THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE REVEREND BARING GOULD

On the Centenary of the death  of Sabine Baring-Gould; an anglican priest, prolific writer of historic and spooky stories (more that 1,240 publications!), expert hagiographer, history scholar and probably best known as the writer of the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers”, fellow songsmith and folk song collector, Sam Richards delves into the musical past…

A Squarson

In 19th century English country life, two people were the most powerful in the parish – the squire and the parson. The Reverend Sabine Baring Gould (1834-1924) of Lewtrenchard, just above Dartmoor, was both. This was a rarity but one conflated word covered it. He was a “squarson”. He was also a novelist (rated by some contemporaries as highly as Dickens), a writer on theology and the church, travel, mythology, folklore, Dartmoor and more – but he is best known today as a collector of folksongs. In his later years he felt that rescuing the old songs was the most important of all his achievements.

His song manuscripts are a valued resource for folksong enthusiasts, academic folklorists, local history and local studies. They are now kept at the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office and at Killerton House, Broadclyst, near Exeter. (** see additional note below from Sam’s friend, author Martin Graebe **)

Collecting

Collecting old songs from elderly locals was a minority pursuit among the wealthy middle classes. Baring Gould was a pioneer in the field and one of the most prolific song collectors at least until the next generation came along. There had been earlier collectors – Davis Gilbert in Cornwall, the Rev, John Broadwood in Sussex – and a few others. After Baring Gould and into the 20th century the number of folksong collectors grew to a significant handful and after the mid 20th century further generations of collectors took up the idea. In the biographies of the 19th century and Edwardian collectors the law, Oxford, Cambridge, business, publishing and especially the clergy figure consistently. Probably only the railwayman Alfred Williams from near Swindon was an exception. The others all had very broadly compatible backgrounds.

…not above using a few drinks as inducement

Baring Gould had a full set – private school education, Clare College Cambridge, Holy Orders in 1864, curate in a Yorkshire parish, then rector of East Mersea in Essex, finally inheriting Lewtrenchard House and the position of squire in 1872. The song collecting of this landed clergyman in Devon and Cornwall mainly happened in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The method was simple. Despite the enormous class distinction between him and his local song men (as he called them – there were few women) he appears to have been popular and not above using a few drinks as inducement. One of his singers, Henry Westaway of Belstone, used to find a little bottle of whiskey tucked away in the barn after Baring Gould’s visits – or so his grand daughter told me. I was once told by an elderly man of the church who knew Baring Gould that living on Dartmoor engendered a sense of commonality which could be pitted against social class. Rich and poor alike experienced the same snow drifts, the periodic flooding, rough tracks and bogs.

Near the knuckle?

Elderly people were sought out and asked for their old songs. A few verses dealing with the “way of a man with a maid” turned out to be a little too explicit for Baring Gould’s polite churchman’s Victorian ears and in some cases his manuscripts tail off with rows of dots and some such comment as “rest coarse”. Baring Gould has often been mocked as a prude but this is unfair. Most of the folksong collectors were similar and they certainly did not even try to get all their collected songs published exactly as sung. The most notable factor is not whether or not there were a few songs considered “rude”.

It is, surely, that Baring Gould’s focus of attention, as with other collectors, was the elderly. It is this that needs unpacking.

Of an Age…

It is not hard to imagine Baring Gould sitting with the prolific songster James Parsons who insisted that the parson wrote down the songs exactly right. Or Baring Gould encouraging Robert Hard and John Helmore of South Brent to sing their old songs but being a little embarrassed by those ditties that were not fit for the ears of the ladies who happened to be present. Baring Gould did not consider cities as fruitful for his song hunts – Exeter, Plymouth – or towns such as Barnstaple, Bideford or Bodmin. Songmen in remote areas of Dartmoor were ideal – Widecombe, South Brent, Lydford, Belstone…Nor did he find what he was looking for among younger singers. Henry Westaway’s sons, he claimed were more interested in songs from American minstrelsy or maybe the music halls. When Peter Kennedy revisited the family in the 1950s this was found to be untrue. Henry’s sons Harry and Bill, by then elderly men themselves, knew plenty of songs of a kind that Baring Gould would have approved of. Likewise when I visited Ivan and Lillian, Henry’s grandchildren, in the 1980s they certainly had good knowledge of folk songs.

