King's Lynn fishermen inspired one of England's greatest classical composers - but the 'wild' tune he adored accompanied a terrible story of torture and death at sea.
Keen to preserve the folk songs, passed from singer to singer without ever being written down, Ralph Vaughan Williams noted down the words and music he heard in Lynn, publishing them in journals of folk songs, weaving their harmonies into his own music and even transforming a folk song about a poacher into a hymn tune he called King’s Lynn.
Vaughan Williams, born exactly 150 years ago, became fascinated with folk music. Worried that ancient songs were being forgotten and lost he began collecting words and tunes across the country.
In January 1905 he travelled to Norfolk, visiting Tilney, Sheringham and Kings Lynn.
In Lynn he heard fisherman James ‘Duggie’ Carter sing The Captain’s Apprentice. Vaughan Williams thought it the most beautiful tune he had ever heard – despite its terrible story of a ship’s captain torturing and killing his child apprentice.
Musician, historian and writer Caroline Davison said: “The wild melody of The Captain’s Apprentice, as sung by Carter, became the main theme in Vaughan William’s Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 and deeply influenced his later work. In old age the composer claimed that the cadences of the tune ‘finally opened the door to an entirely new world of melody, harmony and feeling.’”
Caroline, of Norwich, fell in love with the tune, and was shocked when she discovered the words to the original folk song and its story of the murder of a child sailor.
She was a conservation officer, assessing the historic value of a row of Victorian terraced houses in King’s Lynn, when she learned Vaughan Williams had collected folk songs in a nearby pub, The Tilden Smith.
It was the start of a quest to discover how the Lynn fisherman’s song had a profound impact on the rest of Vaughan Williams' career.
His week-long stay yielded around 70 folk songs. Not yet famous when he first heard The Captain’s Apprentice, he went on to change the course of English classical music, turning away from Germanic influence and tying it into folk traditions.
The first of his three Norfolk rhapsodies opens with the tune of The Captain’s Apprentice and features two more songs he heard in Lynn - The Bold Young Sailor and On Board a Ninety-Eight - a type of sailing ship. Norfolk folk tunes also feature in Vaughan William’s A Sea Symphony, composed in Sheringham, and he turned the tune of a song called Young Henry the Poacher into the hymn Oh God of earth and altar, naming the music King’s Lynn.
The composer called the slums of North End in King’s Lynn, where fishing families lived, the worst he had ever seen. Large families lived in just a couple of rooms; there was no running water and waste from fish preparation and toilets or chamber pots ran into the street. Most were swept away in the 1930s with just one remaining – now True’s Yard Fisherfolk Museum.
In their forthcoming book A Norfolk Rhapsody: Ralph Vaughan Williams in King’s Lynn, Jill Bennett and Elizabeth James explore Vaughan William’s week in in Norfolk.
Published on October 12, the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth, it includes the words and music of the songs Vaughan Williams discovered in Norfolk.
Jill’s father, barge skipper Bob Roberts, was a singer and broadcaster and her grandfather met Vaughan Williams. Jill herself, a founder producer of Radio Norfolk who still covers the west of the county for the station, has loved folk music all her life and is a musician for King’s Morris in King’s Lynn, and has also played for Kemp’s Men of Norwich.
Elizabeth was a curator at Lynn Museum and administrator at King’s Lynn Minster and also has a lifelong interest in traditional music. She has previously written a study of The Captain’s Apprentice, for The Folk Song Journal.
Caroline Davison researched the sad life and violent death of Lynn child apprentice Robert Eastick, for her book The Captain’s Apprentice, Ralph Vaughan Williams and the story of a folk song, and traced similar stories of sadistic ship captains and terrorised children around the country.
She was a conservation officer with Norfolk County Council and then director of the Norfolk Archaeological Trust and has previously written a novel and children’s guide to Norfolk and sung with Norwich bands and choirs.
At the age of 80 Vaughan Williams returned to King’s Lynn to talk about the songs he had collected in the town half a century before. Four years later his arrangement of Paddy Hadley’s Fen and Flood, in response to the devastating floods of 1953, was first performed in St Nicholas Chapel, King’s Lynn – where singing fisherman James Duggie Carter wed in 1865, and the parents of the tragic apprentice whose story he told were married in 1827.
The Captain’s Apprentice, Ralph Vaughan Williams and the story of a folk song, by Caroline Davison, is published by Chatto and Windus.
A Norfolk Rhapsody: Ralph Vaughan Williams in King’s Lynn, by Jill Bennett and Elizabeth James, is published on October 12, by Poppyland Publishing.
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