Real Sailor songs Reprint intro

Subject: Real Sailor songs Reprint intro
From: GUEST,Nick Dow
Date: 18 Feb 23 - 05:17 AM

Does any kind soul have access to the reprint of John Ashton's real sailor songs, containing Bert Lloyd's introduction? If so could you post it here? The reprint was given to me by the printer John Foreman (The broadsheet king) and I lent it out and the rest you know. I now only own a PDF of the original. Thank you

Subject: RE: Real Sailor songs Reprint intro
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 18 Feb 23 - 09:24 AM

Nick, it's 11 pages long. Would you like me to scan it and email it?

Subject: RE: Real Sailor songs Reprint intro
From: Manitas_at_home
Date: 18 Feb 23 - 10:52 AM

It's a bit bigger than that. We have a copy that was given to me by John Foreman.
Nick, you are welcome to our copy.

Subject: RE: Real Sailor songs Reprint intro
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 18 Feb 23 - 11:00 AM

You can print the PDF, set the output on the higher quality printer settings, and the document will come out pretty good and at least usable if not the same exact size (printers usually need to leave at least a 1/4 margin unless you have a printer that does photos.)

Subject: RE: Real Sailor songs Reprint intro
From: GUEST,Nick Dow
Date: 18 Feb 23 - 11:10 AM

Thank you Steve yes please and Thanks for your kind offer Masnitas. I have been attempting to post a bio of John Ashton however the system will not let me for some reason. I'll have another go later.

Subject: RE: Real Sailor songs Reprint intro
From: Joe Offer
Date: 18 Feb 23 - 02:38 PM

Hi, Nick - email me if you're having trouble posting something. I have a few suspicions what the cause may be.

[e-mail]

Subject: RE: Real Sailor songs Reprint intro
From: Steve Gardham
Date: 18 Feb 23 - 02:59 PM

Done!
Yes, my computer won't go directly to the Cat. I get a 440 error when I try, but I can access it via Google. Odd!

Subject: RE: Real Sailor songs Reprint intro
From: Lighter
Date: 18 Feb 23 - 03:09 PM

Same here! But till now I couldn't post today!

Subject: RE: Real Sailor songs Reprint intro
From: Lighter
Date: 18 Feb 23 - 03:12 PM

But I still can't post to the "Gee, but I want to go home" thread.

Subject: RE: Real Sailor songs Reprint intro
From: Joe Offer
Date: 19 Feb 23 - 04:53 PM

This may help, although it appears that neither of these PDF versions have the Bert Lloyd introduction:

The Online Books Page

Real Sailor-Songs

Title:	Real Sailor-Songs
Editor:	Ashton, John, 1834-1911
Note:	London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent; New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1891
Link:	PDF files at Rochester
Link:	page images at HathiTrust
Stable link here:	https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupid?key=olbp78842
Subject:	Ballads, English
Subject:	Folk songs, English
Subject:	Sea songs
Subject:	Sea shanties
Call number:	PN6110 .S4 A7
Other copies:	Look for editions of this book at your library, or elsewhere.

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Subject: Book: Real Sailor songs Reprint Introduction
From: Joe Offer
Date: 19 Feb 23 - 10:03 PM

An anonymous benefactor sent me scans of the Bert Lloyd introduction to John Ashton's Real Sailor Songs, and they were neatly ORR's by my scanner's software. Here it is:


INTRODUCTION
John Ashton. The name is familiar but of the man we know little. Such report as we have is due to the labours of Leslie Shepard, most diligent of diggers in the field (or “veritable dunghill”) of stall and street-corner literature. He tells us Ashton was born in London, September 22, 1834, that his father was a shipbroker and his mother a gunmaker. Whatever his own means of livelihood, at the age of forty he abandoned them and settled to research in the British Museum, pursuing his curious passion for commoners’ culture from his seat in the great round Reading Room, in company with noble-whiskered gentlemen of loftier minds and weightier preoccupations whose names have for the most part sunk without trace.

