Singer: Mr Saunders
Mr Saunders met Vaughan Williams on April 14th at Ranworth and sang 3 songs, with the words of the second and third being taken down by Ivor Gatty.
No details of Mr Saunders were noted.
April 14 1908
Bonny Blue Handkerchief (Roud 378)
When Jones’s Ale was New (Roud 139)
Singer: Walter ‘Skipper’ Debbage
It seems likely that Vaughan Williams met and noted 3 songs from Mr Walter Debbage at Acle Bridge on Wednesday and Thursday, but then at Ranworth on Friday encountered another Walter Debbage! This time he included the singer’s nickname ‘Skipper’ as these extra names were very common in East Anglia and were often necessary to distinguish people, usually men, in the same or closely related families.
‘Skipper’ Debbage’s details from baptism in 1867 to the 1911 census are consistent, as are the details of his 5 children, but the details of his wife, Anna Maria vary from census to census. He had worked on the land for at least 27 years before he met Vaughan Williams and sang 3 songs in April 1908. He died in 1939 aged 72.
April 17 1908
Singer: Sally Brown
Sally Brown of Ranworth has proved impossible to identify with any certainty but the most likely candidate is Sarah Brown, aged about 63 in 1908, who was marked on the 1851 census, when she was 6, as being deaf, though that is not repeated in subsequent decades. However, in 1901 she is noted by the enumerator as being ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘of weak intellect’, though in 1911, the only time her brother, as Head of Household, would have filled in the form, she is not so labelled. At this time she was 68 and described as a ‘field worker on farm’ and is living with her unmarried brother Samuel, aged 66, working as a marsh labourer. In 1901 and 1911 she is described on the census as single, though in the 1910 Journal, where her only song is printed, she is called ‘Mrs Brown’ by Vaughan Williams, which is probably just the accepted form of the time. He didn’t bother to note details of his singers; he wanted their melodies, not their histories.
April 17 1908