Ken Stubbs

Kenneth Charles Stubbs, 1923–2008

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

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

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

Writing in 2013, Paul Marsh noted that

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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