In the course of wanting access to all of Cicely Fox Smith’s poems, I had to join AllPoetry.com and submit a piece of my own work.
Once I had access to more of the 600 poems that Cicely wrote, I was able to add this song to my collection of her poems that I have put to a tune. It is probably a little overly romantic in its view of the sailor’s life, but still a beautiful poem. Cicely’s allusion to watery worlds orbiting distant stars was incredibly imaginative for her time.
I have found AllPoetry to be an interesting platform in the way it forces users to comment on other peoples work before posting new poems of your own. Something similar runs on r/OCPoetry but this site is much prettier and the process for commenting far easier to use.
The discussion on the poems I have written in the past but posted in other places before prompted me to think a little more about poems as a form, rather than song. Here is the result of my musings on the recent eruption in Hawaii. Having visited Oahu on many occasions, I am fascinated by the way vibrant life is intermingled with such colossal destruction.
What strange contrivance of space-time created this selection of atoms?
How did the primordial plasma soup settle on the Hydrogen atom,
or its twin Helium as the start of the puzzle.
Why was Carbon so perfect a thread to weave into flesh, vine and moss?
Why not Boron or Flourine to fashion this cornucopia of life.
How did this jumble of bits manifest into the sunset over a snow-caped mountain?
Or the distraught child in his bombed-out Syrian ghetto.
Are we just the palette of some inter-dimensional artist?
Slapped on the canvas of the cosmos with care or indifference as the mood dictates.
What cosmoses float in the eternal ether made of different stuff?
A few more quarks in the Iron, a little less neutrinos in an Oxygen atom.
How can humanity walk through this reality without being stunned,
by the complex intricate nature of this star-stuff we exist in.
In the New York Times, on 10 December 1904, can be found a letter to the editor arguing over the origins of the phrase ‘Nine Tailors make a Man’, which was obviously in common currency at that time. The correspondent refutes an explanation that a wealthy merchant had nine tailors painted on the door of his wagon in thanks for their work and offers the suggestion that he had heard as a young boy in Scotland that Queen Elizabeth had gathered nine tailors to represent the Tailors’ Guild of the City of London to advise her on a policy issue.
Evidently the New York Times had forgotten its own backlog because it published a letter to the editor of the London Spectator on September 9 in 1882 where the correspondent corrects a review of ‘Harry Erskine and His Times’ by stating that the origin of the saying is ‘Nine Talers (tellers) make a Man’ referencing the custom where the church bell is always rung nine times when a man is buried (one for an infant, three for a girl and six for a women). This incidentally answers a question I had about the lines in The Magpielinking events to numbers.
What started all this? Well the long-form (Nobel Peace Prize nominated) journalist, Ethan Gutmann, chose a recording of Benjamin Bowmaneer to open his new podcast, The Gutmann Report. The ballad, Roud #1514, is also known by The Prancing Tailor or Benjamin Bowman / Bowlabags / Bolibus / Bolderman. The recording chosen was the one made in 1971 by The New Golden Ring, a folk group I had never heard of, but their two albums Five Days Singing Volume I & II are pretty good.
So when I did my own recording of this ballad, I had already heard Kate Rusby’s version, however, as any fans of Kate will know, her voice is so strikingly beautiful that sometimes you forget what she is singing about. When I actually looked at the lyrics I realised that they make no sense. First I thought it was a song about a war with the French, or maybe a reference to Reepicheep from Narnia or Despereaux Tiling with all the thimbles and needles.
Some trawling of the Mudcat threads here and here indicated that the song had something to do with a prevailing view that Tailors were not manly, and thus the butt of several songs and stories making fun of this perception. The Trooper and the Tailor is one example, which reminds me of Alistair Hulett’s Tinker in the Lum. Evidently, cuckholding was a national sport in England. The Butcher and the Tailor’s Wifepaints the Tailor with worse cowardice as he gives up his wife at the first threat to his person. This theme reminded me of the excellent story arc of Mr Gold (Rumpelstiltskin) in the psycho-drama disguised as a children’s story, Once Upon a Time.
So is the version of the story in question, Benjamin Bowmaneer, just a case of making fun of Tailors because they pretend that killing a flea (or louse or mouse) is brave sport? There is another interesting aspect to this song, and it is related to the story that Malcom Douglas relays in this Mudcat thread. It could just be one of many fanciful ‘collection’ stories used to justify insertion of songs into books, but the story goes that Mary Spence’ great aunt heard a traveling tailor singing the song around 1804 and memorised it.
This could well be an example of the folk process, with misheard lyrics accounting for the un-intelligible lyrics of the song version in question. Some key phrases that have alternatives in Malcom’s post of The Proud Tailor.
The Proud Tailor Benjamin Bowmaneer
How the world began How the war began Nine Tailors make a man England fought to a man Low cast away Castors away
Unfortunately I don’t have a way to decide which is the original and which is the poorly heard copy, except that The Proud Tailor was collected around 1928 and Benjamin Bowmaneer was published in 1959 but probably collected well before that.
From Hester Burton’s 1962 book, Castor’s Away!, about the battle of Trafalgar, and the fact that a beaver is also called a castor, it is likely that the line in the Benjamin Bowmaneer version is probably the correct (original) one. However, if the practice of throwing your beaver hat into the air was particularly nautical, why would the reference appear in a song about a tailor? It seems this ballad just keeps asking more questions than it asks. I haven’t even looked at why there are more than six different surnames starting with B for Benjamin.
In any case, it was a pleasant song to sing and as long as you can get past occupation stereotyping, the lyrics have a certain mysterious quality to them.
(image from the British Museum – Creative Commons)
