Tag: wikimedia

Was Sir Walter Raleigh a murderer?

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Sir Walter Raleigh painted by Nicholas Hilliard, from the The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei via the Wikimedia

Ex-Naval man, 20th century historian and Roman Catholic Bishop, David Mathew describes Sir Walter Raleigh’s importance in 1596 like this: ‘With Hawkins, Drake and Grenville lost on service and Frobisher dead the previous year, Sir Walter Raleigh alone remained. Though much less of a naval figure, for he was in essence a Renaissance magnifico, Raleigh set the lines of later doctrine.’

British schoolchildren are taught that he was an important figure in Queen Elizabeth I’s court and navy, and that he was always getting into trouble with his queen, on one occasion for secretly marrying one of her ladies-in-waiting. But was he also a heartless murderer?

A street ballad in Samuel Pepys’s ballad collection certainly suggests he was. Read the story as told in a ballad that was widely sung and part of the oral tradition in England and America well into the 20th century. Sussex singer, fisherman and ferryman Johnny Doughty had a a particularly good version.

It’s sometimes also known as the Sweet Trinity and has its own Wikipedia entry. Mudcat has versions, and a surprising range of really good tunes for the song.

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Three score and ten – the greatest fishing disaster ballad

the_storm_engraving_by_william_miller_after_van_de_velde-470

The chilling engraving The Storm by William Miller after Van de Velde,
published in 1858, taken from the Wikimedia. They’re not English East Coast
fishing smacks, but sadly I haven’t been able to find a suitable engraving
from the correct era

‘As day after day passes and no tidings arrive of the missing Grimsby smacks, it is beginning to be realised that the gale of the 9th ult. will prove one of the most disastrous to the Grimsby fishing trade on record. altogether nearly a dozen fishing vessels, carrying between 60 and 70 hands, are missing.

‘Most of the vessels were provisioned for eight or nine days, and many of them have been out for over a month. Of the safety of seven of them all hope has now been abandoned.’

Report from: The Hull Times, 2nd March 1889

Most people of my generation with a long-standing interest in traditional music have probably sung this song at one time or another, particularly those who like me come from nearby one of the the East Coast major fishing ports.

It’s a big favourite with a magnificent, anthemic chorus, and a powerful theme, and it’s also a song that some of us connect with some remarks  made by old Sam Larner in relation to a storm he remembered from his childhood. Back in the 1950s, he told Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl that the big East Coast storm that people remembered was in 1884, and that there was a saying: ‘Oh dear, oh Lor – the dreadful fishing of 1884.’

Well, Jim Potter has been digging around and has discovered that the song actually refers to a storm in 1889, and that  some 70 hands from Grimsby – three score and ten – really did die that February night, as the newspaper quotation above shows.

This is February 2009, almost 120 years to the day since those brave and unfortunate fishermen met their deaths. As many sailed from Grimsby, we can assume that quite a few were orphans or had been abandoned by their parents and were often treated pretty badly by their employers and surrogate guardians, as Anson makes clear in his book British Sea Fishermen.

Anyway, you can read all about Jim’s research at Folk Leads, find the original fisherman’s poem from which the song developed and read about the Three Score and Ten fishermen’s gravestone that he has identified .

I haven’t been able to make the link to his recording of the song work, so if you want to hear how this one goes, you’ll have to make do with my recording of this great old song.

For more songs at intheboatshed.net, click here.



Heckstall-Smith and du Boulay on the origin of 19th century racing yachts


Wood engraving The Yacht Race – A Sketch from the Deck of a
Competing Yacht, was published in Harper’s Weekly in  1872.
Taken from the Wikimedia Commons

Although Charles II was almost as enthusiastic about yachting as he was about his many mistresses, his collection of 16 yachts do not seem to have had much of an influence on later racers.

From their researches including studying Clark’s History of Yachting up to the year 1815, Heckstall-Smith and Du Boulay say later racing yachts derived their form largely from revenue cutters.

They write: ‘the fashionable type of cutter was about three and a quarter beams to her length, her midship section was so round it might have been drawn with a pair of compasses. She had a nearly vertical stem, and a  short counter high above the water. The greatest breadth was just abaft or close abreast of the mast. The bow was therefore bluff, and the run long and often not ungraceful.’

The type was known as ‘cod’s head and mackerel tail’ and had evolved  in competition with the craft used by smugglers. This seems to me to be a case of a rather imperfect form of evolution, if faster boats could have been achieved by moving the greatest beam aft, but there are some good stories about how the same boat builders worked for both smugglers and  the revenue men.

Living in Kent as I do, this one from Heckstall-Smith and du Boulay appeals to me particularly: ‘it has been recorded that Mr White of Broadstairs, whose descendants afterwards moved to Cowes, used to lay down two cutters side by side, very much as 19-metres and 15-metres are laid down today, and the Government officials used to puzzle their brains to puzzle out which would turn out the faster, knowing that whichever boat they bought, the other would be sold for smuggling.’

For more on revenue cutters at intheboatshed.net, click here.

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