I released what to date has been my only solo album, Love, Death and the Cossack (originally on cassette, now available via Bandcamp), in the summer of 1990. Almost as soon as I’d finished it, I started planning the next one. But over the next 10 years I joined two bands and a West Gallery choir, contributed to 15 albums (including 5 with Magpie Lane, 3 with Geckoes and 3 with the Christminster Singers) and had three children. Which didn’t leave much time for other recording projects. So the second album was put on hold, and has never materialised. But now, as retirement gets enticingly nearer, the time might not be too far off when I really have no excuse for not getting on and making it a reality.
Over the years, like one’s fantasy Desert Island Discs (admit it, we’ve all played that game at some point), the putative tracklist has changed. But the first tune here has remained a constant, even if I’ve changed what the tune is paired with. Back in the early 90s, with Saint Monday, we followed it with my own composition ‘The Stotty Cake Polka’; but having recorded that with Magpie Lane, I don’t see any need to record it again. So now – in what has become a bit of an epic set – the French wedding march is followed with a series of English dance tunes.
I learned ‘Marche de noces à Célestin Gouttefarde’ from a cassette I borrowed from Reading public library circa 1988. This was by a trio, Café Charbons, which included Jean-François Vrod on fiddle, and who specialised in music of the Auvergnat community in Paris. I recently found the album was available online and was very pleased to make its reacquaintance. It’s even better than I remembered it; and I was reassured to find that, having not heard this tune for over 30 years, I hadn’t inadvertently changed it out of all recognition.
Although he worked and lived in Paris for many years, Gouttefarde was born (in 1910) in the Limousin department of Corrèze. He made his first fiddle out of a plank of wood when he was around 10 years old, and played his first Bal at the age of 15. Later he also took up the diatonic, and then the chromatic accordion. Whatever his skills as a musician, he was not universally liked. Another musician recorded in Paris in the early 1980s, Mr Marcel Ventadour, complained that Gouttefarde
lui avait piqué une noce et abimé son vélo: “depuis le coup du vélo, il m’a chié dans les bottes”
Now, with my rusty A level French, I was able to make sense of some of that, but not of the idiomatic “il m’a chié dans les bottes”. So many thanks to fellow concertina-player and former librarian Roland Scales for the translation: Gouttefarde had pinched a wedding [gig] from Ventadour, and wrecked his bike; “He screwed me over ever since the bike episode.”
The next two tunes are from early 19th century English sources. ‘Love laughs at locksmiths’ is from H. S. I. Jackson’s MS, dated 1823, which you’ll find included in The Winders of Wyresdale (an excellent source of tunes, referred to in numerous other posts on this blog).
And, as you can see here, it also provided inspiration for the English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson.
Love laughs at locksmiths, etching by Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827). Image copyright Royal Collection Trust.
‘The Cabinet of love’ is from William Mittell’s MS, dated 1799, from New Romney in Kent. I’d always assumed that the cabinet in question was a group of people rather than a piece of furniture. But actually, the title might be a reference to something else – a collection of smutty poems sneakily inserted into what was, on the face of it, a very respectable collection of poems, first published in 1714 but reprinted numerous times over the course of the eighteenth century, The Works of the Earls of Rochester and Roscommon.
“To my surprise, ‘The Cabinet’ turned out to be a collection of pornographic verses about dildos,” said Dr van Hensbergen. “The poems include ‘Dildoides’, a poem attributed to Samuel Butler about the public burning of French-imported dildos, ‘The Delights of Venus’, a poem in which a married woman gives her younger friend an explicit account of the joys of sex, and ‘The Discovery’, a poem about a man hiding in a woman’s room to watch her masturbate in bed.”
It was printed by Edmund Curll, a publisher with an infamous lack of scruples. He was later imprisoned for printing obscene works, and tried in the House of Lords for publishing unflattering words about peers. His name was adopted in the coining of the term “Curlicism” for literary indecency.
Finally, ‘Three Rusty Swords’, a tune which has now become very well known, but which I originally learned from Dave Townsend in the early 1980s. He had learned it from our mutual friend Dave Parry. I’m not sure what Dave Parry’s source was but, under various titles, including ‘Three Case Knives’, ‘Three Sharp Knives’ and ‘Rusty Gulley’, the tune can be traced back to the late seventeenth century.