Ashton’s chase after oddities resulted in easy enough captures, and within a single decade he was able to display them in such compilations as Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century (1882), Humour, Wit and Satire of the Seventeenth Century (1883), A Century of Ballads (1887), Modern Street Ballads (1888), and the present volume of Real Sailor Songs (1891). The books sold well enough, though it seems probable that Ashton made little money from them. Towards the end of his life he was living frugally in Islington, and his death on July 29, 1911, passed unnoticed. Of all his books, perhaps the one most opened nowadays is Modern Street Ballads, but without doubt the most imposing in appearance and content is the volume of Real Sailor Songs.

And what is the force of that “real”? Does it imply songs sung by sailors? Exclusive to sailors? Giving us the core of truth about sailors’ life? Hardly. Some of the songs in the collection are professional stage compositions more current among landsmen than seadogs, and offering a view quite contrary to fact. For instance, “The Are thus a” (No. 20) has words written by Prince Hoare and a fine tune by William Shield (a tune subsequently re¬used for various folk and near-folk texts including “Bold Nelson’s Praise”).

The song appeared in the Covent Garden opera Lock and Key not long after the Arethusa’s first action in 1778 and, as one sea writer observed, it “sets truth and seamanship alike at defiance”, for in the song the British ship trounces the Belle Poule, but in fact she took a terrible beating and would have sunk if the French vessel had not been frightened off by the arrival of the English seventy-fours. Still, relatively few of Ashton’s choice of sea songs come from the world of high art. By far the greater number were made by hacks who wrote ballads for the broadside houses to print. These would be offered for sale on the stationers’ stalls, or on street corners by itinerant singers, or by pedlars carrying their packs from door to door and across the countryside. A small proportion of the songs were demonstrably made by seafarers. Obligingly, the ballad-sheet of “England’s Glory; or The French King Stripped” (No. 13) tells us that the piece was composed by a Captain Roberts (the event occurred in 1745). “Hawkes’s Engagement” (No. 16) has every appearance of being written by someone aboard the flagship Royal George, though the engagement took place on November 20 not 15 as the song says. Nor can we doubt that the fine complaint ballad called “The Fancy Frigate” (No. 120) was made by some unhappy Jack who knew only too well what he was singing about. This ballad, probably composed during the first decade of the nineteenth century, a time when notoriously “too much importance was attached to the brightening of brass and too little to the condition of the ship as a fighting machine”, underwent various adaptations during the next fifty years, initially among navy men in the form of the song called “The La Pique" and subsequently among merchant seamen who named their remade song “The Flash Packet” or “The Dreadnought”.

It must be said that enthusiasts for sailor songs in Ashton’s time hardly worried at what he meant by “real”. They had an image of the seaman in mind, “clean white-trousered, neat blue abundant-button jacketed, glazed-hatted, long pigtailed, mahogany-waistcoated, quid-cheeked”, and any ballad of his adventures when trouncing the enemy at sea or chasing the girls ashore was to them as enlivening as a hot shot in a mustard pot. Who cared if even the names of the songs’ heroes were mangled, if “Brave Killeygrove” (No. 12) was in fact James Killigrew, or that “Bold Sawyer’ (No. 10), the taker of Goree in 1758, was actually Captain James Sayer? What mattered was that the men were lions and here were the anthems to celebrate them.

We were not always so proud of the tarpaulin breed. For all the present day flourish about Drake’s oaken heroes, the English seaman of Tudor times did not stand high in the general reckoning. The Spaniards and Portuguese were acknowledged as better sailors, and at home were treated as such. True, by superior power of gun-metal our fleet pummelled the Armada at the end of July 1588; but during the August the seamen were dying of dysentery and typhoid in the streets of Margate and other ports, through bad food and overcrowding in the ships and with no hospital willing to receive them ashore. Seemingly as an act of charity, men crippled and put ashore after the brush with the Armada were given a special licence to beg. None of this shows in any ballad surviving from the time of the virgin Queen when obsequious Deloney was the most prolific ballad-sheet author, and anonymous adventure pieces such as “The Sailor’s Only Delight” (No. 33) were best favourites with the backstreet singers (this song has lived vigorously into the twentieth century, altered somewhat for the better but still identifiable as the ballad registered in 1611 and probably referring to the exploits of Diggory Piper in the Sweepstakes towards the end of the sixteenth century).

