Hello! Anybody there...?

I had the great joy last week of getting in person to a Folklore Society Council meeting again, after my previous attempt was thwarted by finally catching COVID. The meeting was followed by a quite bracingly excellent Katharine Briggs lecture by Katherine Langrish, and the announcement of the Katharine Briggs book award winner – Folklore, Magic, and Witchcraft: Cultural Exchanges from the Twelfth to Eighteenth Century, ed. Marina Montesano (Routledge). I have read a couple of the shortlisted books and can confirm their excellence, so anything that beat them must be worth a look. Edited collections don’t always do so well in the final placings, so it’s impressive to see such volumes both winning and making it to runner-up (the outstanding The Routledge Companion to English Folk Performance, eds Peter Harrop and Steve Roud (Routledge), which I reviewed highly favourably in the Folk Music Journal).

 

Katherine Langrish

Not the least part of the joy of the evening was socialising again, catching up with dear colleagues I hadn’t seen in an age. I may have some moderately gregarious tendencies, even though I am quite happy beavering away at my desk, with the result that I do not always realise that I have actually accomplished stuff unless I tell other people.

 

Which may be where the title comes in. Kenneth Horne, usually seeking commercial assistance of some more or less ludicrous kind, would call out the introduction in his fruitily suggestive tones in episodes of the 1960s radio comedy series Round the Horne. What followed was an encounter with the latest hilarious and rather risqué business venture of sometime theatrical couple Julian and Sandy (played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams), with Horne a game and delighted straight (in every sense) foil to their camp.

 

The scripts and performances are hilarious and still stand up, but they are lent considerable extra power by their context. These two evidently gay characters appeared regularly at a time when homosexuality was only just in the process of being decriminalised. There was no pretence here: as Noel Coward once told Nancy Spain about her frock, they ‘wouldn’t fool a blind child of nine’. But they also spoke in an argot cultivated both as defence mechanism and as a means of disguising their criminalised conversation: Polari.

 

Polari was a specific language usage by gay men, but it had common roots with other argots and street languages, including among theatre and carnival people. (It’s always amused me that the rather macho and aggressively straight Ewan MacColl included in one song a slang word he’d obviously heard from truck drivers which is also well known in Polari). This was where I mostly heard it, and still do to some extent.

 

Times change, and usages change, and it is possible that the appearance of Polari in Round the Horne marked some sort of decline in its necessary use as a defensive measure even as it popularised some parts of it. Enter linguist Paul Baker, whose charming and readable history of Polari, Fabulosa!, charts its early life but also follows a more stubborn persistence. It’s a terrific book, and I had the great pleasure of talking to Paul about it and about Polari. I’d all but forgotten I’d done this, in fact, but it is now finished as part of a Folklore Podcast episode on the subject. Clap your Polari lobes on it here.

Paul Baker

This is what I mean about forgetting things I have actually done, perhaps because they were entirely done at my desk without direct personal contact. I was delighted to be reminded of my conversation with Paul at about the same time I was reminded of another online conversation I’d had. This was about a longstanding interest of mine – cannibalism at sea. A while back, those lovely people at Casting Lots: A Survival Cannibalism Podcast got in touch via Twitter. In the course of the correspondence they even called me a ‘cannibalism celebrity’, and then appeared pleasantly surprised that I had immediately put this on all of my biographical material.

 

For their final mini-season they wanted to have a chat with some people they’d cited along the way. I am always happy to talk cannibalism with anyone, and we spent a fun afternoon chatting about the Custom of the Sea. This has been worked into one of their ‘Dinner Guests’ episodes, and is now available. I think between us we must have done every pun on cannibalism that has ever existed, so I won’t repeat any of them here. All I will say is that it’s out now, and it turns out I haven’t just been locked away to no purpose.

 

As it happens, another long outstanding piece of work has also finally seen the light of day, but that is for another time. For now – just tuck in. (Oh. I said I wasn’t going to do that, didn’t I?)

