Monday January 9th, 1905 – King’s Lynn North End, written by Alan Helsdon
Monday morning brought ‘a rich harvest’ as he described it in his lecture on English folk song given at the 2nd King’s Lynn Festival in 1952 – eleven songs. Vaughan Williams was probably led by the Revd Huddle from his hotel into the North End of Lynn to meet two prominent members of the fishing community, Mr James Carter and Mr Joe Anderson.
North Street, one of the most prominent streets in the North End would have appeared nowhere near as tall and not much narrower than Barton Street, where he lived in Westminster, and he may have noted with some sympathy the outside lavatories at the end of the yards – something he and Adeline had inherited when moving into their new home, but the smell, a mixture of drying nets, boiling shellfish, smoke, laundry and cooking, was something he would not have expected or experienced before. In the same lecture as above he said, ‘He was there very forcibly reminded of the fact that the appeal of the folk song was to the ear and not to the nose.’
Revd Huddle had inherited something of a religious revival following a Mission in his parish a few years earlier and Mr Carter was one of his converts. Mr Carter had only recently lost both his wife and his mother yet had presumably agreed to sing for Vaughan Williams, so with the shouts of children from the nearby school in the background, the notating began with the Deeds of Napoleon.
This had a completely different tune to the one he had heard less than three weeks before from Mr Burstow at Horsham but it was clearly an easy job to get it into his manuscript book as there is not a single correction or variant in the whole 32 bars.
It’s no exaggeration to say that what happened next affected the young composer searching for the soul of English music more than anything else in his dealings with folk song. He wrote in National Music, in 1934, p123, ‘The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation’, and in The Captain’s Apprentice (which Mr Carter called The Prentice Boy) he found it and immediately set it in the Norfolk Rhapsody, first performed at a Promenade Concert in August 1906.
