Vaughan Williams’s Journey into Folk: 21 December 1904
‘It’s of a brisk young lively lad’, Mr Baker (senior) of Forest Green, Surrey.
A man from Gloucestershire courts a young woman, but her father does not approve and arranges for him to be press ganged onto a ship. He is ‘wounded dreadfully’ in a battle. The woman appears on the ship, dresses his wounds, and pays for his release. Once in England she tells her father they will ‘wander abroad no more’.
In December, Vaughan Williams and his wife, Adeline, were back at Leith Hill Place for the Christmas holidays. Once again, he used this opportunity to record songs from people in the local area. The first of these was agricultural labourer, George Baker, a widower in his mid-seventies, who lived with his son, George, and family in Forest Green, below Leith Hill. Presumably the composer had been put in touch with Baker by one of his other local contacts: Isaac Longhurst [27 December 1903 & 23 May 1904] and Henry Garman [27 December 1903 & 25 May 1904] both lived close by.
Baker sang at least six songs, but Vaughan Williams only wrote down the words of three. These share the theme of women lamenting the loss of men who have gone to sea. One is about soldiers leaving to fight in ‘north americkay’ during the War of Independence; and the other two concern fathers attempting to prevent their daughters from marrying ‘unsuitable’ men.
‘It’s of a brisk young lively lad’, also known as ‘The London Heiress’, tells a similar story to ‘The Pretty Ploughboy’ [22 February 1904] - in both, the wealthy father gets rid of his daughter’s lover by arranging for him to be press ganged. The practice of ‘impressment’, where physical force was used to recruit men into the navy against their will, was sanctioned by parliament, and press gangs were particularly active during the wars with France between 1793-1815. After this period, the practice fell out of use, but the injustice of young men being forced to go to war still echoed in the minds of singers a century later.
In longer 19th century broadside versions of ‘It’s of a brisk young lively lad’ the daughter disguises herself as a man and is away for seven years before she is reunited with her lover.
Broadwood’s version in English Traditional Songs and Carols (1908) has the woman described like this: ‘Her eyes they shone like morning dew/Her hair was fair to see/ She was grace/ In form and face/ And was fixed in modesty’. Vaughan Williams heard Baker sing ‘Her eyes they shone like morning dew and her hair was lovely grey/She was grey in her face and her eyes were fixed in modesty.’ Although these lines are not quite so poetic, I’ve sung them as he wrote it.
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library link: https://www.vwml.org/record/RVW2/2/179
Roud No.2930
Next post: 22 December