Defining music

Baring Gould was a significant player in a loose network of amateur researchers who pursued and perpetuated an idea – the idea of “folk”. This was significant up to the First World War and beyond and then in a midcentury folk revival which continues to this day. “Folk” had originally come from Germany in the person of Johann Gottfried Herder

(1744-1803), philosopher, theologian, poet and writer, who maintained that a search for German identity (which was buried and largely lost) was to be found in a basic and ancient social stratum he called ‘das Volk’. This was not to be found in (then) modern cities and (then) modern education, or cosmopolitanism or even the culture of a just burgeoning industrialism. For Herder the idea of Volk was a response to the fact that Germany lacked the modern statehood of France or England; furthermore the aristocrats of its dozens of little principalities tended to speak French. “Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine” Herder fulminated: “Speak German O You German”. But if not in cities and cosmopolitan centres, where would the Volk be found? The answer was: in remote areas as far from powerful centres as possible. There you could seek out elderly people whose basic culture was oral rather than dominated by print and modern education. You would ask them for their old – or even oldest – songs. It worked, although it was a self-fulfilling prophecy not without complications.

Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine

This was the method that spread throughout 19th century Europe and subsequently elsewhere. Nationalist music movements flourished in Eastern Europe, Russia, Scandinavian countries – composers like Dvorak, Smetana, the Russian “Five” (Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui, Mussorgsky, Balakirev), Grieg and into the 20th century with Bartok, Kodaly, Gershwin, Sibelius and, of course, the English pastoralists of which Vaughan Williams is the best known representative of what was once called the “cow pat” school of composition.

Cultural Appropriation

Built into the model were a host of cultural assumptions, mediations and ideologies. Old songs recalled the past, usually a mythologized past without much in the way of class conflict or the brutality of land labour. After all, Herder had argued that the Volk element was beyond class and applied to kings and peasants alike. It united all people in nationhood and thus fed musical nationalist movements. In his book English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (1907) Cecil Sharp was quite explicit about this. In attacking modern education as “too cosmopolitan” he declared that it was calculated “to produce citizens of the world rather than Englishmen. And it is Englishmen, English citizens that we want”.

Accessibility

In the 19th century the various parts of rural England were not as remote as is sometimes believed. When Baring Gould collected songs in South Brent from a local stonebreaker and a miller the village had a railway station that remained until the notorious Beeching cuts of the 1960s. It was not hard to get to Plymouth, Exeter or Okehampton. From the viewpoint of the rural song repertoire this is important. Plymouth, for example, had theatres, assembly rooms and eventually a music hall. It had a thriving street literature based on the broadsides printed by Elias Keyes of Devonport during the middle decades of the century and accounting for over three hundred songs. There was, without doubt, an urban repertoire. I personally recorded elderly people in and around Plymouth who had learnt such songs only a decade of so after Baring Gould’s singers passed on and certainly while he was still alive.

Distain for popular music ?

Whether or not some of these songs were known to the likes of Baring Gould’s singers – Robert Hard of South Brent, Roger Hannaford of Lower Widecombe, James Parsons of Lewdown, Sally Satterleigh of Huccaby – is perhaps a fuzzy area. But in some of his writings Baring Gould certainly refers with a degree of disdain to the music hall songs and songs from American minstrelsy that some locals knew. This was par for the course. Nearly all folksong collectors wrote about having to sit tolerantly while their singers sang through rubbish, coarse or vulgar music hall songs, parlour ballads or minstrelsy numbers. Sooner or later the singer would come out with a “folk” piece. It was never sufficiently explained why some songs circulating orally were “folk” and others “not folk”. Then there were those stereotypes that the folk movement encouraged: weather-beaten non-literate rustics that they called “peasants”. This does not take into account the likes of Henry Westaway who had money and didn’t have to work. He also played a violin and, before he went blind, could read music – hymns, popular tunes and the rest – which he played with his sister, a viola player. Baring Gould cannot have failed to know all this but he chose not to mention it.

Authenticity

What are we left with if we apply this critique, this preference for more rigorous research methods, to Baring Gould’s song collecting and publications? Firstly, all other song collectors to a greater or lesser extent edited for publication. Secondly, his collection is chock full of beautiful songs that are still worth singing. But third, it behooves us to be aware that “folk” was a construction replete with nostalgia, a kind of rejection of modern life and a localist or nationalist agenda.

It is clear to sense lurking in the background of the “folk” project a desire for authenticity in life and culture. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary claimed that the word authentic” was the most looked-up word of the year 2023 (one supposes this was online) which shows that the quest for authenticity – the real, the natural, the unspun, the human sized and so on – is still on. Baring Gould’s search for the old and beautiful, a song culture hermetically sealed from urbanism, is a perfect example of the Romantic invention of the folk, the anti-bourgeois bourgeois who harboured a strange distaste for the modern world (industrial, sharply class divided, problematic, popular culture, profit-driven) but took refuge in myths of old England and a more settled time in which everyone knew their place but, say what we may, sang good songs.

Several events in Devon include “Celebrating the Life of Sabine Baring Gould” with Baring-Gould enthusiast Mike Bosworth in Denbury on 28th January and also on 14th April

The Totnes Pulse will also be hosting a major event with Sam Richards in St Mary’s Church on the 31st May. (Details to follow)

Additional Note (09/01/2023) From Martin Graebe author of ‘As I Walked Out’