The legal historian of cannibalism at sea

I'm sorry to hear that the legal historian AW Brian Simpson has died. There's plenty of detail in Christopher McCrudden's obituary in The Guardian.
Simpson's probably best known to folklorists (and most general readers) for Cannibalism and the Common Law, his classic account of the Mignonette tragedy and its ensuing legal case. (This established the precedent in English law that you could not kill someone to eat them, even in the most extreme of circumstances). I've written on the case here before.
It's an excellent book, rich with ballad and customary evidence, and it's invaluable for anyone trying to understand the clash between folk culture and the law. I used it extensively when I was working on Thackeray's poem about cannibalism at sea 'Little Billee' for an article in the Folk Music Journal, 9.5 (2010).
I don't know whether Brian Simpson ever saw this article, but he was certainly uppermost in my mind when I came to illustrate it. He had quoted a broadside ballad about the Mignonette, 'Fearful Sufferings at Sea: Lad Killed and Eaten', but wrote that he had never seen a copy of the ballad. It was serendipity that, while looking for ballad illustrations in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, I came across that very ballad in Ralph Vaughan Williams' own collection. It now adorns the cover of that issue of the journal. Its inclusion was always intended as, and remains, a small tribute to Brian Simpson's sterling work.

Archive material on the Custom of the Sea

Whilst having a look at the Time Online Archive blogs, I came across this review of their coverage of the Mignonette case. It's good to see the archive material in this extraordinary case.

In 1884 the Mignonette was sailing to Australia when it ran into difficulties. The crew were left in a lifeboat without supplies. They killed a turtle, and drank their own urine. Richard Parker, the cabin boy, drank sea water and fell ill.

After 17 days they were in trouble. In accordance with the Custom of the Sea the captain, Tom Dudley, proposed that they draw lots with a view to killing and eating one of their number. The other two crewmembers, Edwin Stephens and Edmund Brooks, were not keen on the lottery. As Parker was already ailing, Dudley suggested they kill and eat him.

They did so.

On their return to England, Dudley, Stephens and Brooks made no secret of what had happened. They were surprised to be arrested for murder. There was a clear determination on the part of the British legal system to establish a test case: Dudley and Stephens were convicted. The statutory death sentence came with a recommendation of mercy given the circumstances, and they were released after six months' hard labour. (A. W. Brian Simpson's Cannibalism and the Common Law is a brilliant survey of the legal machinations in the case).

Many of the comments on the Times Archive blog have suggested that the cannibalism is less horrific than the murder. This is not quite the point. When Tom Dudley got back to shore he was quite candid about what they had done, and why. He fully expected their actions to be understood, as indeed they initially were. The Custom of the Sea included the killing. Indeed popular tradition had it that they were only brought to court because they had not observed every nicety of the Custom and drawn lots. I was interested to see that that argument also made its appearance in the Times comments, too.

The pattern of killing and dismemberment may seem outrageous now, possibly because we have so little context for it, but it seems to have been fairly standard throughout the 19th century. There are plenty of historical and literary sources for comparison. Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket features a very similar killing. Poe's narrative was probably based on survivors' accounts from the whaleship Essex. By a bizarre coincidence, the victim in Poe's novel was also called Richard Parker. For a more darkly comic account, but still conforming to this model, try Canto the Second of Byron's Don Juan.

I was initially interested in the subject because of the songs and ballads dealing with it. Here are two broadside ballads that deal with the historical case of the Francis Spaight, an emigrant ship which capsized in 1835. The crew drew lots before killing and eating Patrick O'Brien, a cabin boy. There are plenty of other serious songs and ballads on the subject, and they are all remarkably similar. I'd argue that this is because it was all too well known as a possibility.

As the Custom of the Sea came to be less of a threat, you also begin to find more comic songs on the subject. The Custom of the Sea comes to be, as it is for most of the people who have sent comments to the Times blog, so remote as to be culturally alien.

I was talking about this very subject at the Folklore Society's recent Sea in Legend and Tradition weekend. I have also written on it at greater length in a forthcoming article on William Makepeace Thackeray's poem 'Little Billee'. The article will appear in the next (2010) issue of the Folk Music Journal.