And the other Stan Hugill book to get hold of is "Sailortown", a sort of gazetteer of all the sailortowns round the world in their heyday. Street maps of places like New Orleans and Liverpool back in the 1880s and so forth.

It give the context for the songs in the other books. As he points out, while people on shore wrote sea-songs about the sea, sailors normally made their shanties about having a good time (or a bad time) in the bars and the bawdy houses ashore.

Though there were some shore poets who got it right - in his preface to "Sailortown", Stan Hugill cites C.Fox Smith, as someone who "gives us in two lines the outlook of the windbag man":

"An Christ", says Dan, "for a night in port, an' a Dago fiddler's tunr,
An' just one whiff of the drinks again, in a Callao saloon."