Month: January 2022

This article was first posted in November 2021, but was significantly updated in the light of important new information in January 2022. 

In late 2022, this research was published by The Ballad Partners, in a collection entitled: “Thirsty Work and Other Legacies of Folk Song”, which contains many other interesting essays and is very reasonably priced at only £13. It may be bought from the Ballad Partners website.

A chance finding in the BBC Radio Times Archive led to this investigation into a series of seven programmes featuring traditional singing from across England, called Thirsty Work, broadcast between April 1940 and March 1941. The details of all the pubs visited are at the foot of this page.

Illustration from the Radio Times, 4th May 1940: Redmire (see part 2 for details)

The Radio Times descriptions didn’t actually mention the words “folksong” or “traditional singers”, so in the early days, I wasn’t even sure if that was the kind of song which was featured in the series (it was!).

To help you navigate through this long (but totally fascinating!) article, here are some shortcuts, but I do recommend that for your first reading, you ignore these, sit down in a comfy chair with a cup of tea and read the whole lot from beginning to end!

• Introduction
• Radio broadcasting in wartime
• How this series came to be made: the producer, Maurice Brown
• How this series came to be made: contacts, locations and criteria
• What happened next and the legacy of the Thirsty Work series
• A note concerning recordings
• Thirsty Work pubs and dates
• References and links

Introduction

Most people in Britain will be aware of the Radio Times, a weekly publication which gives the schedule for all the BBC broadcasts for the week ahead, together with articles on some of the programmes. Starting in 1923, with radio only, it expanded to cover television, and over the years, has been an extremely popular magazine with a huge circulation.

All the old issues of this magazine are now online in the BBC Radio Times Genome Archive.

Investigating the Thirsty Work programmes in detail has unearthed a huge amount of fascinating material and so I have divided it into four articles here.

This first one provides an introduction and background to the series, followed by:

Thirsty Work part 2: the North -singing from Ambleside, Redmire and Harome

Thirsty Work part 3: East Anglia and the East Midlands – singing from the Eel’s Foot Inn, Suffolk and Wakerley, Northants

Thirsty Work part 4: the Cotswolds – two programmes with an unexpected link with “The Archers”: singing from North Littleton and Ebrington

So, first of all, a little bit of background to these programmes broadcast between 9^th April 1940 and 7^th March 1941 – a time when much of the world was involved in the horrendous world-wide conflict of World War Two, and Britain was experiencing an intense period of bombing – with the London, Coventry and Swansea blitzes all happening in this period, plus many troops deployed in northern France and increasingly across Europe and northern Africa.

Radio broadcasting in wartime

The Thirsty Work series was broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme – a channel specifically designed for those British Armed Forces in France – which started transmissions on 18^th Feb 1940. The Forces Programme was meant as an alternative to the Home Service, the sole British broadcasting channel at the time. The Home Service had previously been the National Programme, which had been complemented by a Regional Programme, but that was closed down at the start of the War, as was the nascent television service. However, this structure of regional and national sections within the BBC was still in place throughout the period of the Thirsty Work programmes and was at times a thorn in the side of the series producer, Maurice Brown.

In fact, there were more troops stationed in training camps in Britain than there were in France at this point. Forces Radio became very popular with civilians, with its lightweight content, aiming to boost morale with music and entertainment rather than to provide factual news content.

Radio Times 9th April 1940

This page from the Radio Times, showing the first in the Thirsty Work series, gives an idea of the scheduling typical of the Forces Programme in this period. Most programmes lasted about 30 minutes and the majority consisted of light music, including dance music, jazz and popular songs. There were also variety programmes and musical plays recorded in London theatres and a twenty-minute programme aimed at the British troops stationed in northern France: Parlez-vous Francais?

These programmes were recorded in a “BBC Mobile Recording Unit” – this consisted of one or two engineers working in the back of a converted laundry or furniture van, using direct disc-cutting machines. Each double-sided disc had just 4-5 minutes recording time per side, requiring careful management of the proceedings.

In wartime, as may well be imagined, there was a shortage of both recording equipment and materials, as well as experienced engineers. When you also factor in petrol rationing, it’s amazing that these sorts of programmes got made at all.

See A note concerning recordings below for details about the archiving of the original discs. Part 2 and Part 3 both refer in more detail to the recordings of individual programmes.

How this series came to be made: the producer, Maurice Brown

The producer, Maurice Brown, was evidently key to the series.

Maurice Penton Brown (1909-1981) the son of a bank manager, came from London and was educated at Stowe and Oxford, before starting at the BBC in the then new gramophone department, whilst in his early twenties. The first mentions of him in the media show him working in what we would now call documentaries, but were then usually referred to as “features”.

He married Dorothea (known as Thea) Vigne in 1934 and they had one daughter, Caroline in 1936. It is thanks to Caroline’s page on the genealogy website Ancestry that I was able to find the photo of her father. I have tried to contact her, but to no avail, so I hope if she or any other family members come across this article, they will be pleased to see it, and perhaps contact me via this site.

By 1940 he was reported as holding the post of Music Director in the Theatre and Drama Department.  In 1943 he enlisted in the Naval Reserve and recorded features whilst on board various Naval vessels. In 1949, he produced Five Years After, first broadcast on Sunday 5th June 1949: “The memories and reflections of seven men – Richard Dimbleby, Chester Wilmot, Maurice Brown, Robert Dunnett, Colin Wills, Joel O’Brien, and Stanley Maxted – who were present at the invasion of France on June 6, 1944, and who have since revisited the beaches and battlefields of Normandy. Programme edited and produced by Maurice Brown.”

I believe that Saturday Night at the Eel’s Foot – recorded and broadcast in 1939 (see Part 3) was his first foray into broadcasting traditional singing in its natural habitat, shortly followed by the Thirsty Work series. . At the time, it was rare for folksong to be heard in an informal social setting on the radio, although during the 1930s when the BBC Regional Programme was probably at its zenith, there were various programmes which occasionally featured traditional singers and musicians, dialect speakers and calendar customs such as Mumming Plays. Folksong was more likely to be heard on the airwaves in the more genteel form of the voice of a trained singer accompanied by a piano.

