, old melodeon. Used to go round Good Friday, some of ‘em, busking for money. A fiddle, old Bob Swift from Brenzett, old Bill Ferris from Warehorne and old Fred ‘Amer was playing a triangle. And old Bob Swift he was a good fiddler, Old Bill Bruce was good on the accordion too. A lot of these old boys had a melodeon. Never seen many concertinas. I had three German concertinas, one of ‘em was a good one, Hohner think it was. My concertinas, I got ‘em out of the World Wide Club for a pound, that’s all they were. Old Williams’, pay a shilling a week for twenty weeks, you had to get twenty people, you had something every week, see. I had three concertinas out of it, and two pairs of shoes once I had. I used to wait till I’d paid all of my – I used to have mine last, so I’d paid for it ‘fore I’d got it. I had three good old concertinas; I had a Lachenal too.
It seems that the concertinas were just thrown away once they went out of tune or were beyond a simple repair – “I chucked the old Lachenal in the dustbin in the end”. I recall hearing a similar story from Charles Beale, whose father Albert sometimes used to play a concertina to accompany his singing.
Most of these reminiscences date back to well before the start of the Second World War. But while smoking concerts and village hops might have died out, Charlie was still active in whatever was going on in Stone and the neighbouring villages – as was Lily.
The Kentish Express for 10th March 1939 reported on the performance of two plays written by Warehorne man Clarence Garner, and put on by local performers. Charlie and Lily both took part in one of these plays, ‘The Oldest Inhabitant’, described as “a short comedy sparkling with rustic humour”. The newspaper reported that “Charles Bridger gave an excellent study of the rheumaticy Mr. Giles, but the width of his whiskers–which nearly covered his face–rather spoiled his make-up”;Lily played “the domineering Mrs. Sarah Giles”. I never heard Lily sing, but she was mentioned in the Kentish Express, 8th March 1957, as having taken part in a fund-raising variety concert organised by the WI.
Charlie would play his clarinet each year in November with the Bonfire Band. And he “played the clarinet throughout the performances” in January 1954 when the children of Stone school put on performances of a nativity play, ‘The Pageant of Christmas’, written by the vicar in a conscious attempt to revive the pageants staged by the Oxney Players in the 15th century9. This appears to have been repeated in January 1955. Again Charlie is listed as having played his clarinet, while Lily was amongst the adult singers. Their son Christopher took the part of a shepherd10. The poet John Betjeman was in the audience for one of the performances in 1954, while a year later Sir George Barnes, BBC Director of Television praised the pageant as “a great imaginative conception”.
Charlie Bridger playing the clarinet as part of the Stone Bonfire Band. Copy of a photograph provided to George Frampton by Lily Bridger.
As previously noted, Lily first got to know Charlie after he appeared in Stone village hall as part of a handbell ringing group based at Appledore. It would seem that Charlie kept up this interest: the Kentish Express 2nd May 1975 reported on a society wedding at Waldron, near Heathfield in Sussex, where the Wittersham bell ringers performed, and were “grateful to Stone ringers Mr Charles Bridger and Mr Frank Wenham for standing in at short notice owing to illness”.
At The Crown – literally just down the road from their home in The Street – Charlie played darts and dominoes, and would sometimes sing a song, such as ‘I’ll take you home Kathleen’, ‘The Farmer’s Boy’, ‘Buttercup Joe’, and one which I never heard him sing, ‘Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green’.11 As Lily said, Charlie never really discriminated between different types of songs – “if he took a fancy to it, he’d learn it”.12 Indeed, he learned ‘The Village Pump’ specifically so that he could sing it at a Women’s Institute social, having heard Bob Arnold sing it, in the character of Tom Forrest, on ‘The Archers’. He wrote off to the BBC to get the words, and for the event itself built his own pump, with silver paper cascading out of the tap when he pumped away at the handle.13
Charlie Bridger, front right with pipe, playing dominoes in The Crown. Photograph by Douglas Glass – copy provided to George Frampton by Lily Bridger.
An earlier version of this article appeared in the booklet to the Musical Traditions CD Won’t you Buy my Pretty Flowers?, https://mtrecords.co.uk/pdf/377.pdf
Relevant articles by George Frampton include ‘Charlie Bridger musician and singer’, Bygone Kent, Vol 15 No 1, January 1994, and ‘Players of no mean ability: the Woodchurch Brass Band 1868-1934’, Bygone Kent, Vol 19 No 3, March 1998.
