Folklife Quarterly FQ 40: Jan 2014 Folklife Quarterly, web version | Page 44

FQ 40, Jan 2014, p42 v ‘Ballad Singers of the Border’, J. Kyrle Fletcher’, by Roy Palmer

Ì ‘Ballad Singers of the Border’, J. Kyrle Fletcher1 Ì
Welsh Bibliographical Society 5:2 (July 1938), 107-109
Ï by Roy Palmer Ð

‘Folklife Traditions’

O

© Roy Palmer

Illustrations supplied by Roy Palmer:
(L to R) Cornmarket (photo: Bob Pegg); J. Kyrle Fletcher, 1916; Northfleet.

ne of my boyhoo d’s memories of life in the City of Worcester during the period 1880 to 1885 was of the Ballad Singers who used to come round
on Market Days and on the great Fair Days.
The best remembered of these was an elderly blind man with a concertina who had a regular stand on the Cornmarket. He was a big stout man
with a large white face fringed with grey whiskers. His sightless eyes were closed and he had a perpetual smile, a most unpleasant grin I should
better describe it. He was led about by a small boy who carried a number of printed ballads still wet from the printing press, and as the old man sang
the boy moved through the crowd selling the ballads at one penny each. We called this blind ballad singer ‘The Welshman’, but anyone who came
from the West of the Malvern Hills was usually called Welsh, even those who spoke with the broad Hereford accent.
The blind ballad singer was also the composer of his rhymes, and he went round all the Markets up to Shrewsbury and Newtown. Many of his
ballads I now know were unfit for decent ears, but to a small boy they sounded quite correct, though meaningless. Others dealt with the events of
the day or yesterday, though I suspect the old man occasionally sang a verse or two of some popular song to catch the ears of the besmocked yokels
who crowded round. I know he used to strike up with

‘Does the Czar of Russia think that we are frightened,
Because he has conquered the Turk,
We’ll show him what an Englishman’s made of,
For we’ll give him a lot more work’. 2

Then warming up to his task he would change the tune and sing of some wreck or murder which then occupied public attention.
I remember one of these, or rather part of one, which ran:‘Oh the wreck of the Steam Ship London
Was an awful tale to tell,
Disaster even worse than this
The North Fleet hath befell.
Off Dover she was anchored
With six hundred Souls aboard,
Her passengers were emigrants,
With iron she was stored’. 3

And so on piling horror upon horror in the grim story of the wreck, and all the time smiling and the boy meantime moving through the crowd
shouting “The wreck of the North Fleet only one penny”.
There was another of the old man’s ballads which I can call to mind. It was the Blind Beggar’s Daughter, a mutilated version of Villikins and his
Dinah by the tune but with a happy ending. It began:‘It’s of a blind beggar who had lost his sight,
And he’d a daughter most beautifully bright,
“Let me seek my Fortune Dear Father” said she,
And the favour was granted to charming Betsy’.

After various adventures Betsy meets a young man with ten thousand pounds, and the ballad concludes:-

‘All things being ready and they were alone,
Young Billy and Betsy they were made both as one;
She is the beautifulest [sic] creature that ever was seen,
She’s the blind beggar’s daughter of Brummagem Green’. 4
It is odd how these scraps of old ballads linger in one’s memory and can still be recorded after nearly sixty years.