So Brown was really quite a pioneer in broadcasting the “real thing” in its normal setting. He was well informed about the folksong genre, as shown in a letter to The Listener, published on 14^th August 1941. The letter is in response to a feature about Cecil Sharp in a programmed entitled Everybody’s Scrapbook – whilst acknowledging Sharp’s “magnificent work” he argues against Sharp’s daughter, who, in the programme, had talked about folk-song singing as something that was dead and gone and claimed “If my father had started any later, there would have been little to collect.” Brown refers to the Thirsty Work series and says, “The singing itself is very varied, but there are still singers of great style, with all the swagger, decoration and rhythmic changed of real folk song delivery.”

In October 1947, Brown collaborated with E.J. Moeran to produce East Anglia Sings with recordings made again in the Eel’s Foot and also in the Windmill Inn in Sutton, Norfolk. Two songs from this programme appear on Volume 3 (England) of an ambitious series of records made by Alan Lomax in the early 1950s, the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music. These were issued on Columbia Records, who were pioneers in the development of Long-Playing records, in 1955. Many of the recordings were made by Lomax himself, but others were gleaned from existing archives of folk music including the BBC, which seems to have been enough for Brown to receive a credit on the sleeve notes. He is also credited on Volume 1 (Ireland) with a recording made in Killarney, Co. Kerry in 1947. In August that year a major field-recording trip, guided by Seamus Ennis, was made to Ireland by the BBC at the instigation of Brian George (Head of the BBC’s Central Programme Operations and later founder of the Folk Music & Dialect Recording Scheme), and Brown may well have been part of that, but at the moment I have only this slight circumstantial evidence to suggest that.

In later years his work encompassed a wide range of subjects, from regular airings of Kipling’s Just So Stories on Children’s Hour through a variety of programmes about sailing craft to a good number which involved music from different countries, such as A Serbian Christmas – “A sound picture of traditional celebrations, both religious and secular, recorded at the Yugoslav Volunteer Workers Hostel at Debach, Suffolk, in January 1950” which was made in collaboration with writer, broadcaster and singer John Seymour. Most of Brown’s programmes were broadcast on the Home Service and the Third Programme, with the occasional one on the Light Programme, such as Saturday Night Ashore, which in September 1951 was described thus: “Join the Navy to See the World – Six lighthearted episodes from a dramatised log of the Mediterranean Fleet’s first summer cruise, during June and July, to Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Written and produced by Maurice Brown.”

Maurice Brown retired to Suffolk where he died, in Long Melford, in 1981.

How this series came to be made: contacts, locations and criteria

This series was no mean undertaking; even in peacetime conditions it would be a challenge to produce, at short notice, seven programmes from across England, each one involving a number of amateur performers. Just finding the singers and the pubs in the first place required a lot of what we now call networking. At first I thought I might find folksong collectors and dialect enthusiasts amongst Brown’s contacts, but in the main the initial suggestions seemed to come from colleagues within the BBC.

In February 1940, just as the new Programme for the Forces was being rolled out, Maurice Brown wrote to Laurence Gilliam, the head of BBC Features and Drama, explaining his vision for the series:

“I know that the idea of recorded programmes of pub singing is an old hobby horse of mine, but I feel six or more 15 minute broadcasts could be made of this material for the B.E.F. [British Expeditionary Forces] programme. This would not be in any way confined to folk songs but would consist of songs they sing in given large areas – for instance, in the Lakeland pubs there are fell songs and hunting songs, in Yorkshire their own dialect songs, in Kent hopping songs, et cetera etc., and everywhere you find songs the troops know. It is merely a matter of editing to produce a short programme which although in part localised should still be popular both to the man who comes from that part of the country and the mass who enjoy singing songs.”

In March 1940, shortly after the series was approved, Maurice Brown was investigating a Kentish hopping pub, the New Inn in Mousehole, Cornwall and somewhere in the Cotswolds, where his contact seemed to be Freddie Grisewood a BBC colleague from Daylesford, near Stow-on-the-Wold.

In May 1940 with the first two programmes under his belt, the search for further locations gained further traction. Brown wrote to another BBC colleague, Robin Whitworth: “As I told you on the telephone I am producing a series of twelve programmes on pub singing for the Forces. I want to record at least three in the Midlands.  [ … ] Do you know, or could you find any such places?”

Whitworth (whose father had an intense interest in dialect and had founded the British Drama League which created a sound archive of dialect recordings as a resource for actors) was an experienced broadcaster in the Midlands region, a collaborator with Charles Gardiner (Programmes 5 and 6) and producer of many “vox-pop” programmes, and his correspondence on this matter with Maurice Brown makes for interesting reading.

Whitworth wrote back, mentioning the following Black Country pubs: The Stork, Great Bridge, nr W. Bromwich, kept by Jim Partridge; The Tumbledown Bridge,  Willenhall (pictured here); The Bear, Great (actually West) Brampton, Newcastle under Lyme; The Cleveland, nr Stow Heath, Wolverhampton, and separately, the Portcullis Inn at Hillesley near Stroud in Gloucestershire. Later in the year he was putting out to feelers to a contact in Lancashire for the Thirsty Work series. None of these ideas came to fruition, but it’s interesting to see that they were considering pubs in more urban settings.

Even after identifying suitable pubs, Brown needed good reliable people in the locality to contact the singers and ease the way for the recordings to be made. The landlords of the pubs played a significant part in these arrangements, and other vital people were Ernest Skelton, a music teacher and church organist in Ambleside (Programme 1), Charles Gardiner, a local government official, writer and folksong collector in the Cotswolds (Programmes 5 and 6), and Sidney Jameson, a journalist and amateur folklorist in Harome (Programme 7) – see Part 2 and Part 4 for details of these people.