Songs
Recorded by Andy Turner, April 1983:
The Birds Upon the Tree (Roud 1863)
A Boy’s best friend is his mother (Roud 1756)
The Brave Ploughboy (Roud 1205)
Buttercup Joe (Roud 1744)
The Death of Nelson (Roud 3549)
The Farmer’s Boy (Roud 408)
The Folkestone Murder (Roud 897)
The Gipsy’s Warning (Roud 1764)
Good Old Jeff (Roud 1740)
I’ll take you home again, Kathleen (Roud 12907)
In the Spring Time (Roud 31144)
The Jolly Waggoner (Roud 1088)
Little by little, and bit by bit (Roud 10674)
The Mistletoe Bough (Roud 2336)Old Farmer Giles
O who will o’er the Downs so free? (Roud 406)
Old fashioned Mother of mine (Roud 23549)
One bitter night in winter (The Faithful Sailor Boy) (Roud 376)
Playing on the old banjo (Roud 31136)
The Ship that never returned (Roud 775)
Silver Moon
That’s how you get served when you’re old (Roud 12893)
Three cheers for the Red, White and Blue (Roud 23522)
Three Maidens a-Milking Did Go (Roud 290)
The Veteran (Roud 24926)
Wait till the clouds roll by (Roud 9088)
When you and I were young, Maggie (Roud 3782)
Where is my wandering boy tonight? (Roud 9823)
Won’t you buy my pretty Flowers? (Roud 12906)
The Zulu War (Roud 5362)
Recorded by Mike Yates, April 1984:
The Birds Upon the Tree (Roud 1863)
The Folkestone Murder (Roud 897)
Little by little, and bit by bit (Roud 10674)
That’s how you get served when you’re old
Three Maidens a-Milking Did Go (Roud 290)
The Zulu War (Roud 5362)
Discography
Won’t you Buy my Pretty Flowers?, Musical Traditions, MTCD377 (2019). Includes all the songs recorded by Andy Turner, with the exception of ‘Buttercup Joe’, ‘The Farmer’s Boy’ and ‘Silver Moon’. Available as a download from https://www.mustrad.org.uk/download/covers.htm Booklet (includes lyrics and notes for all of the songs) https://mtrecords.co.uk/pdf/377.pdf
The Birds Upon the Tree, Musical Traditions, MTCD333 (2004). Includes Mike Yates’ recordings of ‘The Birds Upon the Tree’, ‘Little by little, and bit by bit’. Available as a download from https://www.mustrad.org.uk/download/covers.htm
Reg Pellett, Some Old Memories of Woodchurch, 1976 (typed manuscript held at the Centre for Kentish Studies in Maidstone) quoted in George Frampton, Players of no mean ability: the Woodchurch Brass Band 1868-1934, Bygone Kent, Vol 19 No 3, March 1998. ↩︎
Quoted in George Frampton, Charlie Bridger – Musician and Singer, Bygone Kent, Vol 15 No 1, 1993. ↩︎
When collecting shanties and sea songs at the Royal Alfred home for merchant seamen at Belvedere, in the summer of 1928, James Madison Carpenter recorded ‘Blow the man down’ being sung by Harry Johnson. In Carpenter’s transcription of the tune, the singer is given as “Bos’n Johnson”. Carpenter also has a transcription of the words of ‘Blow the man down’ ascribed simply to “The Bo’sn”. It seems quite likely that these actually refer to the same person.
In the summer of 1928 James Madison Carpenter collected four shanties and two other sea songs from Harry Johnson, a resident at the Royal Alfred home for merchant seamen at Belvedere. Carpenter’s Dictaphone recordings survive for four of Mr Johnson’s songs, and can be heard on the VWML website.
On his transcription of one of these, ‘Blow the man down’, Carpenter noted the song as having been collected from “Bos’n Johnson”. It could be that Harry Johnson the same singer identified elsewhere in Carpenter’s notes simply as “The Bo’sn”.
We have no further information about the singer. The England & Wales Merchant Navy Crew Lists 1861-1913 show that in 1891 a seaman by the name of Harry Johnson, born 1853 in Bristol, served as boatswain on board the ‘Blazer’, owned by the Liverpool Steam Tug Co. Ltd. It is possible – but by no means certain – that this was the same man who sang for Carpenter almost 40 years later.
In the summer of 1928 James Madison Carpenter, collecting from residents at the Royal Alfred home for merchant seamen at Belvedere, noted a single song from a Mr Hill. No further information was recorded about the singer.
In the summer of 1928 James Madison Carpenter collected eight shanties and other songs from William ‘Paddy’ Gaul, a resident at the Royal Alfred home for merchant seamen at Belvedere.
Carpenter’s notes for ‘Be Handy, Boys’ record that William Gaul was born in Waterford, Ireland, and spent forty five years at sea. The singer may well be the William Gaul whose death was registered in the Dartford district in the third quarter of 1928 (i.e. shortly after his songs were collected by Carpenter). His age was given as 70.
