Joe and Lena Cooper

Stephen Sedley, then a young barrister, recorded Joe and Lena Cooper at Edenbridge in March and April 1966, having successfully defended their son Abraham in a court case.

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.

Lena, a Romany from the Lee clan, had danced and sung with her brother on the Dartford stage as a child. Joe, from an urban background, had volunteered in 1914, had been gassed twice but had survived, only to find that Lloyd George’s ‘homes for heroes’ didn’t exist. He went on the road. From him I recorded a version of the trench song ‘When this lousy war is over’ which I used in a centennial presentation of WWI songs¹ because Joe’s version began: “When this wicked war is over …”. He described mustard gas rolling knee-high as resembling morning mist in the hopfields.²

This record in the 1939 Register must surely be the family in question, their location being “Caravan in field Off Butts Lane, Sutton, Epsom and Ewell M.B., Surrey”.

First name	Last name	Birth date	Occupation	Marital status
Joe (Joseph)	Cooper	24 May 1896	Travelling Farm Worker	Married
Lena	Cooper	NK 1899	Hawker Unpaid Domestic Duties	Married
Abraham	Cooper	? Aug 1921	Travelling Farm Worker	Single

Lena’s birth year as written on the Register return is unclear. It could be 1879, but is more likely to be 1899 – and even this may not actually be accurate.

Earlier census and BMD records for Joe and Lena are patchy, and decidedly speculative.

Joseph Cooper, 1896–?

As shown above, the 1939 Register states that Joe was born on 24^th May 1896. Possibly he was the same Joseph Cooper whose birth was registered in the Bromley District, in the second quarter of 1897, his mother’s maiden name given as Dekins.

Again this is speculative, but he could be the Joe / Joseph Cooper in the following census returns; we should probably not take too much notice of the variations in year and place of birth.

1901 – Caravan Yard Browns Yard, Magdala Road, Croydon, Surrey

First name	Last name	Relationship to head	Age	Approx. Birth year	Occupation	Birth place
Joe	Cooper	Head	28	1873	Licensed dealer	Cudham, Kent
Eliza	Collins	House keeper	26	1875	–	Leatherhead, Surrey
George	Cooper	Son	6	1895	–	Croydon, Surrey
Joe	Cooper	Son	5	1896	–	Bromley, Kent
Elvie	Cooper	Daughter	2	1899	–	Warlingham, Surrey
Eliza	Cooper	Daughter	0	1901	–	Hampshire

1911 – 9 Portland Cottages, Warlingham, Surrey

First name	Last name	Relationship to head	Age	Approx. Birth year	Occupation	Birth place
Joseph	Cooper	Head	38	1873	Dealer	Cudham, Kent
Mary Ann	Cooper	Wife	36	1875	Hawker	Cobham, Kent
George	Cooper	Son	14	1897	–	Croydon, Surrey
Joseph	Cooper	Son	15	1896	Worker	[?] Kent
Elvina	Cooper	Daughter	13	1898	–	Warlingham, Surrey
Eliza	Cooper	Daughter	10	1901	School	Liphook, Hampshire
Bessey	Cooper	Daughter	8	1903	–	Mitcham, Surrey
Alice	Cooper	Daughter	6	1905	–	Warlingham, Surrey
John	Cooper	Son	4	1907	–	Warlingham, Surrey
Thomas	Cooper	Son	2	1909	–	Warlingham, Surrey
Lavinia	Cooper	Daughter	0	1911	–	Warlingham, Surrey

1921 – Quinnas Cottage, Warlingham, Surrey

First name	Last name	Relationship to head	Age	Approx. Birth year	Occupation	Employer	Birth place
Joe	Cooper	Head	51	1869	Horse Slaughterer	Employer	Kent
Eliza	Cooper	Wife	47	1873	Home Duties	–	Surrey
Joe	Cooper	Son	23	1897	Horse Slaughter	Mr J Cooper Warlingham	Croydon, Surrey
Eliza	Cooper	Daughter	20	1900	Domestic Servant	Private	Liphook, Hampshire
Alice	Cooper	Daughter	16	1904	Domestic Servant	Private	Surrey
Johnny	Cooper	Son	14	1907	Errand Boy	Mr Cooper Warlingham	Sanderstead, Surrey
Thomas	Cooper	Son	12	1908	–	–	Sanderstead, Surrey
Lavinia	Cooper	Daughter	9	1911	–	–	Sanderstead, Surrey
Louie	Cooper	Daughter	8	1913	–	–	Warlingham, Surrey
Alfred	Cooper	Son	3	1918	–	–	Warlingham, Surrey
Ada May	Cooper	Daughter	–	1920		–	Warlingham, Surrey

When recorded in 1966 by Stephen Sedley, Joe said that he had run away from home in Walton-on-Thames to join the army when he was 17, claiming to be 23. Based on a birth date of May 1896, that would place his enlistment as 1913-14, before the outbreak of the Great War.

