The Kent Trad website was launched in February 2025. At that point the focus was very much on singers whose songs had been noted down on paper (rather than recorded to tape); which in practice meant up to the early 1950s. The one real exception was that I’d included an article on Albert Beale, for the simple reason that it made no sense to exclude him, when I’d written articles on his father James and sister Alice, who had sung for Cecil Sharp in 1908 and 1913 respectively.
Since that time, I’ve added transcriptions of the half dozen songs which Peter Kennedy and Maud Karpeles recorded from Albert Beale in 1954. These were fairly simple to transcribe, but making transcriptions from sound recordings is a trickier and much lengthier process than transcribing songs noted down by earlier collectors such as Sharp and Francis Collinson (and also potentially quite subjective). So currently my focus is less on providing the musical notation of songs, and more on writing biographical articles of singers, from the 1950s onwards, of whom sound recordings were made, by collectors including Peter Kennedy, Ken Stubbs and Mike Yates. I’ve published articles on Charlie Bridger, who I was lucky enough to get to know in the 1980s, and Jack Goodban, from whom Mike Yates recorded a couple of songs in the 1970s. Jack Goodban had learned his songs from his father Tom. Building on research by George Frampton, I’ve been able to write short articles on some of Tom’s contemporaries who sang in rural pubs near Dover before the Second World War.
Many of the singers recorded in Kent in the second half of the twentieth century were travellers, and there are now articles on some of the more prominent of these singers. By far the longest article on the website covers the Romany Gypsy siblings Minty, Levy and Jasper Smith. Their life stories were very much intertwined, so they are all covered on the same web page. The length of this article is explained largely by the variety of sources available – not least a really informative interview with Jasper Smith made by John Brune in the mid-1960s. Also, the Smiths crop up very frequently in local newspaper reports. Most of those reports cover their appearances in court, and I’ve included lengthy extracts from many of them. Some readers will find this unnecessarily repetitious, but I found that reading through these accounts of travellers being summonsed over and over again for camping on the highway and/or causing an obstruction (Levy seems to have been up in court on an almost monthly basis in 1967) really brought home to me the extent to which they were targeted by the authorities – at a time when, increasingly, they had nowhere else to go.
Finally, you’ll find articles on the wonderful Gypsy singer Phoebe Smith, and her brother Charlie Scamp. Phoebe was recorded at her post-war home in Suffolk, but she had been born in Faversham, and belonged to the very large Scamp family of travellers, based predominantly in East Kent. Although we have no recordings of their songs, I’ve also provided information on other members of Phoebe and Charlie’s family – the uncles from whom Phoebe learned songs, and others of her own generation who are known to have been singers.
Needless to say, if you spot any errors, or can provide me with additional information about any of the singers covered, please do get in touch via info@kenttrad.org.
Andy Turner
19th May 2026
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