Billy Bowman's Band

While browsing in a Cumbrian bookshop at the weekend I found a collection of Cumbrian Memories published by the local WI Federation; inside was a short piece (undated) recalling Billy Bowman and his sister arriving on a motorbike and sidecar to play at hunt balls and village dances. Denis Westmorland has a lovely song about Billy Bowman's Band, and Colin Armstrong's excellent song The Pride of Lorton Town has the line "Oh, I saw her at the hunt ball dance to Billy Bowman's band".

I wonder if there are any more memories of the band out there? Or even, by some miracle, some recordings of the band perhaps.

A Liverpool ballad singer

Some of the best observations of mid-19th century life in England come from outsiders such as the American writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving and Herman Melville. They noticed and recorded what English writers often took for granted.

Here is a wonderful description of a Liverpool ballad singer by Herman Melville.

In Redburn, a semi-fictional account of his voyage to Liverpool in 1839, Herman Melville describes the character of a street ballad-singer.

"But one of the most curious features of the scene is the number of sailor ballad-singers, who, after singing their verses, hand you a printed copy, and beg you to buy. One of these persons, dressed like a man-of-war's-man, I observed every day standing at a corner in the middle of the street. He had a full, noble voice, like a church-organ; and his notes rose high above the surrounding din. But the remarkable thing about this ballad-singer was one of his arms, which, while singing, he somehow swung vertically round and round in the air, as if it revolved on a pivot. The feat was unnaturally unaccountable; and he performed it with the view of attracting sympathy; since he said that in falling from a frigate's mast-head to the deck, he had met with an injury, which had resulted in making his wonderful arm what it was.

I made the acquaintance of this man, and found him no common character. He was full of marvelous adventures, and abounded in terrific stories of pirates and sea murders, and all sorts of nautical enormities. He was a monomaniac upon these subjects; he was a Newgate Calendar of the robberies and assassinations of the day, happening in the sailor quarters of the town; and most of his ballads were upon kindred subjects. He composed many of his own verses, and had them printed for sale on his own account. To show how expeditious he was at this business, it may be mentioned, that one evening on leaving the dock to go to supper, I perceived a crowd gathered about the Old Fort Tavern; and mingling with the rest, I learned that a woman of the town had just been killed at the bar by a drunken Spanish sailor from Cadiz. The murderer was carried off by the police before my eyes, and the very next morning the ballad-singer with the miraculous arm, was singing the tragedy in front of the boarding-houses, and handing round printed copies of the song, which, of course, were eagerly bought up by the seamen."

The ballad is probably now lost to view; given the speed of composition the ballad singer in the tale above may simply have reprinted a ballad from stock which more or less told the same story. Murder ballads were pretty commonplace; most printers would have had a few to hand which could be utilised to fit any particular set of circumstances. A really sensational story like the Red Barn murder however would generate lots of new songs which could sell very well indeed.

Christmas Waits

In addition to the street singers and musicians already described, Nathaniel Hawthorne also wrote in his journals about some of the English Christmas customs. While the family was staying in Southport in 1856 they were entertained by what he termed 'Waits'.

"The Christmas Waits came to us on Christmas eve, and on the day itself, in the shape of little parties of boys or girls, singing wretched doggerel rhymes, and going away well pleased with the guerdon of a penny or two. Last evening came two or three older choristers at pretty near bedtime, and sang some carols at our door. They were psalm tunes, however. Everybody with whom we have had to do, in any manner of service, expects a Christmas-box; but, in most cases, a shilling is quite a satisfactory amount. We have had holly and mistletoe stuck up on the gas-fixtures and elsewhere about the house."


This was a change from Hawthorne's previous Chrismas, spent in a Liverpool lodging house;- "Early in the morning of Christmas day, long before daylight, I heard music in the street, and a woman's voice, powerful and melodious, singing a Christmas hymn. Before bedtime I presume one half of England, at a moderate calculation, was the worse for liquor." However it may be that he was feeling the pain of being separated from his wife who was abroad in Lisbon while he was confined to his Consular duties. Certainly Christmas in 1854 had been a moment of great personal contenment, and Hawthorne then wrote "I think I have been happier this Christmas than ever before,--by my own fireside, and with my wife and children about me,--more content to enjoy what I have,--less anxious for anything beyond it in this life. My early life was perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life; it having been such a blank that any thereafter would compare favorably with it."

He was struck by the abundance of food in the shops before Christmas; this is London in 1857 - "The shops in London begin to show some tokens of approaching Christmas; especially the toy-shops, and the confectioners',--the latter ornamenting their windows with a profusion of bonbons and all manner of pygmy figures in sugar; the former exhibiting Christmas-trees, hung with rich and gaudy fruit. At the butchers' shops, there is a great display of fat carcasses, and an abundance of game at the poulterers'." Elsewhere in the Passages from the English Notebooks Hawthorne comments on the English fascination with meat on a visit to Skipton Market, "The English people really like to think and talk of butcher's meat, and gaze at it with delight; and they crowd through the avenues of the market-houses and stand enraptured round a dead ox."