In which case, he is almost certainly the William Gaul, born Waterford, 1859, who was the recipient of the Mercantile Marine Ribbon and British Medal Ribbon in 1921, for service at sea during the First World War. And, possibly, the William Gaul from Waterford, birth year given as 1863, who served as a fireman on board the Antelope, registered at Milford, from January to June 1891.
In the summer of 1928 James Madison Carpenter collected three shanties from Roderick Enderson, a resident at the Royal Alfred home for merchant seamen at Belvedere. In his notes to Enderson’s song ‘Down in the meadows’ Carpenter noted that the singer had been born in America, had first shipped in 1871 (so one might assume that he had been born in the early 1850s), and had transferred to British ships in 1885.
In the summer of 1928 James Madison Carpenter collected ten shanties and other songs from William Prosser, a resident at the Royal Alfred home for merchant seamen at Belvedere.
It is possible, although by no means certain, that the same singer had previously been visited by Cicely Fox Smith: her A book of shanties, published in 1927, contains a version of ‘The Stately Southerner’, for which she gives “Mr. Prosser” as a source for some of the words (although the tune printed is not the same as that noted by Carpenter).
We cannot be sure how old William Prosser was, nor where he was born. The death of a William Prosser, aged 79, was registered in Bromley in the second quarter of 1928. This could be Carpenter’s singer. If it is, it means that Carpenter, whose first visit to the United Kingdom was over the summer of 1928, must have met Mr Prosser very close to the end of his life.
In the England & Wales Merchant Navy Crew Lists, 1861-1913 there are several men named William Prosser of roughly the right age. There’s a William Prosser born 1846 in Derbyshire, and another born 1847 at Solva, in Wales. Another, initially promising, possibility is the William Prosser listed as sailing out of Bridgwater, Somerset in the 1860s and 1870s – but further investigation suggests that by 1891 he had left the sea, was working as an Engine driver, and continued to live in the West Country, dying in 1936 at the ripe old age of 94. In other words, this cannot be the man who sang shanties for Carpenter at the Belvedere home.
In an article in the Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald for 6th October 1900, headed “HARVEST HOME AT NEWINGTON”, the regular columnist ‘Felix’ (W.G. Glanville) described the musical contributions which followed the meal and healths:
Dick Mount, a farm hand of some seventy summers, in a twenty-verse song, told the story of a bashful swain and an innocent country lass, whilst another follower of the plough related in a ditty the doings of a certain little tailor of Dover, much to the amusement of the company.
It’s not possible to positively identify the song which Dick Mount sang, but there certainly was a farm labourer named Richard Mount, of very nearly seventy summers, living in Newington at that time.
He was baptised at St Nicholas, Newington Next Hythe, on 11th August 1833, the son of William and Sarah, née Gower. The 1841 census showed them living in the hamlet of Arpinge near Newington. William and his eldest son (also William) both worked as thatchers. In 1851 Richard was working as an agricultural labourer for William Matson, a farmer of 140 acres, at Alkham (the precise location is difficult to decipher, but could be Drellingore). When the 1861 census was taken he was boarding with the family of Samuel Hood at Paddlesworth, to the West of Hawkinge, working as an agricultural labourer, probably for Robert Marsh at Cole Farm.
He married Jane Gilham at St Nicholas, Newington Next Hythe, on 15th October 1870, and the following year’s census found them living with Richard’s father back at Arpinge (recorded as “Harpinge” on the census return). William was by now 79 years old, but his occupation was still shown as Thatcher, as was that of 38 year old Richard. He and Jane had a baby son, also named Richard.
Thereafter census records show him simply as a farm labourer. With Jane and an ever-increasing family, he was living at Coombe Farm Cottage, Newington Next Hythe, in 1881, at Arpinge in 1891, and at Grove Cottage, Newington in 1901. In 1911 he and Jane were residing at 81 Shaftesbury Avenue, Cheriton and, although he was 78 years of age, he was still listed as “Farm labourer”. He died in the final quarter of 1915.
The Romany gypsy Phoebe Smith is widely regarded as one of the greatest English traditional singers to have been recorded. When recorded by folk song collectors, from the 1950s onwards, she was living with her husband Joe near Woodbridge in Suffolk. However she was born in Faversham, spent much of her early life in Kent, and acquired her repertoire of songs primarily from family members..