At that time, and for more than two centuries after, there was little distinction between merchantmen and men-o’-war, and the song repertory of Navy men and merchant crews was identical. Indeed, it was only in the late days of sail, following the growth of commercial shipping lines, that the song-funds of the two services became separate to an appreciable degree. Till then, such pieces as “Captain Ward and the Rainbow” (No. 4), “The Benjamin's Lamentation’ (No. 50), “The Greenland Whale Fishery” (No. 124), “The Female Smuggler” (No. 121)—all old songs that have remained evergreen in twentieth century tradition—were as likely to be raised in the middle deck of a man-o’-war as in the foc’sle of a merchantman. So too were some songs of later composition, the like of “Shannon and Chesapeake" (No. 35) and “Fair Phoebe and her Darkeyed Sailor” (No. 72). However, by the 1830s, and to an increasing extent during the subsequent half-century, lyrical songs such as abound through the latter part of Ashton’s anthology were more comfortable in the mouths of clippermen than of Navy Jacks.

To what extent do the compositions of Ashton’s choice reflect the facts of seafaring life as lived during the period spanned by the songs? Even allowing for the compiler’s conservatism, which we may guess at from the sour notes he appended to some mildly subversive pieces in Modern Street Songs, it is surprising that among his selection there are not more lamentations. The “real sailors” of the time had plenty to yammer about, with ships ill- provisioned, hygiene unknown, discipline harsh, risk of maiming or death from battle, shipwreck, or fall from the yards; and at the end of all, good chance of being defrauded of pay. A song of Nelson’s time, not in the present compilation though doubtless Ashton had seen it since it’s among the bundle he went through in the British Museum, is put in the mouth of an experienced sailor, a bonny fighter but wary of his superiors’ promises:

Now, boys, we are press’d away from our habitation,
And we leave wife and children in grief and starvation;
We venture our sweet lives in defence of our nation,
And we get nothing for it but toil and vexation.

On paper, the victualling scale of the old Navy was no famine pre-scription. A pound of salt pork or two of salt beef per man every other day, a pound of biscuit daily, a weekly issue of pease, oatmeal, butter (half a pound) and cheese (a pound) looks fair in amount if boring on the plate. Drink was mostly beer, a daily gallon to each man. An unbalanced diet, of course, and scurvy or dysentery were commonplace. The quality of the food was often poor, because contractors and pursers were in good position to profit at the expense of the men. Moreover, the resources for preserving victuals were primitive, and especially on long trips meat and meal became unfit for eating. We hear of biscuit full of blackheaded maggots, water infested with wrigglers, of sour beer, of men carving buttons from cheese as hard as horn. But the commonest complaint was against the ships’ pursers. One heartfelt ballad that made the Tower Hill taverns roar in Georgian times is called “The Saylor’s Complaint; or The True Character of the Purser of a Ship”:

As his name foully stinks, so his butter rank doth smell,
Both hateful to sailors, scarce good enough for hell,
The nation allows men what’s fitting to eat,
But he, curse attend him, gives to us musty meat;
With bisket that’s mouldy, hard stinking Suffolk cheese,
And pork cut in pounds,
And pork cut in pounds for to eat with our pease.

His oatmeal, or grout, known by the name burgooe,
Is fitting for nothing but make a sailor spew.
His bruis (brose), no better than common kitchen-grease,
The sailors are forced to eat with their pease.
Such beef-fat so nasty, we constantly use,
That’s but fit for the mast,
That’s fit for the mast or the greasing of shoes.

Now, since he’s so friendly, I’d give, as ’tis due,
By way of requital, a kind wish or two:
And first, may his brandy run all o’er the deck,
And he end his days in a rope with aking neck;
Or may he still eat and be never satisfy’d,
Still craving of more,
Still craving of more, but be never cloy’d.