Brown’s pitch for the series to Gilliam (above) goes a long way to explaining why the word “folk” wasn’t used in any of the Radio Times descriptions and provides us with an insight into the guiding principles behind the series.

Brown also stated his criteria to any potential landlord or host for these programmes. In April 1940, for example, a Mr. J.B. Landan wrote from the Golden Lion in Islington, suggesting that his pub might be suitable. He regularly held singing competitions there, to audiences of 150 or so people, and wrote that he had read about the forthcoming programmes in the Evening News. Brown responded:  

“In the pub broadcasts which I am producing I do not use many singers. What I want is from ten to twenty people singing because they like it. They also must sing songs representing their own district or county. If you could find some completely non-professional singers who will Cockney and London solos and choruses I shall be very pleased to come and hear them when I am next in London. Would you be good enough to let me know if this is possible?”

In his introductory letter to George Miller, the landlord at the Exeter’s Arms, Wakerley (Programme 4) he explained: “These programmes are being broadcast to the Forces, and individual pubs should appeal to regiments enlisted from that district.”

What happened next, and the legacy of the Thirsty Work series

At the end of 1940, plans were being laid for another series of Thirsty Work, to consist of twelve half-hour programmes. However, given the problems with pubs during wartime (See Parts 2 and 4 for more on this), a slightly different perspective was suggested by Brown’s boss in the Features and Drama department, Laurence Gilliam, to whom Brown wrote on 22^nd October 1940:

“TROOPS ENTERTAINING THE TROOPS: I have been making enquiries about your suggested series of programmes on “Thirsty Work” lines. It seems likely that we could broadcast these certainly fortnightly, and perhaps weekly. I contemplate including broadcasts from Polish, Czech, Belgian, French and Dutch camps, the American eagle squadron, in addition to Army messes, aerodromes and between decks on board naval ships. Would you like me to go ahead with this as soon as may be, because at the moment I have no actual contacts.”

And on 7^th November Gilliam responded:

THIRSTY WORK FOR THE TROOPS: I have discussed the new series for THIRSTY WORK with Mr Langham and he welcomed the idea for 30 minute programmes on the new plan starting in the New Year. Would you please let him know as soon as possible the titles and times.”

It seems that events overtook this proposal and the Radio Times archive shows only occasional programmes produced by Brown from 1941 until the end of the war. As noted above, he was a Sub-Lieutenant in the Naval Reserve and several of the programmes he produced were recorded on board Naval ships.

From 1949 to 1958, the BBC actually employed people as folk song collectors and recordists. The most prominent of these was Peter Kennedy, who visited at least two of the Thirsty Work locations, Redmire and Ebrington, on the trail of Brown’s singers. This appears to be very much the way the collecting scheme worked: “Far from comprising a repository of oral recordings gained through fresh encounters, the Recorded Scheme reconfigured numerous extant archives, each with their own criteria of authenticity, systems of classification, and territorial attachments” (Daniel Gomes, in Archival Airwaves: Recording Ireland for the BBC). Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if Kennedy got to Wakerley or Harome, the least known of the Thirsty Work locations, but if the recordings had already been lost at this stage, that may account for why.

A note concerning recordings

When the BBC was established, there was no remit to keep an archive of recordings, although written documentation was a requirement. Many programmes were broadcast live or used existing recordings of music.

It is largely thanks to Marie Slocombe (1912-1995) that any original recordings remain in existence. At the time of the Thirsty Work series, she was working in the Recorded Programmes Department, and there is correspondence between her and Maurice Brown about the “processing” (i.e preservation) of some of the original recordings for this series. There is a well-told tale that Slocombe, together with colleague Tim Eckersley, both in relatively junior positions, were asked, in 1937, by their boss to dispose of a pile of old records. The two realised that amongst these discs were historically significant recordings of people such as George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill and they boldly requested that these be archived. Permission was granted to keep a small selection, and so started what was eventually to become the BBC Sound Archive.

It wasn’t until a few months after the Thirsty Work series, in August 1941, that Slocombe officially became the Librarian for the Recorded Programmes Permanent Library (i.e. sound archivist). Those of us interested in folk music are eternally grateful to her; she was keenly interested in folk and traditional music, song and dance and a committee member of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. She and her head of department, Brian George were influential in the creation and management of the Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme mentioned above, which saw folk music collectors such as Séamus Ennis (pictured below in Ireland in 1947, still using a direct-cut disc recorder, photo © UCD) and Peter Kennedy actively collecting folksong under the auspices of the BBC from a pilot in 1949 through to 1957. This was made possible due to technological developments in portable recording equipment and the BBC was uniquely placed to run such a scheme. Slocombe and George also created the legendary radio series As I Roved Out which ran from 1953 to 1958 and included many recordings made under the scheme.

The British Library Sound Archive is now the repository for the BBC Sound Archive and in their catalogue may be found:

BBC 2519             Ambleside (Thirsty Work Programme 1): Joe Bowman (probably Brait Black)

BBC 2520             Ambleside (Thirsty Work Programme 1): John Peel, Sally Gray (Alfred  Creighton)

BBC 2521             Redmire (Thirsty Work Programme 2): Ilkley Moor Baht’at, The White Cockade, (probably Joe Alderson)

BBC 2522             Ambleside (Thirsty Work Programme 1): Talk about Joe Bowman’s funeral, Brait Black, All Jolly Fellows (John Bell)

BBC 2523             Redmire (Thirsty Work Programme 2): I Like to Hear the Old Cock Crow, Kit Jones; Our Old Nan’s a Mazer, Jim Lambert

They are not identified with the Thirsty Work series in the catalogue, but they definitely are. These are not the original discs recorded in situ at the pubs, but library copies taken from the originals. We know this because (a) there is evidence in the BBC written archives about the selection and procedures and (b) these discs do not contain the entire repertoire of songs which were actually broadcast. It is clear from the BBC memos that it was Maurice Brown who was responsible for selecting the most significant items from each broadcast for archiving, and from the items in the British Library Sound Archive (programmes 1 and 2 only) we can see that less than half the songs that were broadcast were selected for preservation: a memo from Brown on 4 June 1940 regarding selecting songs from Programmes 1 and 2 correlates precisely with the tracks on the BLSA discs.

