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The band has been fortunate, over the last few years, to give informal performances at Leith Hill Place, a National Trust property in Surrey. It was the home, for a few years, of Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was one of the collectors of folk songs in the years running up to the First World War.
As a folk band we have been able to feature songs that he had collected. Over recent years each season has had a different theme for exhibitions within the house. Next year the theme is Protest, so we have earmarked protest songs for performance that we already have in our repertoire, and I have been looking out for additional songs that would fit the bill. One subject I considered was the protest against the appalling conditions in factories at the start of the Industrial Revolution and in particular the conditions within cotton mills. I couldn’t find anything in my various books of folk song collections. The Industrial Revolution was centred in the towns and cities of the north of England, and most of my books feature songs collected when visiting rural areas to record songs passed down through the generations before the songs died out with the upheaval of people gravitating from villages to towns to find work. So I decided to write something. I then realised I had only a vague understanding about weaving and what went on in cotton mills so had to turn to the internet to research the subject. As I am sure you have found yourselves, once you start googling you inevitably end up down unexpected related rabbit-holes of information. Fascinating. What started as research on cotton mills ended up with the horrific massacre of Peterloo.
December. Most people’s thoughts jump immediately to Christmas, the over-commercialised event, that shops start stacking shelves for as soon as the cobwebs of Halloween have been swept away. In ancient times the marking of Midwinter, the winter Solstice, was the important event. Never to miss the opportunity for a good fire our ancestors would gather round it to ensure, fingers crossed, the days would start to get longer again. Fire also features in a couple of other traditions. The first, the ‘Burning of the Ashen Faggot’, a popular Christmas Eve custom in Devon, Dorset and Somerset. This is still celebrated in houses that have hearths wide enough to accommodate an immense faggot of green ash sticks bound round with a number of bands of ash or hazel. It was customary to make it as large as possible so that it slowly burnt through the twelve days of Christmas. In 1952 a faggot of this type was burnt in the New Inn at Northleigh, Devon, where the hearth is seven and a half feet (about 2.3 m) wide and three feet (about 0.91 m) deep. The faggot weighed about a hundredweight (about 50 kg) and was five feet long and eighteen inches thick. An important part of the ritual was watching for the breaking of the bands in the heat of the fire. Their bursting one by one was the signal for cheerful toasts and renewed drinking by all present. In some country inns the landlord provides a free round of cider or ale when the first band breaks. The second is a lot more dangerous – the ‘Burning out of the Old ear’ is celebrated in Stonehaven, Kincardineshire, and features fireballs, inflammable material soaked in tar, held in wire-netting cages on the end of long wire cables. Young men parade up and down the main street swinging the blazing balls in wide arcs around their heads.
As for the band, we are performing a couple of unaccompanied songs at the annual St. George’s Church Carol Service. ‘Past 3 a’Clock’, a traditional carol, and ‘Shepherds Arise’, a traditional seasonal song from the singing of the Copper family of Rottingdean, Surrey.
(My thanks in research to the excellent books The English Year by the folklorist Steve Roud and A Dictionary of British Folk Customs by Christina Hole).
All text, images and music samples on this site are copyright © Childe Rolande.
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Poster for Lucy Anna Martin
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