Marche de noces à Célestin Gouttefarde / Love laughs at locksmiths / Cabinet of love / Three Rusty Swords
Between roughly 1989 and1992 I was in a trio called Saint Monday with my wife Carol on flute, recorders and percussion, and Dave Parry on melodeons. We played Sidmouth, Towersey and Chippenham and, I have to say, I thought we were pretty good. Here’s one of the tune sets from our repertoire.
Saint Monday, Radway Cinema, Sidmouth 1991 – Dave Parry, Andy Turner, Carol Turner
‘Dover Pier’ was printed in Preston’s Twenty four Country Dances for the Year 1791, and I learned it from Bert Simons’ Kentish Hops. Obviously it’s supposed to be a dance tune, but I’ve always played it at a rather stately pace. Originally that might have been for no better reason than, when I was learning the tune, I was transposing from Bb to D, which is something I can do, but only slowly. I think I just got used to the slow pace and found I liked it.
The second tune is from Gloucestershire fiddler Stephen Baldwin. I learned it from the Leader LP English Village Fiddler but you can hear it on Rig-a-Jig-Jig (Voice of the People Vol. 15) and also on the comprehensive Musical Traditions set “Here’s One You’ll Like, I Think” (very highly recommended for anyone interested in English country dance music, and fiddle-playing in particular).
Mr Baldwin had lots of hornpipes, and his names for them rarely corresponded with the titles by which they are generally known. He seems to have called this one both the Gypsy’s Hornpipe and College Hornpipe, while Peter Kennedy listed it as Gloucester Hornpipe.
Philip Heath-Coleman describes it as “a rather idiosyncratic rarity”.
The eighth and final post in my short series of Bampton tunes, this simple tune is one of my favourites.
It’s not the only morris tune from Bampton that starts off sounding like one thing (in this case Headington Quarry ‘Willow Tree’) then goes off in another direction. In fact it seems that the tune derives from a popular song published in Boston, Massachussetts in 1859 – check it out on the Traditional Tune Archive. The second half of that song corresponds to the A music here. The song is in 4/4 but it’s to easy to see how it could have slipped into a classic morris 6/8 – especially if a Bampton musician had recently seen Quarry in action…
This is the penultimate post in my short series of daily postings of Bampton Morris tunes. A week ago I thought I had nothing to say about this tune, but then I did a bit of googling and…
The tune was collected from fiddle-player Jinky Wells, and printed in ‘William Wells 1868-1953: Morris Dancer, Fiddler and Fool’, Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1956), pp. 1-15. The following comes from the introduction to that article:
After Sharp’s death Wells combined with succeeding generations of dancers to keep the local custom going – his blindness making dance tutoring no easy matter – until at last he had to give up. Long before his health failed he wrote some notes about the local custom and his notes are in the Society’s Library. When he became bed-ridden he invited Peter Kennedy to record on tape his spoken views on the Bampton dance tradition. These views, some of which Peter has transcribed on to paper, portray the philosophical character of the man and his penetrating mind. The words preserve that pithy and at times poetical turn of his speech. But the abiding impression of this vivid country character is the gentle courtesy of one of Nature’s greatest gentlemen.
The only notes provided in relation to ‘The Quaker’ are these
‘Verily heigh; Verily ho; vivetty vob like the Shaker’ – ‘Vivetty vob-that means tug of war’ – ‘Vivetty vob’ – that means too many agitators and dictators – ‘All this world seems awfully wrong and it terribly puzzles the Quaker’.
I’m no Quaker, but I certainly found that puzzling, not least because the assumption is that those words are associated with the dance – but to me they strongly suggest a 6/8 rhythm, while the dance tune is in 4/4; in fact it sounds very much like a nineteenth century polka.
Bruce Olson’s Ballad Index refers to a couple of late 19th / early 20th century instances of the phrase “puzzles the Quaker” in print. In both cases – and others that I have found subsequently – the context suggests that it was simply a phrase in common usage at the time, in relation to any puzzling phenomenon, not to be taken literally.
Then I found this on the website of the Victoria & Albert Museum: the sheet music for ‘That’s What Puzzles The Quaker’, as sung by Fred Coyne, written and composed by Geoffrey Thorn, published in London by Hopwood & Crew (between 1860 and 1880 the V&A’s notes say – as we’ll see, it must date from the very end of that period).
Sheet music cover for ‘That’s What Puzzles The Quaker as sung by Fred Coyne, written and composed by Geoffrey Thorn. Published in London by Hopwood & Crew. Image copyright the V&A.