It is usually stated that she was born in Tanner Street (now Tanners Street), Faversham in 1913. Certainly her birth was registered in the first quarter of 1913, and she was baptised at Elmsted on 4th April 1913. In the 1939 Register her birth date is given as 7th March 1912, but 7th March 1913 is the more likely date – this was the date given when her death was registered in 2001. She was the youngest of at least eight children born to Bill Scamp and his second wife Ann, née Jones. Bill Scamp was born at Selling on 18th December 1851, Ann in 1873 at Forest Row, between East Grinsted and Crowborough in Sussex. Bill’s first wife, Louisa née Lee (1850-1892), bore him sixteen children between 1870 and 1890, giving birth to her youngest child one week prior to being admitted to Cane Hill Asylum, Coulsdon, Surrey, where she died and was buried in 1892.1
Phoebe’s parents had settled, and worked on fruit farms in East Kent, but would still travel around Kent and Essex for seasonal work, as Phoebe’s son Manny told Mike Yates:
I suppose life was like a holiday in those days: we would spend a couple of months here to work, then move on to another area for the next harvest, and we’d meet up with our aunties and uncles and cousins. It would be Essex, near Chelmsford for the sugarbeeting, Kent for the cherries, apples, plums and pears, then up to the Fens for the potatoes. That would be the times when the singing was practised. You’d be by yourself six or seven hours, no-one to please, no-one to offend, and an old uncle in the next orchard would shout over, ‘Have you heard this one?2
When she was about four years old the family went to live in Herne Bay. They moved again, to Ramsgate, when she was about ten, and later to Ickham. No Scamps appear in Faversham or any of those other locations in the early 20th century census records, but there were numerous Scamps living in East Kent, often with occupations such as “horse dealer” which suggest that they might be of Romany stock (also “hawker”, “general dealer”, “vagrant” or, occasionally, simply “gypsy”). At the time of the 1861 census Phoebe’s forebears were recorded as living “In Tents, Broom Street, Graveney, Faversham”. The head of the household was Riley Scamp, occupation shown as “Vagrant”. Living with him were his wife Sarah, née Lee, six sons (Oliver, Riley, William, Samson, Clarence and George) and three daughters (Charlotte, Cinamentta and Mary). All of the family had been born in Kent. Riley Scamp was born in 1819, and when he died in 1899 his funeral merited a mention in the Folkestone Express, Sandgate, Shorncliffe & Hythe Advertiser, 8th March 1899:
A ROMANY FUNERAL. —Last week at Ramsgate Cemetery, the funeral took place of Riley Scamp, a picturesque figure in Thanet for many years, and the head of a gipsy family well known throughout East
Kent. The deceased, who was of the Romany type, was 79 years old. Formerly he was a van-dweller ; latterly he abandoned that free mode of life. At the funeral quite large crowd assembled, including many of the gipsy tribe.
Comments by family members on various internet forums revealed that the Scamps sometimes went by the surname Matthews, and in fact it was under this name that Phoebe’s family were listed in the 1921 census, camped with other families including Lees and Ripleys, at Mystole Encampment, near Chilham. Her father William Matthews was listed as “General Dealer”, her mother as “Licence Hawker”. With them were 6 sons and 2 daughters, of whom Phoebe was the youngest. The places of birth of the children attest to the family’s travelling lifestyle: Bexhill in Sussex, Hunton, Tenterden, Chilham and Faversham. Phoebe’s birth place is given here – probably erroneously – as Preston in Kent.
Phoebe’s family were living at Ickham when she married Joe Smith, a scrap dealer, in 1931. They had met the previous year, at hop-picking time:
Joe: Well, round the campfire at night after we finished hop-picking. She come down to see my sister-in-law, you see, to have a word or two with her, I suppose. And I sat there playing the violin. And we started speaking, and…
Phoebe: My husband, he started to talk about the hop picking, and I was rather bashful and shy. And I didn’t know much to say at all. As a matter of fact, I was afraid, really, to speak to him, thinking my father and mother would hear me.
Joe: Well… I thought you were shy and so was I.
Phoebe: I were really smiling at him playing the fiddle, you know, and his brother, you see. Keep looking at me and he keep nodding his head, you see, ‘awards ‘im playing this fiddle, because his brother just couldn’t stand the row. We were grinning at each other, you know, but at the time being I never had any more thought of courting or marrying him than flying. And then he said to me “I’d like to write to you when I go home, would you like to write to me?” I said “Well, you can write and I’ll answer your letters”. And then next year, they come down hop-picking and you said to me, “Would you marry me?” I said, “Well, I’m not old enough really. I’m only seventeen”. So he said there’s lots of girls and boys get married at seventeen and eighteen.
Joe: She was a trouble. I kept writing, you know? And she kept saying she’d see, and all this sort of thing and I got fed up. And every weekend I had off I used to go down there. Never used to go down home because I wouldn’t dare, you see. Her father wouldn’t let her out if I went down home. She say to me “Well, I’ll meet you at the bus stop at Canterbury”, which was the nearest point, you see, where the buses come in, and that’s how we done our courting, and we never did go to the pictures.3
Phoebe recalled that she was desperate to go to see Sonny Boy, the first talkie to come to Canterbury (actually she probably meant the film The Singing Fool, Al Jolson’s follow-up to The Jazz Singer, which featured the song ‘Sonny Boy’, and which was released in the UK in November 1928). But her brother Charlie said “it’s not good for girls to go to the pictures… it learns them things they never ought to know” and the resultant argument led to her father forbidding either of them from going.