Ship diseases, not infrequently started through diet deficiency became galloping epidemics through the close, crowded, unhygienic state of the men’s quarters. In the mid-eighteenth century, a doctor wrote: “The number of seaman in time of war who died by shipwreck, capture, famine, fire, or sword are but inconsiderable in respect of such as are destroyed by ship diseases and the usual maladies of intemperate climates.” As he wrote, the Seven Years’ War was raging, and at its end, 1,522 men were reported killed in action and more than 133,000 were lost through disease or desertion. On Anson’s voyage round the world, of the 1,955 men who sailed from England, 1,051 died on the trip. The figures give an ironical twist to a ballad of the time, written by a broadside hack, titled: “The Lucky Sailor; or The Sailor’s In¬vitation to Go with Admiral Anson”.

Our ships are all a-fitting up.
Again with Anson we will go.
I wish we may have but good luck.
My boy, I’d have you to go too,
For Anson is a lucky man;
Where’er he comes he makes ’em rue.

Poor victualling then, and stinking conditions; hard treatment too. One seaman wrote: “The hardest crust, with the freedom of your own native hills, is preferable to John Bull’s ‘beef and duff’, joined as it is with the rope’s end.” He was referring to the habit of ‘starting’, by which bos’uns or their mates, or even midshipmen would summarily strike out at the men as they went about their work, with a rope’s end, a cane, or maybe three rattans lashed together. There can have been few Navy men of the time without first-hand experience of the kind of bullies who “the moment they issue an order follow it with a stripe”, as one of Nelson’s bulldogs put it. Proud and experienced seaman particularly resented being struck by arrogant little midshipmen, new on board but already feeling their oats as budding officers. Samuel Leech, aboard the Macedonian during the war with the United States in 1812, wrote: “those little minions of power drove me round like a dog”; and a ballad—ignored by Ashton—called “The Jolly Sailor’s True Description of a Man-of-War” contains the verse:

There are snotty boys of midshipmen
Han’t done yet shitting yellow;
As to their age, some hardly ten
Strike many a brave fellow,
Who dare not prate at any rate
Nor seem in the least to mumble;
They’ll frap you still, do what you will;
It is but folly to grumble.

John Wetherell, who served in Cornwallis’s fleet aboard the Hermione, and suffered under its tyrannical captain, Philip Wilkinson, has this to say:

Lord George Gordon was midshipman of the Main Top and as I spoke he kicked me in the breast with his foot and ordered me to leave the duty to him. I answered that it was too bad to be kicked like a dog when in the act of doing what I thought was right, and made my way out on the yard arm. “Walk down Sir in a Moment, you damn’d mutinous rascal, and you shall have your desert,” says my Lord, and down he goes to the lieutenant on the quarter deck and made his story right on his side. Down goes I to the tribunal of justice. First salute I met was a blow on my head with a speaking trumpet, then called the master-at-arms and ordered him to put that damn’d young rascal in irons. This was readily complied with, so poor Jack was clap’t in the Brig as we term it . . .
Next day exercised guns firing at a Barrel with a flag on it. Two or three got each four dozen thro’ this day’s amusement as Wilkinson calls it.

As to formal flogging, every sea writer has his gruelling descriptions, though it is worth remembering that in the Navy this form of punishment, if more frequently administered, was seldom as cruel as in the Army. In some ships hardly a day passed without some luckless fellow being awarded a “four bag” (four dozen lashes), and the seaman’s mental list of “flogging captains” contained many names, particularly during the period 1750-1820, a high era for swinging the cat.
A testimony from the lower deck rings true. The account is from John Nicol, cooper aboard the 28-gun frigate Surprise, towards the end of the eighteenth century:

One of our men was whipped through the fleet for stealing some dollars from a merchant ship he was assisting to bring into port. It was a dreadful sight; the unfortunate sufferer tied down on the boat and rowed from ship to ship, getting an equal number of lashes at the side of the vessel from a fresh man. The poor wretch, to deaden his suffering, had drunk a whole bottle of rum a little before the time of punishment. When he had only two portions to get of his punishment the captain of the ship perceived he was tipsy and ordered the rest of the punishment to be delayed until he was sober. He was rowed back to the Surprise, his back swelled like a pillow, black and blue; some sheets of thick blue paper were steeped in vinegar and laid to his back. Before, he seemed insensible, now his shrieks rent the air. When better, he was sent to the ship where his tortures were stopped, and again renewed.