The BBC Permanent Library (fore-runner of the Sound Archive) made metal masters (“matrices”) from which future copies could be pressed, and – at least for the Recording Scheme – also kept two unplayed pressings in separate locations. In correspondence about the Eel’s Foot programme (Programme 3) Brown mentioned the original 1939 recordings as being “on film” which sounds tantalisingly as if there might have been visual evidence, but in fact his comment refers to the use of a Philips-Miller film recorder, developed in the 1920s for purely audio purposes.

On 11 March 1941, Brown sent the records from the final three episodes off for processing, writing: “I am sending you three records to be processed. They are: the Ebrington Arms, Ebrington, the Ivy, North Littleton and the Star, Harome. Each set of records is separate, and have with them the titles that I wish to be processed. I have in some cases starred the essentials, but would greatly prefer for the lot to be done.”

At the time of writing I cannot trace the existence of any discs for these programmes (4, 5 and 6) or Wakerley (Programme 7) although there is documentary proof of each of these being sent off to the Recorded Programmes department for processing.

Each of the singing communities recorded for the Thirsty Work programmes is quite different, and has its own story to tell. I hope you enjoy reading them and thank you for reading this far!

I would just remind you here that any re-use of this original research should be credited to me, Katie Howson, with this website as the source. It is due to be published in print form in the near future, and details will be posted here when known. Should you wish to use any of the information or images here, please do contact me first.

Thirsty Work: pubs and dates

1. From the Royal Oak, Ambleside, Westmorland, recorded on 15^th & 16^th March 1940, and broadcast on 9th April 1940.
2. From the King’s Arms, Redmire, Wensleydale, Yorkshire, recorded on 13^th & 14^th April 1940 and broadcast on 4^th May 1940.
3. From the Eel’s Foot Inn, Eastbridge, Suffolk, recorded on 13^th May 1939 and broadcast on 13^th May 1940.
4. From the Exeter’s Arms, Wakerley, Northamptonshire, recorded on 8^th & 9^th May 1940 and broadcast on 14^th June 1940.
5. From the Ivy Inn, North Littleton, Worcestershire, recorded on 6^th & 7^th June and broadcast on 22^nd July 1940 (repeated 17^th Sept 1940).
6. From the Ebrington Arms, Ebrington, Gloucestershire, recorded on 27^th & 28^th September 1940 and broadcast on 28^th Nov 1940 (repeated 3^rd January 1941).
7. From the Star Inn, Harome, North Yorkshire, recorded on 3^rd & 4^th February 1941 and broadcast on 7^th March 1941.

For these web articles I have grouped the programmes geographically:

‘Thirsty Work’ Part 2: the North -singing from Ambleside, Redmire and Harome

‘Thirsty Work’ Part 3: East Anglia and the East Midlands – singing from the Eel’s Foot Inn, Suffolk and Wakerley, Northamptonshire

‘Thirsty Work’ Part 4: the Cotswolds – two programmes with an unexpected link with “The Archers”: singing from North Littleton and Ebrington

‘Thirsty Work’ part 5: Director’s Cut – recordings from Programmes 5 & 6 and other updates.

References and links

My researches started in the time-honoured way, building biographical sketches of the singers through the usual genealogical sources. As more information was revealed, I was able to consult the more usual folk song resources such as the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, British Library Sound Archive etc and there are links to some sound recordings within the following articles. I’m indebted to John Baxter for alerting me to Maurice Brown’s letter in The Listener and to Derek Schofield for his help on investigating the Alan Lomax recordings.

I originally found out about the Thirsty Work programmes on the Radio Times Programme Index (previously known as the Genome project), which is very easy to browse and search. Further information on the making of these programmes has been added from the BBC Written Archives Centre, which is by appointment only, in person.

You can hear Marie Slocombe herself telling the story of the foundation of the BBC Sound Archive in a short clip here and her 1964 article The BBC Folk Music Collection, published in Folklore and Folk Music Archivist by Indiana University is available online here.   

Archival Airwaves: Recording Ireland for the BBC by Daniel Gomes is good on the history of the BBC Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme, and in particular the uses to which the archive recordings of folk song and music were put in the 1950s and 60s. It was published in 2019 in Modernism/modernity, the journal of the Modernist Studies Association and is also available online here. 

The BBC website has several good articles on its radio history . 

Asa Briggs’ five part history of the BBC is extremely comprehensive; the first three volumes are the most relevant:  The Birth of Broadcasting: The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 1, Asa Briggs (1961); The Golden Age of Wireless: The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol 2, Asa Briggs (1965) and The War of Words: The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol 3, Asa Briggs (1970). Or for a potted version, see: The Origins of BBC Policy, Paddy Scannell, in The Regions, the Nations and the BBC, ed. Harvey & Robins, BFI (1993).

Also relevant to this article were: A Formative Force: the BBC’s role in the development of music and its audiences in Northern Ireland 1924-1939, Ruth Stanley; and Tom Western’s knowledgeable and perspicacious writings on radio and ethnomusicology (all available on Academia.edu).

The photo of Séamus Ennis recording in a car may be found here on the University College Dublin website who hold the copyright. Dúchas © National Folklore Collection UCD.

Anyone wishing to cite this original research should credit it to Katie Howson and cite this website as the source. © Katie Howson, 2021.

Should you wish to use any of the information or images here, please do contact me first.

My research on the 1940s radio programmes “Thirsty Work”  is now published by The Ballad Partners, in a collection entitled: “Thirsty Work and Other Legacies of Folk Song”. The book contains many other interesting essays and is very reasonably priced at only £13! It may be bought from the Ballad Partners website.

