Hi JeffB,

It's really great to hear from you here. It's really interesting to learn about the interactions between the Bristol Shantymen and the Polish szanty scene. I have noted many correspondences in repertoire --these "lesser-known shanties" -- between the Bristol boys and Polish groups. Sorry if I have only mentioned these a few times in the thread.

Perhaps others here can also fill in details of what was going on around the time you mention, late 80s, in the interactions between Britain and Poland. Stan Hugill, Bristol Shantymen, and, I'd imagine, Stormalong John were all in attendence in Krakow in those years. But rather than just think about the inter-national exchanges, there were also probably some notable intra-national exchanges between the UK performers that were brought together for the occasion. Also there was probably a certain bit of new development or codification of repertoire in prep for performances, I'd think.

Related, here's the link to Stan's notes about his first visit to Krakow in '87: LINK
an excerpt:
Four Poles, two of them oceanographers, one a journalist and one a television producer, sent a video of their shanty singing, in Polish, to Tony Davis of the Liverpool folk group, the Spinners. As a result they were invited to take part in last year's Liverpool Shanty Festival, where they delighted everyone with their music. This group was called Stare Dzwony - the Old Bells. After that several shanty singers were invited by Jacek Reschke to Krakow to take part in the international shanty festival. As well as myself the invitation included Tony Davis who was in charge, Stormalong John from Liverpool, the Bristol Shantymen, Solant Breezes and two individual singers, Ian Woods and Rod Shearman. We were greeted with TV cameras, we were all mentioned in the Krakow newspapers and Marek, of the Old Bells, wrote a column about us in the magazine Wybrzeze. The Old Bells were formed in 1982 by Marek Szurawski and three friends and obtained their songs, which they translated into Polish, from my book Shanties from the Seven Seas. It seems that long before I reached Poland my name was known to a large following ofteenagers and I was told that I had been with them "in spirit" since the first performance in 1978.

What's really interesting for me is that the Polish singers (at first anyway) would not have been part of the "scene" through which they would automatically sing the most popular shanties of the Revival. By taking Stan's book and selecting songs to translate, it was something of a fresh look at it, and as a result, more of the less-performed songs would have been selected, by chance. And that might be one reason why we see so many Polish examples of these songs that are hardly performed in Anglophone circles.

Gibb