Vaughan Williams’s Journey into Folk: 9 January 1905
‘The Captain’s Apprentice.’ Mr Carter, North End, King’s Lynn, Norfolk
The captain of a ship tells the story of how he took a poor boy out of ‘St James’ workhouse’, to be an apprentice. Once at sea he physically abused the boy until, by this ‘barbarous cruel’ treatment, he caused his death. In apparent remorse, the killer warns other captains to take ‘special care’ of their apprentices.
James ‘Duggie’ Carter was the first singer to be introduced to Vaughan Williams by Revd Huddle, the curate of St Nicholas’s Chapel at the heart of King’s Lynn’s North End. Carter was a fisherman, as were most of the men living in this part of the old port, close to the Fisher Fleet, an inlet of the River Ouse. Vaughan Williams wrote later that he ‘got hardly anything but sea songs from the sailors at Lynn’.
Vaughan Williams recalled in old age that the cadences of the tune sung by Carter ‘finally opened the door to an entirely new world of melody, harmony and feeling’, and it deeply influenced his later work. He described the melody as ‘wild’, with its changes in time signature, its lurching triplets, and its range; and he concluded that this was due to the ‘Norse blood’ of the North End fishermen – a fanciful idea based on theories circulating Europe that the oral traditions of isolated ‘peasant’ communities held the artistic soul of each nation. He used the tune as the main theme in Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1, composed immediately after the Norfolk trip, and inspired by the collection of over sixty songs during the trip. In recognition of the part that Carter played in Vaughan Williams’s subsequent success as a composer, there is now a small housing development close to the old North End named ‘Duggie Carter Court’.
The words of the song are particularly graphic, and the full set of verses which outline the various tortures suffered by the apprentice were rarely printed by the Edwardian collectors. Vaughan Williams thought that Carter was singing about a local true story, and it is certain that many apprentices died at sea due to the cruelty of their captains, including Robert Eastick, a boy from King’s Lynn. His story, the history of the song, and its influence on Vaughan Williams’s musical life are explored in my book, The Captain’s Apprentice: Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Story of a Folk Song.
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library link: https://www.vwml.org/record/RVW2/3/64
Roud No. 835
This is the last post of ‘Vaughan Williams’s Journey into Folk’ - thank you for coming with me on the journey. After following the composer’s footsteps during the past year we now have many of the melodies in our heads that were circulating in his, as he worked on The English Hymnal; his three Norfolk Rhapsodies; Songs of Travel; Toward the Unknown Region and A Sea Symphony, during 1904 and 1905.
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