Colchester Folk Club plays
host to Spiers and Boden (John Spiers and Jon Boden) on 15 April when these two
talented musicians perform their ‘Backyard Songs’ tour. They are supported by a trio of singers
called ‘Potiphar’s Apprentices’ who sing the folk songs collected by Ralph
Vaughan Williams in Essex in the early twentieth century.
The Folk Club meets at
Colchester Arts Centre, the former St Mary at the Walls Church in the town.
Potiphar’s Apprentice
Charles Potiphar (or Potipher), an Ingrave labourer, died in 1909. He is remembered specifically for being the
first person from whom Ralph Vaughan Williams collected – i.e. noted down – his
first of a collection of folk songs: ‘Bushes and Briars’.
Potiphar was born in South Weald, married in Ingatestone and later
moved to Ingrave. He was a local man. He
is buried in an unmarked grave in Ingrave churchyard.
The visit by Ralph Vaughan Williams to a humble labourer’s cottage
on 4th December 1903 ignited the composer’s passion for folk
song. He came on a 10-day cycling tour
of Ingrave, Willingale, Little Burstead, East Horndon and Billericay the
following year to collect further examples – over 100 from Essex - and visited
many places in southern England and East Anglia in order to “give them back to
the world”.
In June 1909 ‘Potiphar’s Apprentices’, a trio of local folk
musicians (John and Sue Cubbin and Adrian May) brought back to Ingrave Church
Hall the story and songs collected from Charles Potipher and others. Sue Cubbin, who used to work at the Essex
Record Office, mounted an exhibition in Chelmsford dedicated to Vaughan
Williams’ visits to Essex (2003) and wrote the book of the exhibition entitled
‘A Precious Legacy’ (2006). The audience
in the Church Hall heard a number of songs including:
-
‘Poacher’s
Song’
-
‘I’m A
Stranger’, collected from Mrs Humphries whose father and grand-father lived in
Blackmore
-
‘Bold
Turpin’, an 18th century ballad commemorating the deeds of the Essex
highwayman, Dick Turpin
-
‘Lay Still
My Fond Shepherd’, which otherwise is known as ‘Lark In The Morning’
-
‘In Jessie’s
City’, the sad ballad of a maid who became pregnant by a postman boy – the tune
of which later was used as the setting of the hymn ‘It is a thing most
wonderful’ (Herongate) when Vaughan Williams edited the English Hymnal (1906)
-
‘The
Sheffield Apprentice’, used again in the English Hymnal for the setting of the
tune of ‘There’s a friend for little children’ (Ingrave)
-
‘Bushes and
Briars’, the first song collected from Vaughan Williams at Potiphar’s
home.
Since then Potiphar’s Apprentices have had gigs at a number of
places and have just launched their second recording, ‘Life in the Old Dog’,
which makes reference to the Old Dog Public House at East Horndon, as a follow
up to ‘Return to Ingrave’.
Vaughan Williams and Essex
Although Vaughan Williams never lived in Essex we can claim that
this county had a major influence on his musical output.
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was born in Down Ampney,
Gloucestershire. He studied at the Royal
College of Music at a time when English music was popular in “the organ loft
and the festival platform rather than the stage” [Day, p8]. His tutor Charles Stanford had failed at
opera whilst Arthur Sullivan was succeeding at operetta, but then this was not
considered serious music.
Looking for a musical style, Vaughan Williams became interested in
folk song. The Folk Song Society had
been formed in 1898 but was struggling despite Stanford being its Vice
President. Cecil Sharp declared in 1904
that it was necessary to “get out into the field and listen to what the country
folk had to sing” [Day, p18] rather than endlessly discuss the merits on folk
song in London.
Vaughan Williams heartily agreed with Sharp’s views and had
already been working separately from the Society, giving lectures on folk music
across England and at the Montpelier House School for Girls (later renamed
Brentwood County High School) in Brentwood (Essex). He described folk music in 1902 as “real
music”. “What we need in England, is real music, even if it be only a
music-hall song. Provided it possess real feeling and real life, it will be
worth all the off scourings of the classics in the world” [Heffer, p22].