Frustratingly, only the cover is shown online, so we can’t tell if the song’s tune was related to the Bampton morris tune at all.
The author, Geoffrey Thorn (actually a pseudonym for Charles Townley, 1843-1905) was a prolific author of stage songs and pantomimes. Among other things, he wrote ‘The Parson and the Clerk’ (Roud 1154) which was in the repertoire of Phil Tanner and Walter Pardon.
The words for other printed versions of the song can be found online. The VWML archive catalogue has this undated broadside, published by T. Brock, from the Frank Kidson collection.
What Puzzles the Quaker – broadside from the Kidson collection
And then there’s a slightly longer American version, ‘That’s What Puzzles the Quaker’, originally published in Wehman’s Universal Songster Volume 12 – these song books were “published quarterly roughly between 1884 and 1899 by the Henry J. Wehman publishing company of New York and Chicago”.
The references in verse 2 of the American version to Zulu King Cetewayo (properly Cetshwayo) and British Commander-in-Chief Lord Chelmsford, even without any other information, would be enough to date the song to shortly after the end of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879.
In 1878 he dreamed up a scheme for presenting Prime Minister Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli) with a ‘People’s Tribute’ which was to be in the form of a large laurel wreath made of gold. Turnerelli made a nationwide appeal to all working men to donate a penny each and 52,000 men responded and sent in their pennies. The Court Jewellers Messrs Hunt & Roskell made the wreath which was shown to the Prince of Wales and exhibited at the Crystal Palace. Disraeli was obviously shrewd enough to realise that Turnerelli’s prime motivation was to ingratiate himself with the recently ennobled Ear of Beaconsfield, and sadly for the ‘Old Conservative’ Turnerelli, he declined to accept the gold laurel wreath, doubtless harbouring some anxieties as to the real motives behind it.
As suggested in the song, Madame Tussaud’s, like other waxwork exhibitions around the country, did show a likeness of him [King Cetshwayo]. It was still on display (along with models of his wives) in 1886 – next to an image of Sir Bartle Frere [ High Commissioner for Southern Africa, whose policies had provoked the Anglo-Zulu War in the first place]
Farini was Signor Guillermo Antonio Farini (1838-1929), born William Leonard Hunt) in New York – “tightrope walker, circus impresario, explorer, author, painter, inventor, and businessman”. He was one of several enterprising promoters who sought to entertain the London public by putting on shows presenting “scenes from Zulu life”, or recreations of exciting episodes from the war, at venues such as the Royal Aquarium in London. At least in Farini’s shows the performers were genuine Zulus, which was often not the case in those of his rivals (some simply blacked up).
But where does “the Quaker” fit into all of this? Is “the Quaker” being used here to refer to Quakerdom in general? Was it the nickname of a Liberal politician at the time? Or is “the Quaker” simply being used to represent anyone who takes a more peaceable approach to foreign affairs than the (Tory) government of the time?
I’m still not entirely sure, but if “the Quaker” refers to a specific person this must be the radical Liberal MP John Bright, who had been the first Quaker to hold a cabinet position – and who, following Liberal victory in the general election of 1880, was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in Gladstone’s government. Bright never let political popularity or expediency overrule his principles. He opposed the Crimean War (“A Crime”), and was a fierce critic of Disraeli’s expansionist imperialist foreign policy – attacking for example Britain’s military involvement in Afghanistan (referred to in verse 3 of the Wehman text).
He had also frequently called for restrictions on the the army’s use of corporal punishment – the cat being referred to in verse 6 “Why do the governments stick to the cat?” is the cat-of-nine-tails – and this was a hot topic during the Zulu War.
Ever since the music hall had begun in the 1850s, the lot of the common soldier, and in particular the fact that he could be flogged to near death at the whim of an officer, was a recurrent theme. It was a theme to which the Zulu war gave a new relevance. In 1879 and 1880 the flogging of troops during that campaign led to renewed attempts to abolish the practice and a new spate of songs in support of abolition
In Gladstone’s new administration, the conduct of foreign policy was to be heavily informed by the views of men such as John Bright.