Perhaps tenderness of feeling persuaded Ashton to pass over the flogging songs, which aren’t numerous anyway. But he could hardly ignore the large and often lyrically excellent repertory of press-gang ballads, though the showing of his Nos. 37-44 offers but a smudgy reflection of the lineaments of that kind of songs, whose features became increasingly expressive in the course of the eighteenth century.

In William and Mary’s time, the number of naval ballads issued by the popular printing houses was much increased; evidence of England’s rising interest in sea matters. The war against Louis XIV (“Lewis that Christian Turk” as a song of the time calls him) was popular, and the general feeling was in favour of impressment, except of course among seafarers and men of the coastal towns liable to fall into the hands of the press. At that time, the common run of published ballads on the theme were written by landsmen, and they tended to be breezy affairs such as “The Maidens’ Frolick” that tells how six brisk London lasses dressed in sailor clothes rounded up a number of mild tailors in the back streets off the Strand, and at sword point “yet right or wrong they brought ’em along And happened to meet with three more in the throng. Then said lusty Jane: ‘You must serve King and Queen’. And thus these stout females did press full fourteen, And all taylors.”

“Duke William’s Frolick” (No. 37) and “The Female Press Gang” (No. 39) are of this sportive kind. But towards the end of the century the ballads of the press were being made by folk who knew all too well what they were singing of, and the high-feathered mood had given way in the main to apprehension or lament. In 1792 the Navy comprised less than 17,000 men. Two years later it had increased to more man 87,000, and by 1797 mere were 120,000 men in the fleet. We do not know the proportion of volunteers to those recruited against their will, but it will be understood that during those years, particularly in the area between the Nore and the Downs, the press was hot, and thousands of men were seized, sometimes by force as they walked the street, sometimes by stealth as they lay “snugly moored in Sot’s Bay”, befuddled in some waterside tavern. Then too, not infrequently, homeward bound merchant seamen were taken off their ships by the press tender before they had been paid their due wage, and thus if they had been on a long trip they lost not only a fair amount of money but were prevented from seeing their family after an absence of maybe years. Even the possession of an official ticket-of-leave might be no protection against the press, though at times sly seamen were able to lead the gangs a dance, as William Robinson, called Jack Nastyface by his shipmates, found he could do with the ticket he got after fighting at Trafalgar:

“I landed at Gosport, and proceeded on my road to the boundary of the town, where the soldiers stopped me: but, after showing them my liberty ticket, and having a little parley with them, I was allowed to go on. I bent my course forward until I reached Fareham, and being aware that a press gang was lurking about that neighbourhood, I felt very much inclined to give them a little trouble; I had gone nearly through the town unobserved by them, but at length the alarm was given that a sailor was making good his way in full sail to London; when two members of that worthless set of body snatchers set out in pursuit. I could, by keeping a good lookout, observe their movements and I walked sharply on; they commenced running. I did the same, and kept well on until I arrived at an inn by the road-side, when I thought proper to stop, and let them come up with me. I did not take any notice of them, nor show any appearance of alarm, but, supposing I was a prize, one of them grappled me on the starboard, and the other on the larboard side, by the collar of my jacket, demanding the name of the ship I belonged to; when coolly showing them my liberty ticket, they showered a broadside of curses on me for giving them such a run, and quietly left me to pursue my journey. After this, however, I had to contend with the land sharks, for on my arrival at Alton, I was stopped by a party of soldiers, to whose inspection I had again to exhibit my ticket of leave, and thus for thirty miles from the sea port was a poor seaman hunted by this despicable set, who are constantly watching in the bye lanes and fields to intercept any seaman who may be passing that way; the inducement held out to each of these men stealers is five pounds for each seaman they may capture; and thus many a poor fellow is hunted by these bloodhounds, who chase them with greater eagerness than the hunter pursues the fox.”

Specialists in sea song have criticized Ashton’s collection because there is little sign of the kind of pieces sung by the “roaring brutal dogs of the packet ships”, as Captain W. B. Whall calls them. But by no means all the sailors either in packets or men-o’-war were doggish, brutal, or given to roaring. That much we see from the artefacts in any maritime museum, the fond bits of scrimshaw, the classically-carved coconut shells, the elegant ship models in squarefaced flagons, the intricate fancy-knotted macrame work.