I was not big enough to go into a public house to get a pint of beer with my mum and dad […] That was before the 1914 war. I see some soldiers come by, in these coats and things of London, I thought to myself I’d be happy if I was in that. And I did like the army. I promise you I did like it. I run away from home. From Walton-on-Thames, out against Kingston, and I went over to Weybridge in Surrey and I joined the Army there. Told them I was 23 years of age, but I was nowhere near it. I was only 17, and I told him I was 23 years of age. Asked me my mother’s name. Asked me my father’s name, I told him I did not remember, I did not know ‘em. I was fetched up with some people, I said I run and I left ‘em, because I was working too hard, but it was all the lies in the world to get in the army. And I done that.

Joe’s parents tried to get him out of the army, he said, but to no avail. He was sent to Kingston-on-Thames to have a health test, and thence to Woolwich Arsenal for his army training. There are army service records for a Joseph Cooper which in many respects tally with his reminiscences, but which also throw up inconsistencies. Records – sadly undated – show that his medical examination took place at Kingston, that his trade or occupation was “Dealer”, his birthplace was Mitcham in Surrey, and his stated age was 23. He was 5 feet 5½ inches tall, weighed 122 pounds, and his physical development was good.

Joe recalled that he had three weeks’ training at Woolwich, and then “I was over in France in three weeks”. This suggests that when he enlisted it was not so very long before the outbreak of hostilities – the first contingent of the British Expeditionary Force being sent to France on 15^th August 1914. However it must have been before his eighteenth birthday on 24^th May 1914; once eighteen he would not have had to lie about his age to be allowed to enlist.

When asked how long he’d been in the trenches, Joe replied “1914 to the end of the war. Yes, right the way through it”. The army records do not cast any light on his early years of service. In fact Joseph Cooper’s army service was recorded as having officially begun on 17^th May 1916, and his Enrolment Paper, although undated, references the Military Service Act, 1916 (this was the legislation, introduced in January 1916, which brought in conscription from 2^nd March that year). The Enrolment Paper gives Joe’s age as nineteen (which appears to be his true age on this occasion), and his address as Wickes Encampment, Shepperton; again, his occupation is given as “Dealer”. The paper is signed with an X (“his mark”) suggesting that Joe was illiterate – and Stephen Sedley confirms this. His next of kin is stated as his father, William Cooper, also residing at Wickes Encampment. If this is correct, and his father’s name was William rather than Joseph, then clearly it’s a different Joe Cooper to the one shown in the census records reproduced above. But one wonders if Joe was deliberately providing misleading information to the army; it has not been possible to trace a plausible William Cooper in census records, living with his son Joseph, and with an entry in the ‘Occupation’ field which suggests that the person is a gypsy.

Joe told Stephen Sedley that he served as an infantryman, and that he had been at the Somme, and at “the first battle of Cambia” (presumably Cambrai). The first significant use of tanks in battle was at Cambrai, and Joe talked about this, recalling that initially the tanks had been assigned to the Machine Gun Corps, before the formation of the Tank Corps (which later became the Royal Tank Regiment).

Army records show Joseph Cooper being called up and assigned to the Royal Fusiliers on 17^th May 1916, transferring to the British Expeditionary Force on 30^th August, and embarking for France on 1^st September 1916. Initially he joined the 39^th Infantry Base Depot (IBDs were holding camps located within easy reach of a Channel port, which received men on arrival from England and kept them in training while they awaited posting to a unit at the front), was then being enrolled in the 27th (Reserve) Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, before transferring to the 11^th Battalion, Royal West Kent Regiment on 14^th September 1916. He was transferred again on 25^th December 1916 to the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps, and subsequently to the Tank Corps (formed in July 1917). He was demobilised on 14^th December 1919.

He may have liked the soldier’s life, but that did not stop him being put on a charge on several occasions – for overstaying a period of leave, for being absent from parade, for “loitering during working hours” and “using threatening language to R.P. [Regimental Police] in execution of their duty”.