Joe: We never did go to the pictures and I never did walk nowhere with her, only from the bus to the bus stop, put her on the bus that used to go home. That’s where I used to meet her and where I used to leave her, at the bus stop. That used to annoy me, you know, I used to get fair bored with it. All my worries were not getting her in a row, you see […]
Phoebe: So of course we just signed the register and away we come out. He got hold of my hand, and then he said “God bless you, Phoebe, you’re a nice girl”.
Joe: I remember that. I remember saying that, and I remember you wished me the best of luck.
Their marriage was registered West Tilbury in Essex on 27th October 1930. The bride’s name was recorded as Phoebe Matthews. Phoebe’s father said that he wouldn’t have given consent for her to marry so young, only when she was 21, but “that’s three more years, perhaps I wouldn’t live that long anyway”. And indeed he died within a year. Phoebe said that “He died 12 months after I were married”; in fact he died aged 79 on 27th May 1931, at Minster-in-Thanet.4
Phoebe and Joe’s first child – also named Joe – arrived within a year of their marriage, and money was tight. Joe recalled that “It was very hard times then, wasn’t it? I’m working steady […] But still, we carried on. We didn’t owe anybody nothing. That was a job to make ends meet”. When she was able to, Phoebe started to make floral Christmas decorations to earn some extra cash, and also did farmwork, “fruit-picking or pea-picking or anything”.
Joe found them a home to move to at 57 St Chad’s Road, Tilbury, Essex, and they were living here at the time of the 1939 Register. Joe’s occupation was given as “Caterpillar Driver – Oil Co”. He was navvying with pick and shovel at the start of the war, but then moved on to operating a D8 Caterpillar, cutting chalk. This may have been a sedentary job, but it was physically demanding – “I have come ‘ome of a night time with, with my arms aching so I could hardly make a cigarette”. Joe’s work took him to Scotland at one point, although Phoebe stayed behind in Essex, doing agricultural work. And then, when the farmwork stopped, “I’d go on making these wax roses, roses, daffs, tulips […] I think it’s the most nicest job I’ve ever done is going selling flowers”.
As a port town on the Thames, Tilbury was frequently the target of German air raids. During one heavy raid, when they had had to abandon their home and take shelter elsewhere, a policeman came to find Phoebe to tell her that her mother had died.
Then that’s when I began to realise that everything was gone. At the beginning, I didn’t bother about the ‘ome, I didn’t bother about anything, as long as we were alive. That was everything you see. But when I lost my mother, I thought, well, I don’t know, everything seemed to be going…
Her mother’s grave records that she did on 3rd September 1940, aged 67 years. She was buried in All Saints Churchyard, Biddenden.5
At some point after the war Phoebe and Joe moved to Melton near Woodbridge, where Joe ran a scrap-metal business, and this is where they remained for the rest of their lives. Frank Purslow described it thus:
Near a small Suffolk market town is a well-conducted scrap metal business run by Joe Smith and some of his sons. Next to the yard, in a neat garden, stands the Smiths’ bungalow (built mostly by family labour) surrounded by the trailers of the Smith boys and their families.6
Mike Yates recalled
In those days Phoebe and her husband Joe were living in a bungalow at the side of a moderately busy road. There was a small scrap yard at the side of their home, where Joe and his sons worked. I think what most impressed me on my first visit was Joe and Phoebe’s large collection of Crown Derby porcelain. Every shelf and furniture top seemed to be holding yet another prize piece. They clearly loved their collection and were only too happy to tell me how the horse-drawn gypsy waggons of old had always been full of similar items.7
Phoebe had learned most of her song repertoire in Kent. Mike Yates notes that “Phoebe learnt many of her songs as a young girl from her elder sisters. Her uncle, Oliver Scamp, a Kentish horse-dealer, was also an important source of songs”, while she told Frank Purslow that she learned one song from her favourite uncle, her father’s brother George. Peter Kennedy provides details of the specific sources for several songs: ‘The Oxford Girl’ came from her uncle Oliver, “a Ramsgate tinker who could make a kettle out of a penny”; she had ‘Young Ellender’ from her mother; and ‘Higher Germanie’ and ‘Molly Vaughan’ were learned “from her uncle, George Scamp, the horse-dealer”.8 Phoebe’s son Manny, quoted in the booklet to the 1998 CD The Yellow Handkerchief, said:
A lot of her songs she learned from her mother and father and ‘Higher Germany’ came from her oldest sister, Polly [born 1900, Blean] and her younger brother Henry had a good voice. Her uncles Bill and George were also great singers and Bill had a high pitched voice. If he was singing in another room and you couldn’t see him you would swear it was a woman singing.”