In any middle-deck or foc’sle before the days of general education, the number of men who could read was small. To keep his mind occupied off watch, the seaman busied his hands. Fortunately, material was always ready to hand: scrap wood for whittling, junk rope for fancy work. Knotting, one of the oldest of folk arts, was nowhere more beautifully practised than by early nineteenth-century seamen. The art declined during the clipper era because the ships were often undermanned and the men had small time to spare from their labours, but in the Navy of Nelson’s time a fine hand at fancy-knotting stood as high in middle-deck esteem as a good singer of songs.

There is no doubt of the singers’ standing, nor of the importance of the songs, not merely for amusement but for consolation and encouragement in the face of hideous circumstance. An anonymous sailor aboard the Genoa, (was his name Charles M’Pherson?) has left us a vivid account of the battle of Navarino and its aftermath, in which we read this curious passage: “We had now time to look at the dreadful scene of carnage on our own decks; the gory heap under the after-ladder was the first thing my eyes met. Already had a few of the men begun to perform the last sad duty to their comrades. I went down the cockpit ladder and the scene here was more horrible than before. The heavy smell of the place, and the stifled groans of my suffering shipmates brought a cold sweat over me: and I found myself so sick that I was obliged to sit down for a little on one of the steps of the ladder. On recovering I snatched up a lantern, and proceeded to look at those who were lying stretched on their backs. A voice (singing a sea song) came from a remote corner of the cockpit and on going forward I saw sitting upon the Doctor’s medicine chest, a marine of the name of Hill. I held up the lantern, and saw the poor fellow wanted both arms, the one a little above the elbow, the other a little below the shoulder.’

Behind the renowned conviviality of Jolly Jack Tar lay a cause that was not always amiable. Samuel Leech, at sea in the Macedonian during the war with America in 1812 describes how a sailor had narrowly escaped a flogging, and the crew, elated at his deliverance, insisted that he give them a concert: “Seated on a gun surrounded by scores of men he sang a variety of favourite songs, amid the plaudits and encores of his rough auditors. By such means as this, sailors contrive to keep up their spirits amidst constant causes of depression and misery.” Around the same time, Samuel Stokes was serving aboard the 98-gun Dreadnought. He wrote the account of his service some twenty years later when he was a reformed and sobersided fellow, and looking back to his time in the Dreadnought, he says: “The recollection of this part of my life past in so much wickedness, is very often a trouble to me, but while I belong to this ship I was counted a merry fellow, as I was always one of the first to dance and sing when the hands was turn’d up for that purpose, and that was every evening when duty and the weather would permit, and the Admiral as well as other officers would take a seat near us to see and hear us, and the more sin was mixt with our amusements, the more they was delighted. The sins of this ship was equal to the sin of Sodom, especially on the day we was paid, for we had on board thirteen women more than the number of our ship’s company, and not fifty of them married women. Our ship’s company I think was very near eight hundred men.”

Ah well, little enough sin is aired in the songs of Ashton’s choice, and not a great deal of grumble either, but a good amount of heart-of-oak swagger and fire-eating oratory that didn’t survive well in folk tradition. Perhaps the repertory of “real sailor songs” only gradually shifted its emphasis from the breezy celebration of battle to the recording of complaint and the recounting of lyrical passages, delicate or indelicate, and by and large Ashton had preferred the older songs and those made in the older mould. Typical of a whole genre of ballads that fell out of use among singers—but not among anthologists!—is the song of victory at La Hogue in 1692, “Admiral Russell’s total defeat of the French Fleet” (No. 3). Reputedly it was a favourite with sailors during the earlier half of the eighteenth century but later lost its shipboard popularity as the seaman’s view of his lot grew increasingly critical (true, the occasion celebrated in the La Hogue ballad was becoming remoter as time went on, but not so remote as, say, the events recounted in the adventurous but less jingoistic song of “Captain Ward and the Rainbow” which kept its hold on singers’ affections well into the twentieth century). Of “Admiral Russell’s total defeat of the French Fleet” an observer of the action off Toulon in 1744 wrote, some years later: “I myself heard the song about La Hogue sung by almost every man on board one ship the day of the battle of Toulon with very good effect, till the infamous behaviour of some in the fleet put an end to their song and changed their praises of the dead into curses of the living.”