The election of 1880 returned a Liberal government believing that there should be a new basis on which British foreign policy should be conducted and that the invasion of Zululand, amongst other imperial adventures, should never be allowed to happen again. The author of this new basis, Bright, was a veteran radical MP, now promoted to Cabinet rank. His basic view was that ‘the moral law was not written for men alone…[but] as well for nations,’ and that only by following such ‘eternal principles’ could greatness and happiness be achieved by a nation. Failure to do so, he claimed, would bring down God’s wrath upon the nation and only expiation of past wrongs would ward off disaster. Taxation for defence and imperial purposes was ‘draining the veins of the body to supply ulcers’; war was a device of those ‘jackals of the desert’ the international landed interest, and its prosecution no more than a ‘gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy’, the empire a ’showy equipage’ based on no logic but pride. Bright believed that the whole foreign policy of Britain since the time of William III had been a mistake; even fighting Bonaparte had had no ‘visible result’. The correct policy to follow, in his view, was to avoid any entanglement abroad and eschew war except in strictest self-defence in the firm belief that righteous conduct would encourage (or shame) other nations into equally virtuous behaviour. Unfortunately, Bright could not conceive of another nation acting in a less ethical fashion than Britain or that rational men should choose evil over virtue or, indeed, might count the military and political virtues that he regarded as evil as very proper virtues.
Bright’s basic principles of non-intervention and anti-imperialism, were accepted by the new Prime Minister, William Gladstone, with the proviso that Britain might find it necessary to intervene selectively in certain issues, but that a fund of goodwill should be built up in advance by altruistic acts to ensure success. Foreign policy was, however, never Gladstone’s strong point…
Bright, ever true to his principles, actually resigned from the government in July 1882 after Gladstone ordered the Royal Navy to bombard Alexandria, to recover debts owed by the Egyptians to British investors. This was just a few weeks before King Cetshwayo visited the UK, at Gladstone’s invitation. I’m not sure that the King met with John Bright, as pictured in this illustration from Birmingham Liberal magazine The Dart. But no doubt if they had met, Bright would have lectured him about something, as he is doing in the cartoon.
“Extremes meet”. Cartoon depicting the anti-imperialist John Bright (1811-89) lecturing the Zulu king Cetewayo [Cetshwayo kaMpande] (c.1826-1884). By E. C. Mountford; published in ‘The Dart’ (4 Aug 1882). From Wikimedia.
It has to be said that the puzzled gentleman on the cover of the sheet music doesn’t look anything like the bewhiskered John Bright. So perhaps “the Quaker” is just shorthand for anyone supporting the Liberals’ less aggressive, less jingoistic policies against the government of the day. But surely it’s Bright and his strongly-expressed Quaker principles that inspired the use of the term?
It’s definitely Bright who’s being referred to (not at all favourably) in a cartoon, ‘What Puzzles the Quaker’, by John D. Reigh in the nationalist periodical United Ireland Vol. 1, No. 15 (November 15, 1881).
At first reading, I found the song – especially the version printed in America – to be unpleasant, racist and jingoistic. Obviously it uses language which is unacceptable today, but I can’t decide whether it’s mocking Bright and those like him, or inviting the audience to engage with his views. Music Hall audiences were notoriously conservative and jingoistic, yet verses like this seem designed to generate support for the movement to end flogging in the army.
Why should they wish the brave soldier to flog?
Cutting and hacking his back like a log,
Treating a man much worse than a dog,
That’s what puzzles the Quaker
The following lines quoted in Michael Diamond’s article, but not included in the American songster version, also seem to question the correctness of Disraeli’s imperial policies during the 1870s.
Said Paul unto Peter, the world’s going wrong.
Even England wants that which to her don’t belong.
The Afghans, the Zulus have been made to fall.
Is this Christian conduct? Said Peter to Paul.
And then there are these, which are similar to lines in the American version, but are more obviously sympathetic to the defeated Zulu king.
Farini would like him, and so would Tussaud’s,
But he fought for his country as everyone knows,
And Britons don’t trample on brave foreign foes.
John Baxter suggests that topical songs like this were often designed to allow improvisation, with the performer inserting comments on any event of current interest, and modifying the song to meet the views and preferences of the audience. This may explain why it’s not totally clear if the song is for or against John Bright: it’s possible that it could have been presented either way, depending on who was singing it, and where.
We know that the song was widely sung: both on the stage – as well as Fred Coyne’s performances, we know that it was included in the 1879 Christmas pantomime at the Alexandra Palace in London, and at Middlesborough; and in amateur entertainments – newspaper cuttings record it being sung for instance by a Mr Fulcher at Thorndon in Suffolk in January 1882, and in February 1883 at a fundraising concert in Blayney, New South Wales (“Mr. Warden’s song, ‘That’s what puzzles the Quaker’, was very amusing”).