The different sources given for ‘Higher Germany’ are not necessarily contradictory – it’s likely that Phoebe had heard both her mother and older sister singing the song.
Peter Kennedy was the first to record Phoebe. When searching for songs in Kent in January 1954 he visited a “Mrs. Stanley (Bird)”, who was living in a caravan on a farm near the Three Chimneys pub, between Biddenden and Sissinghurst. Although Mrs Stanley had tonsilitis, Kennedy’s notes record that “She gave us address of her sister Mrs. Smith, Melton Meadows, Melton, Woodbridge, Suffolk. Her husband, Joe, plays fiddle and melodeon”9. This Mrs Stanley / Bird was probably Phoebe’s sister Mary, seemingly known as Polly who, when the 1939 Register was taken, was hop-picking at Frogs Hall Farm, Tenterden, along with various other people named Scamp and Matthews.
Over the next few days Kennedy recorded songs from Phoebe Smith’s step-brother Charlie Scamp at Chartham Hatch, and from Oliver Scamp (possibly Phoebe’s uncle) at Lower Halstow. He visited the Smiths in Suffolk as part of his collecting trip to East Anglia in July 1956 (although possibly this was a return visit – some years later he wrote “From the time I first met Phoebe it took nearly two years before she was able fully to record for me her family songs, in July 1956”10). A copy of his report on this collecting trip can be found at https://www.peterkennedyarchive.org/1956-2/east-anglia-1956/. It commences
Friday 6th: Collected machines and tapes, drove to Woodbridge making a number of calls in Essex en route without much success.
Saturday 7th: Made a number of calls in Woodbridge and arranged to record the Smith’s, gipsies, and Jim Baldry a painter and decorator at Melton.
Sunday 9th: Recorded from Mrs Phoebe Smith (42). Joe her husband had unfortunately hurt his hand in the meantime and was unable to play step-dance tunes on fiddle.
The songs collected from Phoebe Smith on this occasion were:
A Blacksmith courted me
I am a Romany
Shannon Side (Captain Thunderbolt)
Molly Varden (Shooting of his dear)
Higher Germanie
Young Ellender
The Oxford Girl
Pretty Betsy.
He visited the Smiths again in 1962, and on this occasion was able to record Joe playing the fiddle, and their eldest son Joe singing ‘The Riddle Song’, and playing step-dance tunes on the harmonica.
Phoebe told Peter Kennedy that she had been a mouth organ player:
I used to love to play the mouth organ and I began to play it very well, but my father used to say to me, “Phoebe, you mustn’t play that. That’ll give you horrible thick lips”. And I said, “Well, you won’t stop me from dancing will you, Daddy?” Used to say “No. You Can Dance. I love to see you dance, love to hear you sing”.
The step dancing was not without its issues, however – once, when step dancing, she kicked the toes out of her best boots, with the result that her father bought her a pair of boy’s shoes to dance in.
Kennedy put out his recordings on a Folktrax cassette, noting
Although Phoebe & Joe were living in a bungalow with hop-plants in the garden, they still had their wagons there, alongside their scrap-metal business, and most of the chat and singing was around the campfire.11
The Folktrax cassette also included extracts from their conversation, but Phoebe was unhappy about this, when she came to know, as she had not been aware that the material would ever be made available to the public at large.12 It has to be said that, nearly 70 years on, these recordings have proved invaluable in assembling this biographical sketch, and they also show Phoebe and Joe in a very positive light, as a devoted and loving couple.
By the time Kennedy’s Foktrax cassette was released, Phoebe Smith’s singing could be heard on three LPs on the Topic record. The first of these was Once I Had a True Love (Topic 12T193) released in 1970. The songs on this LP were recorded by Paul Carter, but the sessions were directed by Frank Purslow. Phoebe Smith had been the first traditional singer that Purslow saw, when she performed at Ewan MacColl’s Ballads and Blues club and, as he wrote later, “Phoebe was a revelation!”. Another London appearance had attracted the attention of Paul Carter:
It must have been early 1969 when I went to Woodbridge to record Phoebe Smith. Her singing had much impressed me when I heard her at Cecil Sharp House, and I 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. 13
Although Carter argued that it was simply a matter of adjusting the head alignment on Topic’s machine, the record company said that these tapes were unusable, so Carter and Purslow went back to Suffolk, and recorded the songs for a second time. The Topic LP Once I had a True Love was released in 1970. Frank Purslow’s notes for the album describe Phoebe as “a warm, homely, motherly woman adored by her family, despite the strict upbringing they have received at her hands. To Phoebe the most important things in her life are her home, her husband, her family and her friends”. He continued
Both Joe and Phoebe come from backgrounds where the importance of making one’s own entertainment was a necessity – and a tradition. From her childhood Phoebe had been a stepper, tapper and singer.