I have far more biographical and anecdotal evidence than can be published here – if you are a relative or a researcher, please do get in touch, I would be very happy to share the information I have.

This article was first posted in November 2021, but was significantly updated in the light of important new information in January 2022, with an additional biographical note added in July 2023.

This article covers programmes 5 and 6 in the Thirsty Work series broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme between 9th April 1940 and 7th March 1941.

It makes most sense if you read the introduction to the series (‘Thirsty Work’ Part 1) before this one.

• Programme 5 was first broadcast on 22^nd July 1940 from recordings made at the Ivy Inn, North Littleton, near Evesham, Worcestershire on 6^th & 7^th June 1940. The first six minutes of this programme were not broadcast due to a technical hitch, and so it was repeated on 17^th Sept 1940. 
• Programme 6 was broadcast on 28^th November 1940 from recordings made at the Ebrington Inn, Ebrington, near Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, on 27^th and 28^th September 1940, and was repeated on 3^rd January 1941.

As with Programme 4, there seemed to be no recordings in existence, so originally we had no information about the songs sung on these programmes (update: see ‘Thirsty Work’ Part 5 –  Director’s Cut,  for new details of recordings). A visit to the BBC Written Archives Centre has now revealed the details of the songs sung as well as the way these two locations only ten miles apart came to be chosen.

In a memo to Thirsty Work producer Maurice Brown written on 8^th May 1940, BBC Midlands producer Robin Whitworth advised him: “There are some enthusiastic pub singers at North Littleton, about 5 miles from Evesham. There are two Pubs there, but the “Ivy” is the best.” Brown followed this up quickly, visiting the Ivy in company with Charles Gardiner on 21^st and 22^nd May and arrangements were made to record over the first weekend in June.

It seemed strange that the next programme was also from the Cotswolds, but again, information in the BBC archives has revealed something of the situation at the time: in a letter dated 1^st July 1940, Brown wrote to Gardiner: “Could we visit a Cotswold pub as soon after July 22 as possible to fix a recording for August? Unfortunately all my East, South-east, South and South-west coastal pubs are unapproachable because of the military. What shall I do?!”

Gardiner’s response at the end of that month was: “There doesn’t seem to be a pub in Chipping Campden that is not occupied or “ear-marked” by the military and I have made provisional arrangements for a sing-song at the Ebrington Arms a mile and a half beyond Campden where you can be assured of a quiet truly rural atmosphere. We can easily get one or two good singers from Campden over there and they will be well known to the local company.” Brown agreed to this arrangement and recordings were made in the Ebrington Arms on 27^th and 28^th September.

• The Ivy, North Littleton
• Ebrington Arms
• Cotswold Dramas
• References and Links

Programme 5: The Ivy, North Littleton, Worcestershire

Broadcast on 22^nd July 1940 (repeated 17^th September)

“An evening of country and popular songs recorded in a Worcestershire inn by the BBC Mobile Recording Unit. Produced by Maurice Brown. The singers are: Charles Gardiner, George Norledge, Harry Gisboume, Bill Norledge, Wilson Ballard, Frank Norledge, Dick Emms, Sidney Gisboume, Jack Brookes and other regulars of The Ivy, North Littleton.”

In the Radio Times it actually says North Dittleton, but it’s a misprint. It was North Littleton, and there’s also a South Littleton and Middle Littleton, all villages a few miles north of Evesham.

Singers

Bill and George Norledge were brothers, the oldest in the company of singers when this programme was made. They were brought up in the nearby villages of Todenham and Offenham (home to one of the tallest permanent maypoles in England). Bill (1867-1946) lived his married life in South Littleton where he worked as a farm carter and coal haulier. George (1870-1960) also lived in South Littleton all his adult life and had various jobs including stone quarrying as a young man and jobbing gardener in later life.

Frank Norledge (1900-1986) was George’s son and Bill’s nephew. He grew up in South Littleton but by 1939 was living in North Littleton and working as a sanitary labourer.

Harry and Sidney Gisbourne were also brothers, who grew up in North Littleton. Harry (1891-1966) served in the First World War, becoming a sergeant in the Worcestershire Regiment. By 1939 he was working as a market gardener and assistant postman and living near the Ivy Inn. His younger brother Sidney (1900-?) also lived nearby and worked as a market gardener.

Wilson Ballard (1882-1945) seems to have moved about a bit, but by 1939 was settled in North Littleton, working as a market gardener with three sons working alongside him.

Jack Brookes (1882-?) also lived in the village, and worked as market gardener in his younger life, though by 1939 he was working as a carter on a farm.

I wasn’t able to identify Dick Emms (also referred to as Harry) confidently until I got a tip off from Paul Burgess, who pointed me in the direction of Richard Henry Emms (1886-1967) – i.e. Dick Harry! This man was living in Monmouthshire at the time of the radio broadcasts, so he hadn’t been an obvious candidate, but he had enough local connections to convince both of us he was the man on the radio programme.

Charles Gardiner (1902-1966) was born and brought up in Cirencester. Sometime after his marriage in 1925, he moved to the Evesham area where he became Clerk to Evesham Rural District Council and several other local authorities. By 1939 he was living in the village of Aldington, where he remained for the rest of this life. It is apparent from the Register taken that year that he was very active in the War effort locally, with his extra jobs including ARP Officer, Food Executive Officer and National Registration Officer. But Gardiner also had a creative streak – we shall come to that a little later in the section titled Cotswold Dramas. Through this connection we know that he sang The Village Pump and Good Ale, although we don’t know if either of these featured in the Thirsty Work programme. We also know that he collected songs in his local area, although to what extent isn’t known.

Songs from the Littleton villages

The “Programme as broadcast” documentation held in the BBC archives reveals the songs broadcast in the two Littleton programmes – the incomplete first broadcast (just 4 songs, indicated with an asterisk here) and the repeat with the whole of the intended programme. It is not known who sang which songs, although only Harry Gisbourne, Frank Norledge and Jack Brookes were listed in the first programme, so they must have sung the starred items between them.

