John Wilfred Goodban, 1910–1988
Jack Goodban was born on 9th April 1910. His mother was Alice, née Mockett; his father Thomas was a waggoner on a farm. The family lived at Martin, near East Langdon, about 4 miles from Dover. When the Second World War began, Jack was still living with his parents and his younger brother Thomas, at “Bungalow, Martin Vale, St Margaret’s At Cliffe”. Both he and Thomas were cowmen. Jack’s sister-in-law Irene “recalled [Jack] as being a cowman at Reach Farm, St Margarets-at-Cliffe, working from the War onwards for Gilbert Mitchell”.1
Jack married Dorothy Florence Harvey2 at St. Augustine’s Church, East Langdon on 6th March 1943. She was the granddaughter of Ike Harvey, landlord of The Rose at West Langdon. By 1955 they were living at 2 The Avenue, St Margaret’s-at-Cliffe. We know the address thanks to an article which appeared in the Maidstone Telegraph, 10th June 1955:
Lament of the singing cowman
Many Kent folk songs may be forgotten
Pass by the gardens in front of 2, The Avenue. St. Margaret’s Bay, any evening and the chances are that you will hear someone singing songs that you have never heard before.
For you will hear 45-years-old Mr. Jack Goodban, who works by day as a cowman at Reach Court Farm, singing some of the hundreds of folk songs that he knows. Many of these are hundreds of years old and have never been published.
Jack Goodban learnt them, as a boy, from his father, Mr. Tom Goodban, and many of them have strong local influences, like “Murder at Folkstone,” a narrative song, which recounts the shocking murder, long ago, of two young girls at Folkestone.
But, nowadays, Tom Goodban finds that he cannot remember many of the folksongs he once knew so well.
There is little or no opportunity to sing them to anyone, and, because he has no children, Jack fears that many of the songs handed down through his family will pass into oblivion.
Some time ago, Peter Kennedy, of the B.B.C. folk song unit, was in touch with Mr. Goodban, but nothing has materialised to date.
Peter Kennedy was the presenter of the BBC radio programme As I Roved Out between 1953 and 1958, and it may well be that Jack Goodban or his father listened to this programme, and wrote to Kennedy suggesting that he come to St Margaret’s to record Tom’s songs. Kennedy’s failure to follow up on this lead has to go down as one more lost opportunity to document the stock of songs sung in Kent. In the event, it would be August 1975 before a folk song collector visited Jack. This was Mike Yates, who was following up on names given to him by George Spicer – a singer who had lived in Sussex since the 1940s, but who was born at Little Chart and, as a young man, had worked as a cowman at Abbey Farm, West Langdon from 1928 to 1935, and had learned a significant part of his repertoire in this part of Kent.
There was obviously once quite a tradition of pub-singing in the villages just inland from Dover and Deal and George was only too happy to give me a list of singers who used to sing there. Sadly, only Jack Goodban was still alive, and his repertoire, though extremely interesting, was small. When we first met, Jack was helping a neighbour put up fence poles in a field that bordered the top of the famous White Cliffs. When I mentioned old songs, Jack asked me if I was from the BBC, adding that they had written to him in the ’50s to say that they would like to record him. Sadly though, they never turned up! To begin with, Jack denied knowing any songs at all and it was only as I turned to leave that he said, “You mean those old historical songs… like The Shannon Frigate?” If anything was guaranteed to stop me dead in my tracks, then it was a comment such as that.