[…] “In those days,” she told me, “people used to make their own amusements, used to have nice week-ends together, used to sit round and have a little sing-song; and of course you’d learn songs from your parents, and you’d learn them from the people that used to come round. They were made of things that really happened. I mean, years ago when I was a child – and I’m not all that old – we never had radios and that sort of thing; and of course things that happened they used to make songs about, and stories. People used to learn them by listening to other people singing them. I learned one particularly from my father’s brother George. He was my favourite uncle, and I remember he used to get me on his knee and give me sixpence to sing for him. I used to love to hear him sing, he used to be – well you know – so dedicated into his songs when he was singing . . . he used to help the songs.”
When l asked Phoebe what attracted her to a particular song, she was quite definite. “l like the words of a song to have a real, true meaning, and I like a tune that goes according to the words and the happenings in the song. You can imagine – I can – as well as feeling for them – things that happened – what they did. I can picture them, you know, in the sorrow parts as well as the happiness. They’re human. Oh! I sing modern songs as well; there’s some very very, nice modern songs, but I don’t think they hit you quite so deep inside, because a lot of the songs today are just made up from out of the wind. No, I never went out and had music lessons, or dancing or singing lessons. All I learned I was self taught or from my parents. And l think that is the only true way that anyone can call themselves a tapper or a singer. I mean, if you learn it yourself you’re interested, you’re dedicated. There’s a lot of people today that do it just to get around and some money and that sort of thing. They don’t do it for the love of it, they just do it for what they can get. I always did singing and tapping and dancing just to please myself and make other people happy.”
Purslow also explained that
I have long since wanted to see her on record, but she is rather a difficult singer to record satisfactorily. Attempts to record her at “special occasions” have failed to capture what I consider to be the real Phoebe. Faced with a strange audience she tends to put on a “performance”. So we sat with Phoebe and Joe in their lounge and chatted and drank tea and then recorded a few songs. The results were excellent. A few days later I visited them again and had a long chat with Phoebe about the songs and her attitude to them, which I taped, and which shows how aware she is of the content of the songs and their meaning – and the tradition behind them, a living tradition, of which she, and Joe, and the family are a vital part.
Reviewing Once I had a True Love in the 1971 Folk Music Journal, Peter Kennedy wrote that having Phoebe’s songs available on record “realizes a long- awaited dream”. The album did not meet an entirely positive reception, however. Frank Purslow considered that Phoebe’s uninhibited singing style in front of an audience represented a put on “performance”, and that he had captured the “real Phoebe”. Others held a diametrically opposite view. The singer Danny Stradling, who met Phoebe and heard her singing in the 1960s and 1970s, has called the album “a travesty”, and relates that
in the months after the release of this record she was very unhappy with the outcome, and told me “they kept telling me to do it again because I didn’t do it the same as last time”.14
The “last time” here presumably referring to Paul Carter and Frank Purslow’s first attempt to record her for Topic. But, really, they should have been aware that it was unrealistic (and insensitive) to expect any traditional singer – still less one from the travelling community – to turn in an identical rendition of a song on two separate occasions.
Phoebe’s son Manny, quoted in the booklet to the Veteran CD The Yellow Handkerchief, gives a further reason for dissatisfaction with the LP:
Mum had such a clear voice and when she’d had a glass or two of Guinness she would sing and you could hear her at the other end of the village, but when she was recorded for the record (Once I Had a True Love) they wanted her to sound like a folk singer, so her singing is subdued.
This suggests that, as far as her family were concerned, these more restrained performances did not represent the “real Phoebe”.
It’s worth noting that Paul Carter was probably aware that the recording equipment at his disposal was simply not capable of dealing with the wild, unrestrained style of singing that Phoebe was wont to adopt in public performances. Indeed Musical Traditions editor Rod Stradling believes that “in those days, there was not any microphone available that could record her very dynamic singing properly”, and that it was impossible for any recording to do justice to her singing – “you needed to ‘be there’ to properly appreciate England’s finest female traditional singer”.