• Is Everybody Happy Here?
• Johnny George
• I’m a broken-down man
• Barley Mow *
• Two Little Girls in Blue *
• Buttercup Joe
• Swim, Sam, Swim
• Never let your braces dangle *
• Memories
• Just like the Ivy *

These songs are a mixture of traditional, Music Hall and popular songs, in keeping with Brown’s broad criteria (see Part 1.)

There is also evidence of folk songs that were sung by some other people in the village.

James Madison Carpenter and Francis Collinson had both collected songs from singers in Littleton: Carpenter’s singer was Charles Rose, who was actually still alive when the Thirsty Work programmes were recorded – in his eighties, living in North Littleton. Carpenter made a wax cylinder recording of Rose singing Gaffy Gay, and noted down I am a Rover, King Arthur’s Three Sons and One-O. (Image above from VWML – see References & Links section.)

Collinson’s singer was Miss M. Osbourne, who sang Lord Nelson: this could have been either of two sisters from a pub-keeping family in the village. Millie May Osbourne was still alive in 1941, and living in North Littleton, where in 1939 she was licensee of the Blacksmith’s Arms: a pub evidently to known to BBC producer Robin Whitworth when he wrote the memo to Maurice Brown quoted previously, but which lost out to the Ivy for the Thirsty Work broadcast.

Whitworth may also have provided an introduction for Maurice Brown to local man Charles Gardiner, but it’s very likely that the two had already met, as Brown had actually lived in Evesham for a short while. In August 1939, the BBC Radio Features and Drama department evacuated to Wood Norton Hall in Evesham, and on the 1939 Register taken a few weeks later, Maurice Brown and his wife Dorothea were listed as living in the Market Place. The department moved on to Manchester in November, but Wood Norton Hall continued to be used by the Monitoring Service for the duration of the war. So Brown probably wasn’t in Evesham for more than a few months, but probably long enough to have come into contact with Charles Gardiner, who apart from his day job in local government, was also an amateur writer of “sketches” for the BBC Midlands Region. Correspondence in the BBC archives reveals much antagonism from the Midlands Regional Executive towards Brown, who worked for the National section of the BBC, accusing him of poaching on their patch and, in a particularly frosty and exasperated memo from October 1940: “I have given up asking Mr Brown to inform us beforehand of their visits,” and “I am responsible for any contracts between Mr Charles Gardiner, a very well known Midland broadcaster, and the corporation.”

Some of those rural vignettes written by Charles Gardiner featured other local singers that we are about to meet in the next pub …

Programme 6: The Ebrington Arms, Ebrington, Gloucestershire

Broadcast on 28^th November 1940 (repeated 3^rd January 1941)

“An evening of popular and country singing recorded by the BBC Mobile Recording Unit in a Cotswold inn. Chairman, Charles Gardiner. Singers: George Hawkins, Lionel Ellis, Ben Benfield, Garnet Keyte, Dick Taylor, Sydney Nicholls, and other regulars of the Ebrington Arms, Ebrington
Produced by Maurice Brown.

 “Maurice Brown took the recording car to Ebrington Arms, Ebrington, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, a few weeks ago, and made the recordings there for this programme. The name Ebrington is pronounced ‘ Yommerton ‘ in these parts, and is known locally as ‘ the place where the fools come from’. The villagers, however, say that ‘ only fools go there’. The singers will include a coal seller, a bricklayer, a policeman, and a man who says he is a Jack-of-all-trades. Many of the songs have never been recorded before, and most of them are drinking songs.”

As noted in the introduction here, it had originally been the hope to broadcast Programme 6 from a pub in Chipping Campden, but these were all too busy with soldiers, so this country pub a couple of miles away was suggested by Charles Gardiner. Several of the singers that Gardiner knew in Campden were taken down to the Ebrington arms, but interestingly Tom Hooke was not among the Campden contingent, despite being a very well-known community singer there; he had been born in London and had worked professionally on the music halls, so would probably not have fitted into Brown’s vision of the amateur country singer singing for singing’s sake.

Songs

The “Programme as broadcast” documentation reveals the songs recorded in the Ebrington Arms on 27^th and 28^th September 1940: there were a couple of drinking songs, and quite a few had been commercially recorded, so the Radio Time claim wasn’t particularly accurate, and unlike the introductory paragraph, was probably not written by Brown himself.

• Down by the old Abbey Gardens
• Foolish Boy
• Jones’ Ale
• The Fly be on the Turmut
• The Black Horse
• Granny’s Old Armchair
• Robin-a-Thumb
• The man who invented beer

See ‘Thirsty Work’ Part 5 –  Director’s Cut, for new details of recordings from Programme 6.

Early folksong collecting in Ebrington and Chipping Campden

Ebrington  turns out to be a well-trodden location for folk collectors. When Cecil Sharp visited the area in 1909 (during which time he was also collecting morris dances in the Cotswolds) he noted songs from several singers in Ebrington, including Charles Woodward, Albert Parnell and Thomas Coldicott. The latter singer had first come to the Folk Song Society’s attention in 1892 when his song We Shepherds are the Best of Men was published in English County Songs. Lucy Broadwood and Fuller Maitland had been introduced to Thomas Coldicott by Frederick Scarlett Potter, a sculptor and writer. Scarlett Potter also noted down The Barrel of Pork and Job Jenkins from Higford Keyte, who was related to Thirsty Work singer Garnet Keyte in some way.

Later on, Francis Collinson also collected at least one song in Chipping Campden – The Foolish Boy – from Garnet Keyte (no date, but quite likely to be 1940s).