Another Chritmas practice that Hawthorne noted was that of kissing under the mistletoe "On Christmas Eve and yesterday, there were little branches of mistletoe hanging in several parts of the house, in the kitchen, the entries, the parlor, and the smoking-room,--suspended from the gas-fittings. The maids of the house did their utmost to entrap the gentlemen boarders, old and young, under the privileged places, and there to kiss them, after which they were expected to pay a shilling. It is very queer, being customarily so respectful, that they should assume this license now, absolutely trying to pull the gentlemen into the kitchen by main force, and kissing the harder and more abundantly the more they were resisted. A little rosy-cheeked Scotch lass--at other times very modest--was the most active in this business. I doubt whether any gentleman but myself escaped. I heard old Mr. S----- parleying with the maids last evening, and pleading his age; but he seems to have met with no mercy, for there was a sound of prodigious smacking immediately afterwards. J-----[Hawthorne's son, Julian] was assaulted, and fought most vigorously; but was outrageously kissed,--receiving some scratches, moreover, in the conflict. The mistletoe has white, wax-looking berries, and dull green leaves, with a parasitical stem."

Ballad chanters and croakers

Nathaniel Hawthorne was the American Consul in Liverpool from 1853 to 1857, and during his posting he kept journals of his life in England. He published some of his impressions in his book Our Old Home, and further extracts from his journals were published in two volumes after his death as Passages from the English Notebooks.

Within these Notebooks there are several references to street musicians and singers; the references are not all complimentary but they do show us something about the kind of people who played or sang in public, and what they sounded like to an educated American gentleman. Hawthorne doesn't claim any musical expertise, and his tastes appear to be quite conventional; he appreciates the singing of Jenny Lind, but is more moved at hearing Samuel Lover sing his Irish songs, or by one of Robert Burns' sons singing one of his father's compositions.

Hawthorne clearly found the street singers quite difficult to listen to:- "The ballad-singers are the strangest, from the total lack of any music in their cracked voices." (Passages from the English Notebooks, entry for June 20 1854) This may be a general observation based on his first encounter with a ballad-singer in Chester; "I passed, to-day, a man chanting a ballad in the street about a recent murder, in a voice that had innumerable cracks in it, and was most lugubrious." (Passages, November 5 1853) At any rate he seems to have met enough similar examples to describe the style thus; "Ballad-singers, or rather chanters or croakers, are often to be met with in the streets," (Passages, 1 December 1853)

Later, while on a visit to London, Hawthorne was favourably impressed by one particular street singer - but it turned out there were extenuating circumstances:-
"There is a woman who has several times passed through this Hanover Street, in which we live, stopping occasionally to sing songs under the windows; and last evening, between nine and ten o'clock, she came and sang "Kathleen O'Moore" richly and sweetly. Her voice rose up out of the dim, chill street, and made our hearts throb in unison with it as we sat in our comfortable drawing-room. I never heard a voice that touched me more deeply. Somebody told her to go away, and she stopped like a nightingale suddenly shot; ... It seems she was educated to sing at the opera, and married an Italian opera-singer, who is now dead; lodging in a model lodging-house at threepence a night, and being a penny short to-night, she tried this method, in hope of getting this penny." (Passages, October 3 1855)

Hawthorne lived on the Wirral bank of the River Mersey in the elegant gated enclave of Rock Park, travelling across to his Consular offices in Liverpool by ferry. Aboard the ferry he was struck by the abject poverty of so many beggars, yet he recognised the dignity shown by these people and his journals describe one such "elderly beggar, with the raggedest of overcoats, two great rents in the shoulders of it disclosing the dingy lining, all bepatched with various stuff covered with dirt,...--a miserable object; but it was curious to see how he was not ashamed of himself, but seemed to feel that he was one of the estates of the kingdom, and had as much right to live as other men." (Passages, December 10 1853)

Among the beggars who travelled on the ferries were bands of musicians; Hawthorne may not have thought much of the music, but the sadness of their situation clearly affected him.
"On board the ferry, until the coldest weather began, there were always some wretched musicians, with an old fiddle, an old clarinet, and an old verdigrised brass bugle, performing during the passage, and, as the boat neared the shore, sending round one of their number to gather contributions in the hollow of the brass bugle. They were a very shabby set, and must have made a very scanty living at best. Sometimes it was a boy with an accordion, and his sister, a smart little girl, with a timbrel,--which, being so shattered that she could not play on it, she used only to collect halfpence in." (Passges, December 1 1853)

