Old & New Cornish Christmas Carols
Cornish Carols - A Tradition For The World
Cornwall’s
Gift to Christmas.
Leaves From A Cornish Notebook. By John Penwith. *
“Now
friends, we’ll have the Old Chrestmas Hem. Seng up, one and all,
and they that can’t seng must toadley.” The choir leader gives
the first two lines of “While Shepherds Watched, repeating the
correct starting note, and suddenly the edifice is full of joyous
sound. Clarinet, flageolet, bassoon and bass viol add richness to
the village voices. For weeks past the choir had been practising
evening after evening, like the Wessex singers in Under the
Greenwood Tree. Sometimes, down in the darkness and wet where men
dig for tin, the ring of iron on rock gives place for a few
minutes to “Flaming Seraphs” or “Arise and Hail” as Dick
and Tom try out their parts and old Sam comes in with a bass that
is deeper than Dolcoath mine….
There
were no people keener on carols than the Cornish miners of the 19th
century. They brought to their singing the fervour that informed
their Methodist faith. Songs opened up for them a world of beauty
wonderfully in contrast with their hard rough, primitive lives. It
gave them, between cramped cottage and seeping lode, the moon and
the stars and the ineffable peace that lay beyond them.
By
1825 carols were dying out, or had already died out, in most parts
of England. William
Hone in his EVERYDAY BOOK for that year referred to them as
ditties “which now exclusively enliven the industrious
servant-maid and the humble labourer.” For all that, he thought
well of them. “Though most of them exist at the present time”
he wrote “are deficient of interest to a refined ear, yet they
are calculated to awaken tender feelings.” He implored his
readers to collect all the carols that might be sung that year and
send them to him.
A
revival was beginning and the pioneer, as William Home noted was a
Cornishman. Davies
Gilberts of St Erth, who had published a collection, with the
tunes in 1822, and a second edition had been required in 1823. The
carol he wrote, was already a thing of the past, the Cornish
examples which he had rescued having been sung “in Churches on
Christmas Day, and in private houses on Christmas Eve, throughout
the West of England up to the latter part of the late century.”
He
was followed ten years later by William
Sandys, the solicitor antiquary. At that time, whilst there
was still some carol singing in the North and Midlands, the
practice appeared “to get more neglected every year.”
We
have it on the authority of Dr. Percy Dearmer that Davies Gilberts
book was the first modern collection of traditional carols. How
much this volume contributed to enthusiasm in Cornwall cannot be
easily assessed, but its effect upon the country as a whole was
undoubtedly considerable.
The
Carol had almost disappeared from English life through the puritan
insistence upon associating God with gloom. In 1644 the people of
this country, who may or may not have been so merrie as Chesterton
supposed, were ordered to keep Christmas as a fast, and in 1647
they had no Christmas at all; it had been abolished by the
Cromwellian Parliament.
The
carol did not easily recover from this assault and in later years
was further discouraged by the Puritan element in Methodism and by
the repressive atmosphere of Victorianism. At the time when
William Hone wrote, the “merry” had been omitted from “God
rest ye merry gentlemen.” But whatever harm Methodism in general
may have done to the English tradition of happy song (and opinions
may differ on that point), it had quite the opposite effect in
Cornwall, at least during part of the nineteenth century. It was
in the mining areas, where Methodism was especially strong – at
Gwennap, St Day, Redruth, Camborne, and the whole Billy Bray
district – that music and singing had their greatest appeal.
Every chapel had its choir and its orchestra of flutes, clarinets,
bass, sax horn, ephonium and bassoons. The bassoon was always a
favourite instrument for the Cornish loved a deep register – a
florid air, a good bass, and “points of imitation” serving
them as a classic formula.
In the weeks before Christmas, the singers (a term which included the instrumentalists) would practice in the cold chapel or schoolroom, some of the miners walking there five or seven miles after core and home again after rehearsal. As well as singing folk ditties and the newer carols such as Nahum Tate’s “While Shepherds,” and Charles Wesley’s “Hark the Herald Angels.” They composed tunes and words of their own. They were written down, six staves to a page, in little oblong manuscript books convenient for carrying to chapel.
It
was these carols, the “curls” composed by the miners
themselves which form a really valuable contribution to
music. Unfortunately, they are seldom heard at all in Cornwall
today and are more likely to be sung in Cornish centers overseas
than in the county of their origin. I shall be much surprised this
Christmas if, for instance I come upon a group of revellers
singing “The Prince of Life” or “Angels Proclaimed”.
The
tunes were taken far afield by the miners that no-one knows quite
how many carols may have originated in Cornwall. Dr. Ralph Dunstan
suggested that "Hark Hark, What News the Angels Bring,”
which Handel is supposed to have written and to have offered a Mr
Guest as payment for bed and breakfast, may have been a Cornish
tune which had found its way from Cornwall to Lancashire; and in
the same way other carols have probably been credited to
particular composers or counties when in fact they are Cornish
property.
One
of the best of the Cornish work is the St Day Carol, rescued some
years ago by the late Canon Doble and Mr W. D. Watson the head
Corporation gardener at Penzance. Mr Watson heard old Thomas Beard
sing it at St Day, and then himself sent it to Canon Doble. He
also translated it at St Day into Cornish – so well that
scholars have mistaken his words for an original Cornish text,
probably of the fourteenth century. I heard him sing it in the old
language a few days ago, and I thought that it sounded even
lovelier than in English:
Another song which the Oxford Book has given the world was taken down by Canon Doble from Elizabeth Hocking, of Redruth, in 1920. Miss Hocking, then aged eighty-four, had heard it from her mother as a child. Unfortunately, the rescue movement began so late as a tardy off-shoot of the general interest in English folk song inspired by Cecil Sharpe, that the old people who might have helped are no longer with us - and there is no doubt that during the past twenty years an irreparable break has occured in the continuity of Cornish life. But some of the old music books remain, carefully preserved in their brown paper covers, and who knows what treasures may still turn up in Butte, or Detroit, Johannesburg or Adelaide?
In that greater Cornwall overseas there are thousands whose fathers and grandfathers knew the difference between the Great Comfort Ye and the Little, and who have kept closer to that tradition than their families at home. In 1948 the people of Maugham Methodist Church in Adelaide, in a broadcast heard on this side, showed they could still "strike up a curl" for all the world as though they were living in the St Just or St Day of Queen Victoria's time.
Perhaps this Christmas some of you will remember the singing miners and with them Davis Gilbert, of St Erth, who on the Christmas Eve of 1839, lay dying at Eastbourne while outside in the streets happy voices sang of the first Noel.
*Note: J Penwith was the pen-name of J H Martin, b1914, d1998. He wrote for "The Cornishman" and other papers before leaving Trezelah, Gulval, in 1952. He ended up in Stevenage, Herts, where he co-founded and edited the magazine "Ships Monthly". He is buried, with his American wife (Ruth), in Ludgvan. John was a Bard of the Cornish Gorseth "Man of the Moors". Information supplied by his son Mr. David K Martin of Ashford in Kent.