The Thirsty Work singers

Garnet Keyte (1883-1971) was born and brought up in the nearby town of Chipping Campden where his father ran a coal business. On his first marriage he was described as a farmer, but a few years later when his father died he went into the coal business himself and was successful enough to buy two houses in 1919. That same year saw the death of his first wife, but he soon met and married his second wife, who was herself a widow with three young children after her first husband had been killed in World War One. By 1939 they had moved out of the centre of the town and were living in a new council house on Station Road, from where Keyte continued to run the coal business and he was a familiar face around the town carrying hundredweights of coal from the lorry to houses and cellars.

Lionel Ellis (1904-1986) was living in Chipping Campden High Street in 1939, where his widowed mother was running a fishmongers and greengrocery, whilst he was working as a market gardener. He married in December that year, and in 1945 he and his wife Dorrie had a house built at their market garden on Aston Road. He lived his whole life in the town, working in younger life in his father’s basket making business making skeps for the produce grown locally, and later running a successful market gardening and floristry business. In May 1920 Lionel Ellis, then aged 15, and two of his older brothers Michael (1904-1982) and Don (Percy McDonald, 1906-1993) first danced with the Chipping Campden Morris. Morris historian Keith Chandler interviewed both Lionel and his brother Don, and in 1997 he described Don as “the custodian of the tradition and its history across more than eighty years.” Lionel Ellis stopped dancing sometime in the 1950s. He and Garnet Keyte clearly knew each other well, as can be seen by their many radio projects detailed in the next section. In the interview with Keith Chandler, he sings a snatch of The Village Pump, but says “I never considered myself a singer … in fact I was damned nervous.” 

Ben Benfield (1906-1979) also lived in Chipping Campden for his whole life and in 1939 was living on Aston Road and working in the building trade, although later he worked as a groundsman at the Grammar School. He was another morris dancer, joining the team in 1931 and remaining a member of the side until the mid 1950s.

Sydney Nicholls (1903-1975) was from Ebrington itself. He worked as a farm labourer and seemed never to have married.

Dick Taylor (1914-1986) lived in Ebrington and in 1939 was married and working as a builder’s labourer.

George Hawkins (1869-1961) was often known as “Shep” or “Shup”. In his youth he moved around a fair bit in villages around the Evesham and Stratford area, but when he was about 40 he settled in Ebrington where he remained for the rest of his 92 years. He is generally described as a shepherd, but in 1958 when he won a long service award from the Royal Agricultural Assocation, his employer Mr Harry Stanley told the Tewkesbury Register “It was impossible to put Shep in the wrong job. He was shepherd, shearer, thatcher, mole catcher, drainer, mower, ditcher and hedge cutter, and in the days when wheat crops were weeded by hoeing, Shep always set the pace for the rest of the team, even when he was 70.” Another report reveals that “Shep” Hawkins was also a noted athlete – winning sprint races at the age of 80. At the age of 78 he appeared on Wilfred Pickles’ popular Have a Go radio show and boasted that he had two children aged eight and nine with his second wife! Thirsty Work was not Hawkins’ first radio appearance, as he had been a guest on a 1939 radio programme scripted and hosted by Charles Gardiner (See next section), called Down on the Farm. This had been recorded in Evesham Town Hall, where Hawkins turned up in his full shepherd’s regalia.

Peter Kennedy visited Shep Hawkins in 1957. Hawkins had memories of the morris dancing tradition in Ilmington as well as songs he had learned from older generations, such as The Little Black Horse, or The Penny Wager, which Peter Kennedy recorded from him in 1957. See the Links section below to listen to that recording.

Cotswold Dramas

Finally we get to consider the circumstances in which this group of men came to be gathered for the Thirsty Work recording, and to find out more about the man who arranged it, who acted as chairman for this session and who also sang in the Ivy Inn in North Littleton: Charles Gardiner.

And in fact, according to notes made in 1952 by Peter Kennedy, it was Gardiner who had originally collected the song mentioned above, The Little Black Horse.

Searching the Radio Times genome archive for Gardiner turned up a number of programmes written by him: mostly dialect “sketches” set in the fictional village of Upper Slocombe, which ran until the mid 1950s. Garnet Keyte and Lionel Ellis were regularly performers in these regional dramas, but their first radio appearance actually predated Gardiner’s work, when they were in The Campden Wonder, written by John Masefield, on 9^th January 1935. Ellis had been on the radio even earlier, on a documentary in 1934 called The Microphone at Large, the first edition of which came from Chipping Campden.

Gardiner’s first programme was broadcast on 18^th March, 1936: Motor Cars or Hosses – “Being a Truthful Account of one of the more Deplorable Episodes in the History of the Parish Council of the Cotswold Village of Upper Slocombe.” The Gloucestershire Echo (20^th March) commented after the programmes that: “Very few people could have recognised the voice of the author in the preliminary anecdotes, nor will many realise that the solo which was rendered in the inn scene was actually sung by Mr. Gardiner.”

The second in the series was Pump and Circumstance broadcast in May 1937 and again (with a different producer) in 1938 – “A faithful account of another deplorable episode in the History of the Parish Council of the Worcestershire village of Upper Slocombe. Reconstructed from the unofficial records by C. H. Gardiner. Re- enacted by a group of Local Inhabitants. The first ‘ deplorable episode’ reconstructed by C. H. Gardiner, who is Clerk to Evesham District Council, concerned a conflict between advocates of ‘hosses’ and ‘motor’ for a new fire engine. The present play deals with a dispute about whether the parish pump, the water of which is contaminated, shall be replaced by a piped water supply. Pump and Circumstance will be acted by Worcestershire players in the local dialect.”

A full listing of Charles Gardiner’s output (so far as I have been able to ascertain) is appended here as a PDF: Charles Gardiner’s radio programmes Just a reminder here, that if you would like to use or refer to any of this original research, please credit it to Katie Howson and cite this website as the source.

