Following a brief, but very fruitful, visit to the Local Studies centre at Kendal Library I can now add some details of the folk-song competitions in Kendal in the early years of the 20th century.

The main source of information is an article by the Kidson scholar, John Francmanis, in the journal Rural History, Volume 11:2 (2000), pp.181-205, "The Folk Song Competition: An Aspect of the Search For an English National Music" published by Cambridge University Press. The library also has a lot of information about the Westmorland Music Festivals, including some of the programmes.

The competitions were held as part of the Westmorland Music Festivals which had been organised annually by Mary Wakefield since 1885, and which even now still continue biennially in her name.

The newly established English Folk Song Society was eager to collect new songs, and from 1902 to 1906 they supported the competitions in Kendal to gather such songs. There were also later competitions in Brigg, Lincolnshire and Frome, Somerset as well.

Frank Kidson judged the Kendal entries in 1902, 1903 and 1904; but as the terms of the competition required previously unpublished songs he had to eliminate several entries each year on the grounds that they had already been published. Cecil Sharp was the judge in 1905 and 1906, and he was quite strict about excluding songs which he did not think were folk songs.

In spite of all these restrictions a good few songs were sung, and of these a much smaller few were collected and printed in the Journal of the Society.

The Festival programmes which listed the entrants show that there was a thriving singing tradition in Westmorland, whether or not the songs met with the approval of the judges.

Anne Gilchrist visited some of the competitors in 1909, and she wrote about her experiences in the Journal of the Lakeland Dialect Society in 1942.

I'll add some more information about the singers and their songs in a later post.