Belvedere – Page 3 – Kent Trad: songs sung in Kent

Collected by James Madison Carpenter, Royal Alfred, Belvedere, 1928

James Madison Carpenter MSS Collection (JMC/1/5/4/B)

Carpenter typed the first two verses, but the bawdy verses which follow were handwritten.

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.

Songs

Blow Boys Blow (Roud 2624)
Down in the Meadows (The Meadows Down Below) (Roud 22910)
Heave Away (Roud 616)

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.