Vaughan Williams’s Journey into Folk: 22 April 1904

‘Van Diemen’s Land’. Jim Bloomfield, East Horndon, Essex

Three poachers are transported for fourteen years to Van Diemen’s Land, where they are ‘ranked’ like horses and yoked to the plough. The singer dreams of his sweetheart in England and advises listeners to give up poaching to avoid suffering his hardships.

This warning against the consequences of poaching - sometimes known as ‘The Gallant Poachers’ – is a sobering riposte to the flippancy of ‘The Poachers’ [27 December 1903] and was found widely across the country, set to several different melodies. It was sung on this occasion by Mr Bloomfield (Vaughan Williams wrote Broomfield) at The Dog, East Horndon [See April 21 1904]. Vaughan Williams had collected songs from him on two previous trips to the area, [4 December 1903 and 22 February 1904], and Bloomfield sang for him again on a later trip in October. A woodcutter from West Horndon and a well-regarded singer, he had ‘been known to go on for hours when well primed’ according to Vaughan Williams. The composer noted down eighteen songs from Bloomfield in all - although two of these were almost identical versions of ‘Died for Love’; and two were versions of ‘On the Banks of Invaree’ with different tunes.

Van Diemen’s Land, named after the 17th century Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies company but claimed as a British colony in 1770, was a transportation destination for British convicts for around fifty years between 1803 and the early 1850s. Charles Darwin, Vaughan Williams’s great uncle, visited the colony in 1836 when on his famous expedition aboard the HMS Beagle. The island was re-named Tasmania in 1856 (Tasman was the first European to visit the island) as the colony attempted to distance itself from the penal origins of the earlier British settlement: by then ‘Van Diemen’s Land’ had become a kind of mythical place of devilish torment in the imagination of British singers – a far-flung ‘demon’s land’ of no return.

Vaughan Williams Memorial Library link: https://www.vwml.org/record/RVW2/2/52

Roud No. 519

Next post: 23 April