And, thanks again to John Baxter, I can report at least one example of the song – or its chorus at least – being sung in direct opposition to the Conservative party. The report is from the Aberdeen Journal for Tuesday 3rd February 1880, but concerns a political meeting held in Chester. It begins “A large meeting was held last evening at the Linen Hall Rink, Chester, in support of the candidature of Mr. H.C. Raikes, the senior member of the city”. Mr Raikes was standing for re-election as MP for Chester, but the meeting was subject to repeated disruption from a “group of obstructives”. Towards the end of the rumbustious meeting, as Henry Raikes attempted to address the meeting, his words were largely drowned out by a “constant din”, and
the singing of a chorus with the refrain of
“Explain these mistakes if you can Mr Raikes,
That’s what puzzles the Quaker”
I’m pleased to report that in the general election of February 1880, the voters of Chester City constituency returned two Liberal members.
Going back to the question of whether this song actually has any connection with the Bampton Morris tune, the lines quoted by Michael Diamond would fit quite nicely to Jinkey Wells’ tune. In fact looking at the Wehman lyrics, it is possible to shoe-horn them into the tune – even the chorus which initially I was so convinced should be sung in 6/8. Wells was born in 1868; it seems entirely plausible that he heard the song in his youth and later pressed the tune into service for a dance, probably bending the melody a little in the process. At some point I shall make sure I get sight of the sheet music to see if my conjecture holds water.
The Quaker is one of several tunes the Bampton Morris use for their single sidestep dance, and is very unusual in that it includes a key-change between the A and B musics. Moreover, Jinky consistently plays the tune the opposite way round to how it is done today – i.e. his A music is now what is played as the B music, and vice versa.
I play it the same way round as Jinky Wells, which is also how it would normally be played when used as a country dance tune.
The Quaker
Played on C/G anglo-concertina
Update 20th June 2021
Well, a couple of weeks on from my original post I have, thanks to the good offices of the British Music Hall Society, been able to see a scanned copy of all 6 pages of the sheet music of Geoffrey Thorn’s song ‘That’s what puzzles the Quaker’. And I can now reveal that… the song was sung to fairly pedestrian tune in 3/4 which bears absolutely no resemblance to the Bampton morris tune.
So Jinky Wells’ “That’s what puzzles the Quaker” rhyme has led me up a blind alley – although, I have to say, I really enjoyed researching the song and tracking down the less obvious references in the song. Maybe Wells associated the rhyme with the morris tune. But, equally, it may be Peter Kennedy who, having recorded both the rhyme and tune, assumed that they were linked, and printed them together in the EFDSS Journal.
Anyway the prize of finding the original source of the Bampton tune is still up for grabs. If anyone reading this discovers its source, please let me know!
I know ‘Glorishears’ tunes from Bledington and Fieldtown. Both excellent tunes, although completely unrelated to each other. Research some forty years ago by Mike Heaney established that
the title is a corruption of the phrase “Glorious Year” – taken from a song titled ‘Now Comes on the Glorious Year’, which was published in 1709 in D’Urfey’s The Modern Prophets.
the Bledington tune appears to be based on the song’s melody.
Despite the many differences, there are definite similarities between the Bledington and Fieldtown dances. And one can imagine that a dancer from Leafield or Finstock saw the Bledington men doing their dance, then decided to adapt it for his own village team. He couldn’t remember the tune, so another was used instead; but the distinctive figure – the leapfrog – and the distinctive title were retained.
Meanwhile at Bampton they use a different tune again, and the dance has no leapfrogs. Go figure, as an American might say.
Jinkey Wells wrote the title as ‘Glory Shears’ and, given that those are both actual words, that probably makes more sense than ‘Glorishears’!
Bampton Morris being used to advertise the Standard Vanguard motor car, 1951
Number 4 in my short series of Bampton tunes. This isn’t quite how it’s notated in the Black Book, but it’s how Mat Green plays it, and that’s good enough for me.
!["Extremes meet". Cartoon depicting the anti-imperialist John Bright (1811-89) lecturing the Zulu king Cetewayo [Cetshwayo kaMpande] (c.1826-1884). By E. C. Mountford; published in 'The Dart' (4 Aug 1882). From Wikimedia.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Bright_Cetewayo_cartoon_1882.jpg)
Squeezed Out 