Joe Cooper’s reminiscences of life in the trenches were vivid, and entirely unsentimental. He talked of the difficulty of sleeping in a dugout, and of having to be constantly vigilant for snipers:

Now if you see them trees are moving about as green in the summertime, like, moving about… if you could see that tree move you’d know there was a sniper in there. Well you’d report that then. To the machine gun man. Well, the machine gun comes up number one, and he puts a Stokes [?] mortar in there… Well he blows him out of the tree altogether… If we didn’t shoot him, he’d shoot us.

He told of how gas would roll across the fields:

Now just say you been down the hop country, you seen a foggy morning haven’t you? You’ll see the fog off the ground somewhere about a foot to a foot and a half, that’s like the gas used to come up off the trenches, out on the battlefield.

How the British soldiers were initially unprotected against German gas attacks:

When they start using the gas in there, you had no gas helmets, nothing like that. We had to get our own water, our own water, you know, put it into a medicine bottle, soak it into the bottle. And when we seed the gas a-coming up, the gas alarm come through the trenches, ringing a bit of a bell… We had to put that water all in our own mouth. Only our own water mind. Over your nose and over the top…

And that, when they were provided with gas masks, at first these proved unsatisfactory.

When troops were ordered to go over the top

That was from two in the morning, from half past one or two o’clock. The officer used to come round with the orderly officer, with the rum issue, and he used to give him a tot of rum into a glass and we’d drink it. Well that used to put the nerve into you. If you understand what I mean now. Well, when they said boys “Stand to, ready to go”, you couldn’t hear a shell fire, you couldn’t hear a rifle fire or nothing. Not till the big guns started to the back of us, our own guns.

Then

if someone was hit on the battlefield, if he was my own brother I wouldn’t dare touch him. Wouldn’t dare to touch him if his arm was blowed off or his head was blowed off. Wouldn’t dare to touch him… Just take care of yourself. If you did you was entitled to a court martial, if you got catched at it. If they catch you doing it – ’cause we did do it, because we was doing it for the sake of your partner, if you could.

To recover the wounded from No Man’s Land they would use stretchers on wheels, attached to a rope, at night, so as not to be seen. Then they would attend to the wounded as best they could, and take them down the supply trench back to the second line of defence.

Joe spoke dispassionately about the enemy, recognising that “Some was pretty good, some was bad, ’cause we had to do it the same as they did… They tried to blow us up and we tried to blow them up”. But he was far from oblivious to the desperate conditions in which men found themselves:

I should think it was about from three to four weeks when we did get in the real, proper slaughter. We had no dugouts. We had no trenches. We had dug up just a little trench, and told to dig out as well we could from shell hole to shell hole to shell hole, and dig ourself in. But after we’d done that, it was real proper murder, they served us so that you could almost see the blessed angels come down from the sky to stop the war. With my own two loving eyes. And that’s the God’s honest truth, as ever was in heaven.

And when, finally, the armistice came, the men were all infested with lice:

What they call these lice, real proper lice. You’ve heard talk of lice, haven’t you? Well in the front line trenches we got smothered with them things. Even come out the lace holes of our boots, or our shirts. Clothes we had on, they was not fit to wear. We had to take ‘em off and destroy ‘em outside… We did burn them up and put all new clothes on.

Then after the war, as Stephen Sedley recounts, he came home to find that, contrary to Lloyd George’s assurances, there were no “homes fit for heroes”, and he took to (went back to?) a life on the road.

As yet, no record of Joe Cooper’s death has been located.

Lena Cooper, née Lee, 1899(?)/1904(?)–1968?

While the 1939 Register appears to show Lena’s birth year as 1899, other records suggest that she was born in 1904. The birth of a Lena Lee was registered in the Maidstone District in the second quarter of 1904, and this tallies with census records – for instance with the Lee family recorded in the 1911 census at Iron Mill Lane, Crayford:

1911 – Iron Mill Lane, Crayford, Kent

First name	Last name	Relationship to head	Age	Approx. Birth year	Occupation	Birth place
Leonard	Lee	Husband	50	1861	Clothes peg maker, Hawker	Swancombe, Kent
Ellen	Lee	Wife	46	1865	Clothes peg seller, Hawker	Heathfield, Sussex
Louisa	Lee	Daughter	25	1886	Clothes peg seller, Hawker	Hollenton, Sussex
Sarah	Lee	Daughter	23	1888	Clothes peg seller, Hawker, Hawker	Hollenton, Sussex
Walter	Lee	Son	14	1897	Clothes peg maker	Kent, Chatham
Celia	Lee	Daughter	10	1901	School	Kent, Folkestone
Lena	Lee	Daughter	7	1904	School	Kent, Marden
Tilly	Lee	Daughter	4	1907	–	Kent, Swanley

