‘The Sandgate Dandling Song’ and ‘The Captain’s Apprentice’
North Shields Fish Quay, 1964, by Laszlow Torday
‘The Sandgate Dandling Song’, included on The Unthanks’ new album, ‘Sorrows Away’, was written in 1842 by Bobby Nunn, a blind fiddler from Tyneside, and set to a local traditional tune. As Rachel Unthank has explained, ‘dandling’ songs, sung to a child on your knee, are common in the Northeast of England, where she was brought up, and this one, its tender affection riven by a reference to a keelman’s drunkenness and cruelty, has been a favourite for many years. ’I like how unapologetic it is’, she has said. ‘Domestic violence is a taboo and dark subject, yet the woman in the song asks for no sympathy. I find it really moving’. A lovely interpretation, sung by Rachel on her own some years ago, was included on ‘English Folk Field Recordings, Volume 2’.
The band, and perhaps especially the producer Adrian McNally, Rachel Unthank’s ex-husband, have made some changes to the song on ‘Sorrows Away’. ‘When Daddy’s drunk’, the woman sings to her child in the original, ‘he’ll take his knife and threaten sore to take my life’, and she makes no further comment on the matter. In the new version, though, McNally, on behalf of the keelman, sings another verse: ‘I’ll not be drunk, I’ll not be bad’, he promises; ‘I’m not like him, me canny dad. You’ll see I’ve changed, this time for good’. The song ends with the possibility of reconciliation, in keeping with the theme of the album.
The record’s quiet optimism is unusual, as the Unthank sisters have long tended to favour sad music; there is a melancholic tone to most of their songs, many of which are rooted in their native Tyneside culture. The collection of ‘Songs From the Shipyards’, for instance, released a decade ago, reflects on the overwhelming losses suffered by local people when the shipping industries in the Northeast began to collapse. In the album’s sleeve notes, McNally wrote: ‘Impressions and accounts of our industrial past often tread the line between proud memories and rose-tinted nostalgia, between the respect we have for the people who worked hard and the danger of glorifying their lives as honest, decent and proper; between describing them as great days and remembering that they were tough and dangerous; between the pride for what the workers achieved and the reality of the wealth it created being siphoned away from their communities’. The Unthanks’ music follows that line closely.
This year has marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and among the many celebrations of the occasion has been a series of essays broadcast on BBC Radio 3. One of the talks, ‘Belonging’, was delivered by Adrian McNally, who spoke warmly about how he has been inspired by the composer’s enthusiasm for collecting old folk songs and his willingness to incorporate them in classical compositions, as well as by his interest in their connections with place and community - topics that are also at the heart of The Captain’s Apprentice, a recently published book on Vaughan Williams by Caroline Davis.
Davis tells the story of how the composer went to the Norfolk port of King’s Lynn in January, 1905, searching for obscure folk songs. Born into an affluent and well-connected family, educated at a good public school and at Cambridge, Ralph Vaughan Williams was perhaps not an obvious companion for the rural labourers and seafarers of East Anglia, but one evening, in a working man’s pub, he met and befriended an old fisherman, James ‘Duggie’ Carter, who sang to him a song about a sea captain’s cruelty to a young cabin boy, ‘The Captain’s Apprentice’, which Davis suggests may have had its origin in the real-life case of Robert Eastick, an apprentice from a King’s Lynn workhouse who died in 1856 in suspicious circumstances on the way to Ceylon. It struck him forcefully, and Davis quotes the composer’s remark, made late in life, that the fisherman’s song ‘opened the door to an entirely new world of melody, harmony and feeling’, so clearly it was significant. It was not the story’s harshness or violence that made it memorable, as Vaughan Williams, like other Edwardian folk music collectors such as Cecil Sharp, Percy Grainger and Gustav Holst, would have been familiar with many gloomy and brutal tunes from rural England, so perhaps it was the song’s intense emotion, or ‘Duggie’ Carter’s, that particularly touched him.
Vaughan Williams is often associated, not entirely correctly, with pastoral nostalgia. It is true that much of his music, such as the beautiful fantasia for violin and piano, ‘The Lark Ascending’, which premiered in 1921 and today remains hugely popular, evokes an innocent and unspoilt England, but Vaughan Williams was anything but insular and had no regard for sentimental notions of ‘Merrie England’, with its maypoles, Morris dancing, and other folkish ways. Said to have been somewhat radical at Charterhouse, Vaughan Williams became interested in socialism while at Cambridge and was influenced by the ideas of William Morris; he was also an internationalist, a supporter of the idea of a federal union of Europe and the Chair of the Home Office Committee for the Release of Interned Alien Musicians in 1940, despite expressing concerns about the impact an influx of Austrian and German musicians might have on English musical culture. Similarly, while disagreeing with the pacifist beliefs and vigorous left-wing politics of fellow composers Alan Bush and Michael Tippett, he publicly supported their right to express their opinions, and although he was not a religious man, he wrote many works for performance in church and edited the music for the classic ‘The English Hymnal’. According to his biographer Michael Kennedy, Vaughan Williams was ‘that extremely English product – the natural nonconformist with a conservative regard for the best tradition’. Something similar might also be said about The Unthanks.
For further exploration:
Rachel Unthank’s version of ‘The Sandgate Dandling Song’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDPKqo2PXAw
The song’s history and lyrics: https://mainlynorfolk.info/folk/songs/sandgatedandlingsong.html
Interview with The Unthanks about ‘Sorrows Away’: https://www.folkradio.co.uk/2022/10/the-unthanks-the-folk-radio-interview/
Adrian McNally on Vaughan Williams: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001cnvs
‘The Captain’s Apprentice’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKcXmbuZslU
Vaughan Williams’ ‘A Lark Ascending’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR2JlDnT2l8
Whitby Harbour by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, c.1885