Jack, like George and so many other singers that I have known, was a keen gardener and these recordings were made in the kitchen as his wife sat quietly salting runner beans into large earthenware pots. Jack, it turned out, had also sung in The Wheatsheaf at Martin, where his father sang and taught him The Shannon Frigate and The Aylesbury Girl, a song that was also sung by a couple of brothers called Wood.3
‘The Aylesbury Girl’ and the rarely collected ‘The Shannon Frigate’ were in fact the only songs which Mike Yates was able to record from Jack. Sadly, the rest of his and his father’s repertoire were thus lost. However George Frampton conducted a considerable amount of research into the singers with whom George Spicer had mixed in his West Langdon days, and was able to elicit further information from several of the singers’ surviving relations. The following quotations are taken from George’s article on George Spicer on the Musical Traditions website:
Jack’s sister4 was Irene Granger of Shepherdswell, near Dover. She recalled her brother as being a cowman at Reach Farm, St Margarets-at-Cliffe, working from the War onwards for Gilbert Mitchell. However, although acknowledging his renown as a singer, could only recall him performing Paddy McGinty’s Goat, adding that he ‘would also be in demand at weddings and parties on account of this.’
[…]Tommy’s son Tom [i.e. Jack’s older brother] was a shepherd on the cliffs between Dover and St Margaret-at-Cliffe, adding that ‘Uncle Jack was a cowman. Jack was always singing the old songs…
[…]A second letter from Mrs Bushell [Mrs Margaret Bushell, née Goodban, of East Studdal, Jack’s niece] added: ‘My mother can remember Uncle Jack singing Don’t Let your braces dingle dangle. Poor old sports, he got caught and dragged through the mangle. I think it is the chorus. And the other one, The Ring my Mother Wore.’5
Jack Goodban died at his home in The Avenue, St Margaret’s-at-Cliffe in April 1988, four years after the his wife Dorothy had passed away.
Thomas Charles Goodban, 1871–1945
Jack’s father Tom was born at East Langdon on 10th November 1871, the son of Edward Goodban, and Eliz, née Pilcher. In the 1871 census their surnames had been recorded as Goodburn rather than Goodban, and their address simply as “East Langdon”. Edward was employed as a Miller’s labourer. At the time of the 1881 census, the family were living at “W Oaks Cottage, Ripple, Eastry” – this was probably Winkland Oaks Cottages, which is actually closer to the village of Sutton. Edward’s occupation was now Farm labourer.
While Edward, Eliza and family were still living at “W’Oaks Cottage” in 1891, 19 year old Thomas is not listed at that residence, and I’ve been unable to trace him elsewhere. However, the following year he got married, on 15th October 1892, at St Margaret’s, St Margaret At Cliffe. His bride – like Thomas, 21 years old – was Alice Louisa Mockett.
In both the 1901 and 1911 censuses, Thomas, Alice and their growing family were living at Martin, near East Langdon, about 4 miles from Dover. Thomas worked as a carter, or waggoner, on a farm. They were still living at Martin in 1921, with Thomas’ occupation now shown as Agricultural Worker, working for the Mitchell family, at Martin Lodge Farm. The 1939 Register listed him as “Farm Waggoner Retired”, living with Alice, and two of his five sons, Jack and Thomas, at “Bungalow, Martin Vale, St Margaret’s At Cliffe”. The next entry on the Register was for Martin Vale farm in Station Road, and it seems likely that this had been the farm where he had ended his working life. He died on 26th March 1945, and was buried in St Augustine’s Churchyard, East Langdon.
The website of the St Margaret’s History Society records that Thomas was one of 13 children, although only ten of these survived to adulthood. Two of his younger brothers, Edward and Charles, ran a boot and shoe shop in Chapel Lane, which also acted as the premises for Goodban Bros. Cycle Agents, offering new bicycles to purchase, plus repairs of cycles and prams.6
In the 1970s, when Mike Yates recorded the singer George Spicer – by then a long time Sussex resident, but who had worked at West Langdon before the Second World War – George recalled the names of other singers from whom he had learned songs while living and working in the area. One of these was “Tommy Goodburn, a regular at The Wheatsheaf Inn, Martin, who used to sing Henry, My Son”7. Actually, this must have been Tom Goodban – as we’ve seen, the Goodban surname was sometimes recorded as ‘Goodburn’.
