Sticking to songs with a Bootle connection, this is a version of a simple and direct short haul shanty from Hugill's Shanties of the Seven Seas (from which the illustration above also comes); Hugill tells us he "learnt this many years ago from a certain Mr. Dowling of Bootle, who had sailed in the Colonial Packets". Elsewhere (in Sailors' Songs and Sea Shanties) he explains, "Until the end of the days of sail this shanty remained a favourite song for sheeting home the foresail and for other jobs calling for a few good pulls. The pull came on the word 'haul' at the end of each verse."
Haul the Bowline is #632 in the Roud folksong index.
This kind of patriotic song may seem seriously out of step with modern sentiments, what with its references to "motherland" and the victory over Germany, with the tune lifted from Oscar Rasbach's music for Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" (you know, the poem that goes "I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree" - Rasbach's setting was a big hit for Paul Robeson during the time of the war). All that aside, I've decided to include this air raid shelter song here anyway, because it's an important memorial to a big part of Merseyside's social history.
I got the words from Kiss Me Goodnight Sargeant Major: The Songs and Ballads of World War II, where Mrs Mary van Eker explains: "I was but a civilian who ran to the air-raid shelter every time the alert sounded. There was no author to this song really, someone sang a line and then someone sang another. It comes spontaneous to us here."
As Liverpool was such a strategically important bombing target for Nazi Germany, Bootle was very much in the line of fire, being at the northern end of the stretch of docks. Night after night the town was under a blanket of bombs, with the people of Bootle taking shelter in places like the basement of the Co-operative store on Stanley Road. On the 7th May 1941, the Co-operative basement shelter was full to capacity when the building above was hit. (The photo I'm using here records the wreckage at the site after the bomb hit.) At least 36 people died as a result; there is a memorial garden to the victims on Ash Street.
I include the song here because it's important to remember the spirit of the people of Bootle who were able to sing together as the bombs fell around them.
A song about a stowaway on a ship from Liverpool to New York. This version is learned from Liverpool ballad singer and former demolition worker Bruce Scott, who includes it on his album "My Colleen by the Shore". The sleeve notes for that album say that he learned it in the Criterion pub, Brunswick Road, from Noel Scanlon, a Kerryman living around West Derby Road. Stan Hugill also collected a version of this song (with the title "Bold MacCarteney") from Liverpool seaman Spike Sennit, with similar words but a rather different tune; that version was published in Spin Vol. 7 No. 4, 1969 (and recently reprinted in Bosun's Locker, a collection of Hugill's Spin contributions).
The City of Baltimore, on board of which the hero of our song stows away, was a transatlantic liner built in Glasgow and operating mostly out of Liverpool, sailing at first with the Inman Line. She made her first commercial sailing from Liverpool to Philidelphia in 1856, and was scrapped in 1885.
Versions of this song sometimes go by the title of 'The City of Baltimore' or 'Bold MacCartney' (with MacCartney being spelled in all sorts of ways, such as "MacCarteney" as seen above). It is #1800 in the Roud folksong index.
A song written in the 1960s by Glyn Hughes about a real life street performer who sang, with his dancing dolls, at Bevington Bush just off Scotland Road toward the end of the nineteenth century. It's sometimes known as 'Whiskey on a Sunday'. As Gerry Jones writes on his Liverpool Lyrics website, "Seth Davy was a real person, he really existed, and he died a couple of years into the 20th century... I know the truth for a fact because, when I was a brand-new teacher in the Dingle in 1963, our old lollypop man told me that he had actually seen Seth Davy doing his stuff. So I have spoken to a first-hand witness."
Above is a picture of him at work - another great find by Matthew Edwards, this comes from a latern slide belonging to Ingrid Spiegl, widow of Fritz Spiegl (who arranged Johnny Todd for orchestra to create the "Theme from Z-Cars"). The picture (produced from the latern slide by Liverpool Museum) was used to illustrate an article about Seth Davy (sometimes spelled Seth Davey) in The Puppet Master, Vol. 16 No. 8, in which Peter Charlton writes the following:
"Seth Davey was a West Indian jig doller who really did sit astride an old packing case, outside the Begington Inn (known locally as The Bevvy), near 'Paddy's Market' off Scotland Road, hitting a plank with his fist whilst crooning unaccompanied as his dolls danced... Popular belief is that Seth Davey was West Indian, possibly Jamaican, though Ray Costello in his Black History, a history of Liverpool's black population, says that he was West African... We only know of two songs that he sang regularly and both of these were Minstrel songs... One of these was 'Who likes gravy on their taters?'... His other pick of the pops was 'Massa is a stingy man', from the repertoire of Dan Emmett, one of the stars of American minstrelsy. It is this song that Glyn Hughes based his song on:
'Oh Massa is a stingy man,
And all his neighbours knows it,
He keeps good whiskey in the house
An' neber says 'here goes it',
Sing come day, go day
God send Sunday
We'll drink whiskey all de week
And buttermilk on Sunday'"
A song by Tony Flanagan about a Catholic church which shut its doors, and the campaign to reopen it.
St Mary of the Angels Catholic Church was built in 1907 in the baroque style - a slice of Rome off Scotland Road, richly decorated with Italian marble carved by local Italian craftsmen. Much of the lavish interior was paid for by Amy Elizabeth Imrie (later known as Mother Clare Imrie of the Poor Clares after she became a nun), heiress to the White Star Shipping Line fortune.
This is a local version of the traditional old ballad "The False Knight on the Road", most often associated with Scotland; in all versions, a child is met by a "false knight", that is, the devil in disguise; the child refuses to give ground to the devil or accomodate him in any way (generally being quite cheeky to him), and in the end wishes him back to hell. Francis James Child included "The Fause Knight on the Road" as ballad #3 in his multi-volume Popular English and Scottish Ballads, published between 1882 and 1898 - he provides 3 different versions of the same tale from a variety of sources. The Wirral version is slightly unusual in that the child is a girl rather than a boy (as in most other versions).
The False Knight is #20 in the Roud folksong index.
This is a song by Pete McGovern, who's perhaps most famous for writing the song "In My Liverpool Home". I don't know whether he wrote the music as well, or just the words - if anybody can place the tune as taken from another song, or knows that it's a composition of McGovern, I'd be interested to know. Like Back Buchanan Street, it is another tale from the period of slum clearance out of the heart of Liverpool and into the brave new world of planned towns. As city-dwellers were relocated there, Speke's population boomed from 400 to more than 25,000 by the end of the 1950s. It quickly got a reputation for being rough, run-down, and smashed up, and this song plays on that reputation. There's a recording of Pete McGovern singing this in the BBC documentary The Singing City, which tells the tale of how urban regeneration changed the face of Liverpool and its music making. Before McGovern sings the song, Ken Dodd remarks of these estates: "If you pay your rent two weeks on the run, a policeman comes and finds out where you got the money from."
The picture that I'm using above of the sadly underused South Parade in Speke comes from Geograph, and was taken by Sue Adair.
