Tag: Sam Larner

Beyond the Quay, a CD of sea songs by Tom and Barbara Brown

Tom and Barbara Brown’s new album Beyond the Quay is
made up of sea songs

Tom and Barbara Brown are old friends, and I’m very pleased that they should should put out a CD of sea-songs. Songs connected with the sea  have been out of fashion around the folk scene’s clubs and festivals for far too long in this country.

Interestingly, even though I’ve recently heard the claim that sea shanties are the new Rock’n’Roll, there are none here. Instead, this CD is full of songs about ships, ports, sailors, and of course heroes and villains. Most are traditional and most belong to the West Country.

Tom and Barbara’s performances are marked by some very effective harmony singing, of which there are two excellent examples here: Young Susan and a version of The Death of Nelson to a tune learned by the couple from traditional source singer George Dunn of Staffordshire, with additional verses from the broadside ballad.

Another aspect of this disk that I particularly like is that it includes a very nice but less well known version of one of my favourites, The Bold Princess Royal. Tom’s version from Bristol is much harder to sing than the one I know from Sam Larner – so much so that he gets extra points from me for making an excellent job of it. I gather it came originally from a singer called Albert Lightfoot.

In the interests of historical veracity I should explain that Tom’s version has the same problem as Larner’s – he has the British ship being chased to windward, which seems unlikely as the Moorish pirates’ xebecs were far better to windward than the British boats during the era being described.

And I should also add that Tom and Barbara have been lucky enough to be supported on this CD by our old friend Keith Kendrick and young musicians and singers Emily and Hazel Askew.

Copies of Beyond the Quay are available direct from Doug Bailey at WildGoose Studios and from folk music CD stockists generally. While you’re over at Doug’s emporium, do take a look at some of the other recordings he has on offer including Keith Kendrick’s recent CD Songs from the Derbyshire Coast.

Further information about Tom and Barbara Brown and a programme of their performances and general doings is available from their website http://www.umbermusic.co.uk .

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Hervey Benham tells stories from the great storms of 1883 and 1884

The chilling engraving The Storm by William Miller after Van de Velde,
published in 1858. From the Wikimedia

The great gales of ’83 and ’84 were legendary. The song Three Score and Ten describing their effects on the East Coast fishing fleet was widely sung from Yorkshire down to Cornwall, and when talking to Ewan MacColl in the 1950s, old Norfolk fisherman Sam Larner said that as a boy in those years he remembered seeing the body of one of the sailors washed up on the shore through the window of a mortuary.

It seems that the 1884 storm was a double hit, for in the months before the 1884 storm fish had suddenly become so plentiful that the prices paid at the fish markets were very low – so a period of relative poverty for the fishing community was followed by the tragedy of many deaths.

Larner said that after these events there was a local saying: ‘Oh dear, oh lor, the dreadful fishing of 1884.’

A few years before MacColl interviewed Larner, Hervey Benham recorded the dramatic recollection below and published it in his excellent book The Last Stronghold of Sail – the story of the Essex sailing smacks, coasters and barges. You might find a copy at ABE Books.

I should explain that the ‘skilling’ was the practice of dredging for oysters off Terschilling on the Dutch coast, and bringing them back in wet holds. It was a big business in those days.

‘The terrible losses in the great gales of 1883 and 1884 had as much as anything to do with the end of the ‘skilling’. Five smacks, Mascotte, Conquest, Recruit, Pride and William and Mary, and 27 men from Brightlingsea were lost in two gales in those years, days of disaster which the tablets round the church walls recall.

‘From Charlie Death, a grand old veteran of the place, I heard how the cutter Express came as near being lost as was possible in the 1884 gale. About seven in the morning they were in a gale of wind with a seven-cloth jib set abaft the mast, when a sea broke aboard and took everything out of her except the mast and bowsprit. One hand, Walter Crampton, was washed overboard and lost. Sails, boat, spars and bulwarks were gone, and, believe it or not, even the cross trees from the mast. The ballast, dredges, and eight thousand oysters in her hold had shifted so that she lay with her upper dead-eyes in the water.

‘They let go a couple of dredges over her bow to try to bring her up to the sea, but it was to no avail, and as fast as they tried to get the ballast back it shot up into her side again. At two o’clock in the afternoon another sea swept them, taking the hatches and ripping up the decks. Now they were a floating wreck, and the men felt inclined to give up, but Death got them to set a five-cloth jib abaft the mast, and, having done this, they left him with some rum at four o’clock in the afternoon lashed to the tiller. Once he was swept away bya a sea, but at dawn the battered Express crept into Yarmouth Roads and anchored. Next day they sailed her home – and drew four shillings a head!’