According to the 1955 newspaper article quoted above, Jack Goodban learned many songs from his father, but no songs were collected directly from Tom.
Alice Louisa Goodban, née Mockett, 1872–1958
In a letter to George Frampton from Jack Goodban’s sister Irene Granger, she mentions that her mother used to sing ‘The Faithful Sailor Boy’ (Roud 376) with the chorus “Farewell, farewell, my own true love, such parting brings me pain”. This is the only known reference to Alice as a singer.8
Alice was born on 1st November 1871, and baptised at St Margaret-at-Cliffe on 31st December; her mother’s name was given as Elizabeth Mockett. No name was recorded for her father, and subsequent records do not really clarify the situation. The log books of the Church of England School in St Margaret-at-Cliffe for 1879 and 1884 have “George Mockett” as the only parental name to be recorded – but might this actually have been her grandfather, agricultural labourer George Finnis? The 1881 census shows Alice living with her grandparents George and Mary Finnis in a cottage in St Margaret-at-Cliffe. These were most likely Alice’s father’s parents, as they do not appear to have had any daughters.
When Alice married Thomas Goodban in 1892 the marriage records give her father’s name as “Charles Mockett”, but census records cast no light on who this might have been. As Alice Goodban she lived with her husband at Martin until at least 1921, subsequently returning to St Margaret-at-Cliffe. Alice died on 9th February 1958, and was buried in the Churchyard of St Augustine, East Langdon.
Songs
Recorded by Mike Yates, 27th August 1975:
- The Aylesbury Girl (Roud 364)
- The Shannon Frigate (Roud 963)
Both songs appear on Green Grow the Laurels, Topic LP 12TS 285 (1976), and on Up in the North and Down in the South, Musical Traditions MT CD 311-2 (2001).
Other songs known to have been in Jack Goodban’s repertoire:
- Don’t let your braces dingle dangle (Roud 27923)
- Murder at Folkstone (Roud 897)
- Paddy McGinty’s Goat (Roud 18235)
- The Ring my Mother Wore (Roud 7372)
- George Frampton, “I don’t know if this is actually a folk song”: The Life and Music of George Spicer (1906-1981), Part 2: The West Langdon Years, 1928-35, Musical Traditions, 2012, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/g_spice2.htm ↩︎
- A wedding notice in the Dover Express, 26th March 1943 is headed GOODBAN—HARVEY but Dorothy is listed as “eldest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. J. Pilcher, of Langdon Abbey”. The 1921 census shows John and Matilda Pilcher residing in East Langdon with their 1 year old son, Albert, and 9 year old daughter, Dorothy Florence Harvey. She is recorded as “Daughter (father dead)”. She had presumably been born out of wedlock. ↩︎
- Mike Yates, booklet notes for Up in the North, Down in the South, Musical Traditions (MT CD 311-2), https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/yates.htm ↩︎
- Actually Jack’s sister-in-law. Born Irene Pilcher in 1924, Jack’s wife Dorothy was her half-sister. ↩︎
- George Frampton, “I don’t know if this is actually a folk song”: The Life and Music of George Spicer (1906-1981), Part 2: The West Langdon Years, 1928-35, Musical Traditions, 2012, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/g_spice2.htm ↩︎
- Goodban’s Cycle Shop, Chapel Lane, St Margaret’s Village History website, https://www.stmargaretshistory.org.uk/catalogue_item/goodbans-cycle-shop-chapel-lane-with-advertisements-from-local-papers ↩︎
- Mike Yates, booklet notes for Up in the North, Down in the South: songs and tunes from the Mike Yates collection 1964-2000, Musical Traditions, 2001, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/yates.htm ↩︎
- George Frampton, “I don’t know if this is actually a folk song”: The Life and Music of George Spicer (1906-1981), Part 2: The West Langdon Years, 1928-35, Musical Traditions, 2012, https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/g_spice2.htm ↩︎
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