The young boy with the accordion made a deep impression on Hawthorne, as he recorded in his journal two years later: "There is a little boy often on board the Rock Ferry steamer with an accordion,--an instrument I detest; but nevertheless it becomes tolerable in his hands, not so much for its music, as for the earnestness and interest with which he plays it. His body and the accordion together become one musical instrument on which his soul plays tunes, for he sways and vibrates with the music from head to foot and throughout his frame, half closing his eyes and uplifting his face, as painters represent St.Cecilia and other famous musicians; and sometimes he swings his accordion in the air, as if in a perfect rapture. After all, my ears, though not very nice, are somewhat tortured by his melodies, especially when confined within the cabin. The boy is ten years old, perhaps, and rather pretty; clean, too, and neatly dressed, very unlike all other street and vagabond children whom I have seen in Liverpool. People give him their halfpence more readily than to any other musicians who infest the boat." (Passages, June 11 1855)

Elsewhere in the Notebooks Hawthorne also describes the holiday scenes of "pale-looking" factory workers enjoying days out on the river, or in resorts such as Southport, where music and dancing and fairground entertainments provided a release from the toil of the mills and factories.

This is a valuable contemporary account of England in the early 1850's as seen by a sympathetic outsider; Hawthorne made a record of scenes which others simply took for granted, and even if he didn't much enjoy the songs or music he heard in the streets he still was sensitive to the people who produced them.

Magdalene Laundries: Bizarre Opening

It is a bit late in the day to catch up with the film 'Magdalene Laundries', but as it has just been broadcast on Channel 4 on 30 November it has been my first sighting of it. It is a powerful film which portrays the sheer awfulness of treatment issued to 'errant' women in Catholic Ireland in the 1960's - although such treatment isn't confined to Ireland, or to Catholics, nor to the (not so distant) past. Young women and girls who had illegitimate children, or who were thought to be morally at risk were sent to institutions run by nuns - portrayed in the film as cruel and sadistic, but who were probably in reality as much victims of a harsh moral climate as the inmates themselves.

The film began badly; there is a wedding scene with Irish music playing but a sinister note is introduced by a priest singing the song 'The Well Below the Valley' which tells of a girl who has had illegitimate children and will have to pay penance in purgatory for her sins. The scenes then show a girl being raped by her cousin while the wedding celebrations merrily continue.

BUT - and this reveals huge difficulties. The song 'The Well Below the Valley' had a reputation as an unlucky song as the full version describes incest and infanticide; by the 1960's hardly anybody in Ireland sang it except a few among the travelling community. No priest would have sung it. It would never, ever, have been sung at a wedding. ( I shall pass over the sheer anachronism of the highly decorated bodhran the priest is seen to be playing.)

The song was popularised in the 1970's by the Irish folk band Planxty who had learned it from the recording of an Irish Traveller, John Reilly, who had died from malnutrition in 1969. But its theme ensured that it is still seen as a 'difficult' song and other recordings of the song are still relatively rare.

Above all it isn't a song for a social occasion and it is this inability to understand cultural contexts that grates so much that for me it undermines the truth of the rest of the film.

Denvir's Penny Irish Library

If you perform a Google search for "John Denvir", you will likely be asked whether you really meant to search for John Denver. In the 19th Century John Denvir (1834-1916) was a noted Liverpool Irishman and a strong supporter of the republican cause. Although born in Ireland while his father was working there, Denvir belonged to an Irish community that was well established in Liverpool before the 1840's. As a young boy in Liverpool he witnessed the terrible scenes of distress among migrants escaping the Famine, scenes which powerfully influenced his political development as an Irish nationalist. His autobiography, 'The Life Story of an Old Rebel', was first published in 1910, and it is now available to read online at Project Gutenburg.

It is well worth reading for the story it gives of how the Irish in Britain developed a heightened political consciousness which was almost entirely based on Irish events, rather than on their own experiences in their 'home' community. Denvir himself contributed significantly to this expression of a distinct Irish cultural and political identity by publishing a series of penny booklets in the 1870's in his 'Irish Library'. These were sold by the thousands at the time but are extremely rare today. I've had to look in the British Library catalogue to find a list of his titles and I've shown them below to indicate how 'Irishness' was being expressed at the time.