Though from Elizabethan times to the period of Crimea every important naval event and many not so significant had inspired a crop of ballads, whether written by gentlemen ashore, ship’s officers, or half-educated pot poets, very few of the historical battle songs have any mark of being written by men before the mast. Notoriously the common folk have little sense of official history and smaller interest in it. Thus many a narrative song of great events was printed over and again for educated amateurs, and may have been long sung in the wardroom, yet swiftly dropped out of the ordinary seaman’s repertory and never took hold in tradition.

Without doubt the class of sea songs that survived best among the folk singers—notably among merchant seamen and fishermen—have been the kind of lyrical pieces exemplified by the heart of Ashton’s collection (Nos. 70-131). Many of these are of relatively late composition and it would not be too fanciful to imagine that the words of some were written by sailors using “the crown of a hat for a table and a pile of shot in the combings for an easy chair” as a seaman of the Genoa put it.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, just as the merchant ships were growing increasingly distinct from Navy vessels, so the men of the two services were becoming separate; more and more the Navy was being manned from the south, and the merchant marine from the northern counties and Scotland., and that affected the song repertories of lower deck and foc’sle. For that matter, in the merchant service itself the repertory was by no means uniform; different kinds of crew meant a different fund of songs; as Christopher Lloyd reminds us in The British Seaman, there were “the tough Geordie colliers, the superior seamen of the Indiamen who sailed Blackwall fashion, the packet rats of Liverpool who have been called ‘the hardest men in the world and the most reckless, the most lawless, and in some cases the most fearless’. During the clippership epoch, when sailorizing reached its climax, the Royal Navy saw little of such men.”

Ashton’s collection is a splendid example of those “curiosities’ that fascinated amateurs of popular literature and street epic in the nineteenth century and whose attraction has by no means faded yet. Sea-doggish Captain Whall was rather scornful of sailor song collections that “smell of the British Museum, much labour has been spent in hunting amongst old records, ballad sheets, and suchlike, and much musty stuff unearthed, which may be some value to the historian, but most of which is clean forgotten”. In this respect, Ashton’s choice cannot be found innocent. Most of the songs here have passed into oblivion, and it is usually easy to see why; many were little sung, and some probably not sung at all (for the appearance of a song on a broadside is no guarantee that it was ever performed). Still, a proportion of the songs in his volume found durable favour in the mouths of men before the mast.

In a way it is ironic that, more than the battle songs or the (usually more authentic) ballads of disaster at sea, the love lyrics and narratives of amorous encounter ashore are the central part of the seamen’s repertory, and the part that lasted best among singers. The songs of separation and absence, the ballad in which the girl learns that her lover is lost at sea, or the sailor finds that his sweetheart is fickle, seem to hold immortal attractions. It has been remarked (by G. Malcolm Laws) that “these romantic and sentimental ballads fail to reflect the proverbial stoicism of seafaring men’s loved ones. And yet by expressing the emotions caused by such tragedies, the balladists have struck chords of response among the folk, especially those who know the sea.”

Perhaps in the long run these are the most real sailor songs of all, for in a way that is often tender and always elliptical they have within them a recognition of sadness and a longing for a better life, and even more than the outright songs of complaint the best of them accord with the view of “Jack Nastyface” who wrote at the end of his vivid account of lower-deck life as he had experienced it: “In contemplating the varied scene of so motley a profession as that of a sailor, there is much to be thought on with pleasure and much with a bitter anguish and disgust . . . Great Britain can truly boast her hearts of oak, the floating sinews of her existence; and if she could but once rub out those stains of wanton and torturing punishment, so often unnecessarily resorted to, and abandon the unnatural and uncivilised custom of impressment, then, and not till then, can her navy be said to have got to the truck of perfection”.

A. L. Lloyd, Greenwich.
Spring, 1973.