In the 1982 interview with Keith Chandler the Morris historian, Lionel Ellis describes how, as a result of him and several others refusing to join the Actors’ Union, Equity, their involvement in this dramatic work came to an end. The story within the family was that Ellis and a couple of others asked to be paid for rehearsals. This was refused and Ellis “stormed off”! His last drama was The Silver Bowl (1955), a retelling of The Campden Wonder, written this time by Georgie Herschel, who had produced a costumed version for the Chipping Campden celebrations of the Festival of Britain in 1951. He continued with occasional involvement in features and documentaries, such as the 1957 programme People Today where he was the subject of an interview by film-maker Philip Donellan, who also included both Lionel and his wife in his 1966 film The Abbey of the English about Westminster Abbey.

You may recognise the name Bob Arnold in this group of men. He went on to play the part of Tom Forrest in the long-running radio series The Archers – set in the fictional village of Ambridge, which is said to be based on the village of Inkberrow, a few miles northwest of North Littleton.

Other men in this photo who were regulars in Gardiner’s dramatic productions and who subsequently went on to be long-running cast members of The Archers were Bill Payne from Ebrington who played Ned Larkin, and George Hart from Campden who played Jethro Larkin, until 1987.

Bob Arnold worked with Charles Gardiner regularly, and in the library of the English Folk Dance and Song Society is a proposal by Gardiner for a radio programme Songs of the Upper Thames, about the folksong collector Alfred Williams, detailing the songs the two of them would sing (see Links). This was broadcast on the Western regional programme on 1st July 1949.

Arnold (born George Richard Arnold, 1910-1998) came from Asthall near Burford, in the south Cotswolds, and had a successful radio career melding together singing (especially before the War), reading (Morning Story, Children’s Hour), acting (The Mayor of Casterbridge) and compering, with a busy sideline in being a guest celebrity asked to open fetes etc. He credited his early radio involvement to influential acquaintances such as William and Peggy Kettlewell who lived in Burwell; the latter was the first secretary at the English Folk Dance Society in 1911, and the two were acquaintances of Cecil Sharp; these links with the EFDSS provided Arnold with further radio work such as English Dance Party in the 1950s. A BBC radio producer who was involved in the earliest actuality recordings from the Cotswolds in 1934 – Owen Reed – also produced The Mayor of Casterbridge and other programmes where Bob Arnold was involved in an acting role some twenty years later.

Bob Arnold first heard folksongs in the pub run by his grandfather, The Three Horseshoes (now the Maytime Inn) in Asthall and learned Good Ale from Charles Gardiner. He made an LP Mornin’ All in 1972 with the Yetties consisting of a selection of standard rural folk songs. His last appearance on The Archers was at Christmas 1997, when – very appropriately – he was singing folksongs in the Ambridge pub, The Bull.

So there you have it, the roots of The Archers in the “Upper Slocombe” series of sketches, written by Charles Gardiner and featuring several of the singers from Programme 6 in the Thirsty Work series. I have often wondered if the name of Gardiner’s fictitious village was inspired by Marie Slocombe, who worked for the BBC: she was based at Evesham in the War and went on to become an integral part of the team fronted by Peter Kennedy that recorded folk song in many more locations than the seven featured in this radio series (see Part 1).

‘Thirsty Work’ Part 1: traditional singing on the radio 1940-41

‘Thirsty Work’ Part 2: the North – singing from Ambleside, Redmire and Harome

‘Thirsty Work’ Part 3: East Anglia and the East Midlands – singing from the Eel’s Foot Inn, Suffolk and Wakerley, Northamptonshire

‘Thirsty Work’ part 5: Director’s Cut – recordings from Programmes 5 & 6 and other updates.

References and Links

I originally found out about the Thirsty Work programmes on the Radio Times Programme Index (previously known as the Genome project), which is very easy to browse and search. Further information on the making of these programmes has been added from the BBC Written Archives Centre, which is by appointment only, in person.

Thanks to Gwilym Davies, Judith Ellis, Keith Chandler and Paul Burgess.

Gwilym and Carol Davies and team have put together a splendid local resource on their Glostrad website.

Peter Kennedy’s 1957 recording of Shep Hawkins singing The Little Black Horse may be heard on the British Library Sound Archive website. 

Peter Kennedy’s typewritten reports for the BBC make fascinating reading: here’s a link to one of his 1952 trips which included Charles Gardiner, Lionel Ellis and Bob Arnold as well as referring to the dialect liaison link: Peter Kennedy Archive (see pp 1, 8, 9, 10).

Francis Collinson’s transcription of Garnet Keyte singing The Foolish Boy is in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library and can be seen in their digital archive. 

Charles Gardiner’s outline of his 1949 radio feature Songs of the Upper Thames  on the work of Alfred Williams may also be read in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library digital archive. Gardiner had a lifelong interest in dialect, publishing a number of articles in the Evesham Post in 1959-1960, which were gathered together in a booklet entitled The Old Cotswold Dialect published by the Evesham Historical Society in 2008. 

James Madison Carpenter’s collection of songs, mumming plays etc has an online catalogue.

Chipping Campden Morris can trace their history back to the 18^th century. They have a unique tradition which has been passed on down the generations and is not danced by any other morris sides. For more history on the team, see Chipping Campden Morris Dancers – an outline history by Keith Chandler, The Morris Dancer, 1997.

The Chipping Campden Historical Society has a brilliant website with several related stories on it, from where I sourced the good quality photo of the Cotswolds drama team in 1949. Here’s a link to the Have-A-Go story from the Evesham Journal on their site. They also published a booklet called Campden Characters in 2011 which includes Garnet Keyte and the Ellis family, and mentions morris dancing, singing and mumming.

The Ivy Inn in North Littleton has its own folktale The Mystery of the Ivy Inn, told on its website.

Anyone wishing to cite this original research should credit it to Katie Howson and cite this website as the source. © Katie Howson, 2021.

It is due to be published in print form in the near future, and details will be posted here when known. Should you wish to use any of the information or images here, please do contact me first.

I have far more biographical and anecdotal evidence about the singers than can be published here – if you are a relative or a researcher, please do get in touch, I would be very happy to share the information I have.