Denvir's Penny Library, later issued as Denvir's Penny illustrated Irish Library
Published in Liverpool in two volumes in a monthly series, 1873-1874

No. 1 Ireland: her monks at home & abroad. Richard J. O'Neill
No. 2 Catechism of Irish history. John Francis MacArdle
No. 3 The Book of Irish Poetry. John Denvir
No. 4 The Second Book of Irish Poetry. John Denvir
No. 5 The Third Book of Irish Poetry. John Denvir
No. 6 Biography of Marshal MacMahon, Duke of Magenta. W.J. Ashton
No. 7 The red hand of Ulster; or, The captive chief of Tyrconnell. John Denvir
No. 8 The life of Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan. John Hand
No. 9 The life of O'Connell.
No. 10 How Ned Joyce went to his own funeral.
No. 11 The Life of Robert Emmet. John Hand
No.12 A wreath of Irish song and story

Vol. 2 No. 13 What is home rule? Hugh Heinrick
Vol. 2 No. 14 The camp fires of the legion in the late Franco-Prussian war. J. Lysaght Finigan
Vol. 2 No. 15 Hugh O'Neill, the great Ulster chieftain. Slieve Donard
Vol. 2 No. 16 Rosaleen Dhu; or, The twelve pins of bin-a-bola: an Irish drama in three acts. John Denvir
Vol. 2 No. 17 The story of '98. Ross E. Trevor
Vol. 2 No. 18 Home rule ballads. John Denvir
Vol. 2 No. 19 Irish street ballads. John Hand
Vol. 2 No. 20 The Irish in England. Hugh Heinrick
Vol. 2 No. 21 The Irish in the United States of America. John Denvir
Vol. 2 No. 22 Brian Boru and the Danish invasion. Daniel Crilly
Vol. 2 No. 23 "God save Ireland!" or, The rescue of Kelly & Deasey. Slieve Donard
Vol.2 No. 24 Our Irish Christmas garland

"Slieve Donard" was the pen name used by John Denvir

Celebrating the last shantyman

Last weekend, November 18 &19, a large and very loud group of singers met in Liverpool to wish a happy hundredth birthday to the last of the working shantymen, Stan Hugill. Stan may have died in 1992, but his spirit was very emphatically present at this celebration of the songs of the sea which he did so much to preserve.

Stan was born on the other side of the Mersey at the Coastguard station in Hoylake, Cheshire in 1906 where his father was one of the Coastguards. His father and grandfather were both singers, and their songs were written down in notebooks which were passed down to Stan. The family moved to other stations before returning to Liverpool where Stan finished his schooling, and from where he began his sailing career in the early 1920's. On board the last of the commercial sailing ships Stan learned the work songs of the sailors; the shanties which accompanied the heavy tasks of heaving and hauling. Stan was the shantyman on the Garthpool, the last British four-masted bark, which was wrecked off Cape Verde in 1929. After further adventures ashore and at sea, including four years in a German POW camp, Stan became an instructor at the Outward Bound School at Aberdovey, Wales from 1950 to 1975.

It was during a period of enforced rest from his work at the School following a broken leg that Stan began to research sea shanties, the results of which he published in 1961 in the magisterial "Shanties from the Seven Seas". The book met an enthusiastic response in the atmosphere of the post-war British Folk Revival, and Stan himself found an welcoming audience for his songs in the folk clubs during the Sixties and later. To his delight and surprise the new generation were able to replicate the rough and ready sound of a ship's crew that to his ears was nearly as good the original. In Liverpool the Spinners folk group especially found inspiration from Stan, and he wrote regular articles in his 'Bosun's Locker' column for 'Spin' magazine. A group of Liverpool singers, Stormalong John, sang with Stan frequently, most memorably perhaps at the 1984 Garden Festival. Until his death in 1992 Stan travelled all over the world inspiring new audiences with the real salt flavour of shanties. This weekend in Liverpool was a chance for the younger generation to pay tribute to Stan.

As yet there is no memorial to Stan where the old Coastguard Cottages once stood in Hoylake; perhaps his songs and his books are his best memorial, but he well deserves some kind of permanent tribute in Wirral or in the port city of Liverpool.

Matthew Edwards

What makes a traditional singer?

In a fascinating article on the Musical Traditions website Mike Yates considers how he 'mistakenly' took the Sussex singer Bob Blake for a genuine traditional singer.

Mike Yates is probably the most experienced collector of traditional songs alive today, and clearly he has thought about this topic for a long time before publishing his thoughts. It seems that in this case the singer learned his songs almost wholly from printed sources, rather than learning them through oral tradition from his family or community. However Bob Blake seems to have been accepted by other 'traditional' singers as one of their own, and possibly it was this desire for acceptance that motivated Bob Blake in the first place. He wanted to be able to sing songs in the same way as the old timers he heard in the pubs in Sussex.

I wish more people were moved by this same simple aim; to be able to join in with other singers and to be accepted by them on equal terms. Singers like to hear each other sing, and nothing is more valuable than the respect of one's peers. Clearly Bob Blake did win such respect - and, on the basis of his few recordings, he richly deserved it.

Bob Blake didn't seek to win fame; he wanted the approval of the crowd in the pub. If somebody like Mike Yates came along and "collected" his songs that was well and good, although he was suspiciously reticent as to where he came by these same songs.

In the end it may be more a matter of how the songs are sung, and listened to, than how they are learned, that defines what is 'traditional'; communal acceptance by one's fellow singers (and audience) may be more significant than an authentic history.