Mike Yates, writing in the magazine Traditional Music in 1977 advanced a further theory about the relationship between Phoebe and folk song collectors:
I have heard it suggested that when Hamish Henderson discovered Jeannie Robertson and played those first tapes to English and American collectors, some or those collectors then went out determined to find an English female singer of equal stature. The implication, of course, is that Phoebe Smith was that discovery and that she was asked, directly or indirectly, to alter her singing style, to slow down her pace, to emphasise certain notes in far greater detail etc. Some readers may dismiss this as rubbish ; but it intrigues me that Phoebe is the only English singer that I have heard who sings in this manner. The other members of her family – sisters and brothers including the Kent gypsy Charlie Scamp who now lives in Faversham – that I have heard certainly sound no different from most other gypsy singers. The matter is still unresolved in my mind.15
Mike Yates spent time with Phoebe in the 1970s, and some of the songs he recorded appear on the Topic LPs Songs of the Open Road (12T253, 1975) and The Travelling Songster (12TS304, 1977) and, subsequently, on the Veteran CD The Yellow Handkerchief (VT136CD, 1998). Mike wrote:
I first heard of Phoebe Smith in 1963, when I was working a Cecil Sharp House as an assistant to Peter Kennedy. Peter had recorded Phoebe as a part of the BBC collecting scheme and he was busy transcribing her songs when I first went to work for him. Some years later I began collecting songs from English gypsies and travellers and whilst in Faversham, Kent, I met Phoebe’s relatives who told me that she was still an active singer. They gave me her telephone number and, within days, I was in Suffolk, driving out of Woodbridge along the Melton road looking for her home.
[…]
When I visited Phoebe I was aware that she had also been recorded by Paul Carter […] on behalf of Topic Records. There seemed little point in going over old ground and so we worked on the songs that Phoebe had learnt in her youth, many of which lay half-buried in the depth of her memory. Some songs came back quickly. Others had to be coaxed, verse by verse, sometimes line by line, until she was happy that she could recall no more of the song. And what songs they were
[…]
Phoebe and Joe Smith came from large families and were used to entertaining. They loved social gatherings such as dances, where Joe would play his fiddle, or pub singsongs where Phoebe would sing and step-dance, and they especially loved the company of other people. I think that they were two of the kindest and most likeable people that I ever met, and I am very glad that John Howson is now able to make so many of their songs available again. I know that Phoebe and Joe would approve.
Phoebe Smith died on 8th November 2001 at the age of eighty-eight. She and Joe had seven sons: Joe, Henry, Nick, John, Manny, Fred and Tom, and by the time of her death the family had expanded to include thirty grandchildren, fifty-four great grandchildren and twenty great, great grand-children.
Songs
Recorded by Peter Kennedy:
A Blacksmith Courted Me (Roud 816)
Captain Thunderbolt (Roud 1453)
Down by the Sheepfold (Roud 559)
Higher Germanie (Roud 904)
The Hopping Song (Roud 1715)
I am a Romany (Roud 4844)
Jolly Herring (The Herring Song ) (Roud 128)
Molly Varden (Roud 166)
The Oxford Girl (Roud 263)
Young Ellender (Roud 1417)
Recorded by Paul Carter and Frank Purslow:
A Blacksmith Courted Me (Roud 816)
The Dear Little Maiden (Roud 1751)
Higher Germany (Roud 904)
Molly Vaughan (Roud 166)
Once I Had a True Love (Roud 170)
The Tan Yard Side (Roud 1021)
The Wexport Girl (Roud 263)
The Yellow Handkerchief (Roud 954)
Young Ellender (Roud 1417)
Recorded by Mike Yates:
Barbara Allen (Roud 54, Child 84)
Captain Thunderbold (Roud 1453)
Dear Louise (Roud 23792)
Green Bushes (Roud 1040)
Jolly Herring (Roud 128)
Johnny Abourne (Roud 600)
Lavender (Roud 854)
Old Gypsy’s Waggon (Romany Rye) (Roud 13213)
Raking the Hay (Roud 855)
The Sheepfold (Roud 559)
Wings of a Swallow (Old Rocky Road) (Roud 13214)
Young Morgan (Roud 5369)
Others:
Game of All Fours (Roud 232) – recorded by Peta Webb, King’s Head, Islington, 1970
Once I Had a True Love, Topic Records 12T193 (LP, 1970), TSDL193 (digital download, 2009)
The Yellow Handkerchief, Veteran VT136CD (CD, 2001)
Songs by Phoebe Smith also appear on
Songs of the Open Road: Gypsies, Travellers & Country Singers, Topic Records 12T253 (LP, 1975), TSDL253 (digital download, 2009) – Mike Yates recordings
The Travelling Songster: An Anthology From Gypsy Singers, Topic Records 12TS304 (LP, UK, 1977), TSDL304 (digital download, 2013) – Mike Yates recordings
Songs of the Travelling People: Music of the Tinkers, Gipsies and Other Travelling People of England, Scotland and Ireland, Saydisc CD-SDL 407, (CD, 1994) – Peter Kennedy recordings