Vaughan Williams’ lectures at Brentwood had inspired one of the
pupils, Georgina Heatley. After the
final lecture she handed him a piece of paper with songs sung by one of the
housemaids at her home, which was the Rectory at Ingrave. Georgina suggested that much folk song was
rendered, but was unrecorded. With it came an invitation from her father to
attend a Parish Tea, which he accepted. At the tea was a 75 year old labourer (a
shepherd) by the name of Charles Potipher, dressed in his Sunday best, and
probably not comfortable with attending such functions above his station in
life at the Rectory. In any case “the
old songs he knew were about young love and sex, taboo subjects in the
oppressive Victorian atmosphere of the rectory” [Kent, p161]. He was reluctant to sing to Vaughan Williams
at tea but promised that if the composer visited his cottage the following day
he would sing for him.
So it was that on 4th December 1903 that VW collected his
first folk song from Charles Potipher. This
visit to a humble labourer’s cottage ignited the composer’s passion for folk
song. In 1904, Vaughan Williams came on
a 10-day cycling tour of Ingrave, Willingale, Little Burstead, East Horndon and
Billericay collecting further examples.
In January 1905 he collected songs from around the Kings Lynn district
of Norfolk and whilst on holiday in Sussex and Yorkshire later that year. In 1906 he visited Samuel Childs at the Bell,
Willingale, noting down ‘Sweet Primroses’.
Vaughan Williams earnestly believed that if these songs were not noted
down they might be lost forever. Vaughan
Williams became one of the greatest folk song collectors of the early twentieth
century. It inspired the writing of his
three ‘Norfolk Rhapsodies’ and ‘In the Fen Country’.
Ralph Vaughan Williams jotted the folk songs using pencil and
paper. He later made some wax cylinder
recordings. One singer was Mrs
Humphries, also of Ingrave, who recorded ‘Bushes and Briars’. She had heard her father and grand-father
sing this while a youngster living at Blackmore (Essex).
While this mammoth project was in its early stages, Percy Dreamer
approached Vaughan Williams to edit a new hymn book. His name had been recommended by Cecil Sharp
and Canon Scott Holland. Intended to be
a short task it absorbed VW who spent £250 out of his own pocket and took two
years. The result was the ‘English
Hymnal’ published in 1906. Folk song
tunes were included as musical accompaniment to sacred words: ‘Monks Gate’ was
a tune Vaughan Williams had collected from a place near Horsham. The famous ‘To Be A Pilgrim’ is set to the
tune ‘The Captain’s Apprentice’.
The English Hymnal draws on a wide range of musical styles but as
he wrote in the Preface, “where there is congregational singing it is important
that familiar melodies should be employed”.
Tunes were written based on folk songs collected: ‘I think when I read the story of old’ was
set to a tune named ‘East Horndon’; ‘There’s a friend for little children’ to
the tune ‘Ingrave’ and, the most familiar of the three still sung today, ‘It is
a thing most wonderful’ set to a tune ‘Herongate’.
“On 4th August 1914 war was declared on Germany, and
Vaughan Williams, like the heroes in many of the folk songs he loved so much,
felt his duty to enlist as a soldier” [Day, p29].
Charles Potipher died in 1909 and is buried in an unmarked grave
in Ingrave churchyard. In early 2001,
Brentwood Borough Council decided to commemorate him in the naming of a road on
the then new Clements Park estate – Potipher Way. Other roads were named in remembrance of the
Vaughan Williams connection, for example, Vaughan Williams Way, Pastoral Way
(after his third symphony).
Three years before his death, in 1955, Vaughan Williams revisited
Brentwood and recalled his first visit to the town which had had such a
profound effect on his music.
In 2003, to mark the centenary of Vaughan Williams’ visit to
Ingrave, the Essex Record Office mounted an excellent exhibition entitled ‘That
precious legacy’ commemorating the composer and folk singing. The exhibition led to the publication of a
book by Sue Cubbins, sound archivist, and is highly recommended for further
reading.
Bibliography
The English Hymnal (1906)
Cubbins, Sue. That Precious
Legacy. Ralph Vaughan Williams and Essex
Folksong (Essex Record Office, 2006)
Day, James. Vaughan
Williams (Dent & Sons, London, 1972)
Heffer, Simon. Vaughan
Williams (Phoenix, 2000)
Kent, Sylvia. Folklore In
Essex (Tempus, 2005)
Brentwood Gazette. 4 January 2001. 8 August 2003.
(The majority of this item has
previously been published on the blog of Blackmore Area Local History)
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