And at Belvedere ten years later:

1921 – Occupation Road, Belvedere, Erith, Kent

First name	Last name	Relationship to head	Approx. Birth year	Age	Occupation	Employer	Birth place
Leonard	Lee	Head	1863	58	Street Hawker	Own Account	Not known
Ellen	Lee	Wife	1866	55	Street Hawker	Own Account	Not known
Lena	Lee	Daughter	1903	18	Street Hawker	Own Account	Epping, Essex
Tilly	Lee	Daughter	1906	15	Home Duties		Epping, Essex

(Clearly this is the same family, although there are inconsistencies between 1911 and 1921 with the girls’ ages and place of birth).

If this is the right Lena Lee, then she only had one brother, Walter, so it must have been with him that she danced and sung on the Dartford stage as a child – although when recounting how she and her brother used to dance, she seems to refer to him as Billy.

As well as singing songs, Lena diddled several dance tunes. She recalled that she would perform on the Dartford stage at 11 or 12 o’clock at night. She had a brother who used to play the tambourine and the mouth organ while she danced – “shuffle on, cakewalk, and step dance – any step tune you could play, he’d do it”. When she was twelve years of age they had been performing in the street when they came to the notice of a gentleman who, having followed them for a while, bought them both a cup of tea, gave them a golden sovereign, and subsequently on a Sunday visited their home to speak to their mother, arranging for a car to come and pick them up at 6 o’clock that day – presumably so that they could perform at a local theatre.

Lena said that her paternal grandfather “was a bit of a Spain man” and “my father, you would take him to be, if he was alive… he would look if he was a Spain man. There was a bit of a mix-up in the blood, you see, but he is a bit of a Spain man, my father is”. When asked, did she mean that he was from Spain, Lena answered “Yes, from Rome”.

It is not known when Lena and Joe met and married. In the 1939 Register, their son Abraham’s date of birth was given as August 1921. If that date is correct, then it casts doubt on the relevance of the other census records quoted here, since both Joe Cooper and Lena Lee appear to have been single, and living with their parents at the time of the 1921 census, taken just two months earlier.

The death of a Lena Cooper – probably the same person – was recorded in the Tonbridge district, in the second quarter of 1968.

Mike Yates and Joe Cooper

Writing in English Dance and Song in 1975, Mike Yates recorded that

The first gypsy that I met was Joe Cooper, an old man who had parked his trailer in a country lane near to where I live. I saw him one afternoon sitting bolt upright on a wooden chair which had been conveniently placed by the side of an open wood fire. Joe was cleaning a fiddle and I could hear him humming a tune to himself as he went about his work. The fiddle provided a mutual topic of conversation and, before long, we were talking like long lost friends. On the subject of songs I found Joe to be somewhat reticent. He sang me three or four, but confessed that his heart really wasn’t in the singing, explaining that he had just lost his wife and that songs had meant a great deal to her. Anyway, he said, why didn’t I go and see “Sharper’s Joe” who was only camped a few miles away.³

Mike Yates does not specifically say that he recorded the few songs which Joe Cooper sang for him, and there do not appear to be any recordings of him among the Yates recordings deposited with the British Library and Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. However the same article in English Dance and Song included a transcription of ‘Ripest Apples’, collected from Joe Cooper in January 1970. This is similar, but not identical, to the version of the song which Stephen Sedley had recorded. Cooper is a common Gypsy surname, so we can’t be sure if the Joe Cooper that Mike Yates met is the same man as Stephen Sedley recorded in 1966. On the other hand, the fact that this singer had recently lost his wife would tally with Lena having died eighteen months or so previously.

The Musical Traditions CD Here’s Luck to a Man… An Anthology of Gypsy Songs & Music from South-East England (MTCD320, 2003), featuring recordings made by Mike Yates, includes one song and a toast credited to “Lena Jones”, but careful listening suggests that these are in fact Stepehen Sedley’s recordings of Lena Cooper.

Songs

Recorded by Stephen Sedley, 26^th March and 19^th April 1966:

Joe Cooper

Gather Round (Roud 23635)
Love it is pleasing (Roud 1049)
My single sailor (Roud 264)
Ripest Apples (Roud 542)
When this wicked war is over (Roud 3446)

Collected by Mike Yates, January 1970:

Ripest Apples (Roud 542)

Lena Cooper