"Tawney in Depth" is taken from Cyril's scripts for his one-man show of the same name, in which he spoke at length about the background to his classic songs and how he came to write them.
First of all, what is meant by 'oggie'? Well it's a slang term for a Cornish pasty. The full term is 'tiddy oggie' and I'd say that its native use is confined mainly to Cornwall itself, and to South West Devon, around the Naval port of Plymouth. I've tried asking for an oggie in South East Devon, at Exeter St. David's Station, only to be met with a blank stare and a slack jaw (**see footnote). In the old days, you could buy oggies at many places in Plymouth, but sailors coming back to the Dockyard last thing at night were most likely to patronise the man who sold them from a box outside the Albert Gate. I first heard his vendor's cry on the radio during the war, long before I went West myself. A Plymouth sailor serving overseas had written in to a 'Sounds from Home' slot requesting the Oggie Man's cry. That's how famous he was. The Oggie Man was a permanent institution synonymous with the Royal Navy itself, or so everyone thought.
Before the war the Oggie Man had no competition, simply because there was no room for any. The Blitz, however, cleared a space right opposite his pitch, and in the late Forties first one, then two or three, caravan snack bars appeared on this bomb site, selling a variety of snacks, not just oggies. It was only a matter of time before the Oggie Man, as such, disappeared, either to retire from business or to get his own caravan and join the others. In the song, this change has taken place while the sailor has been away.
The idea of the Oggie Man as a subject for a song had been in my mind for some time, though only as a valedictory lament for something that had passed. If that were how it had turned out 'The Oggie Man' would have merely become part of a great mass of such songs that the Folk Revival has produced, but that wasn't the case. The human catalyst who brought the song about was a BBC producer called Brian Patten, the man mainly responsible for developing my broadcasting career both before I left the Royal Navy and for many years after I turned professional folk singer. He was both my producer and close friend and advisor. Brian was based in Bristol, but often came to Plymouth to hold auditions, and on one of theses occasions in 1959 we arranged to meet one evening for a drink at the Blue Monkey, in St. Budeaux. Brian had himself served on the lower deck during the war, and I clearly remember my surprise as we stood at the bar when he suddenly said: "Cyril, don't you think there ought to be a song about that chap who used to sell oggies outside the Dockyard Gate?" I told him I'd had that very idea in mind for quite a while. Whether he believed me or not, I don't know. For my part it seemed more than just a coincidence. I reckoned it was a kind of sign from Heaven that the song should be written. We said goodbye at closing time, and I set off to walk back to my lodgings in Beacon Park. As I walked along it started to drizzle with rain. If it hadn't been for that, I doubt if the song would have started: 'Well, the rain's softly falling'.
On the way home that night I wrote what I knew would be the first verse and what I thought would be a later verse, perhaps the last, but not necessarily. I assumed I'd be writing other verses at a later date. I'd recently been studying Cecil Sharp's Appalachian Folk Song Collection. These songs were published exactly in the form that they were sung to him, with no editorial interference. Often there were several versions of a song, and in some cases it was clear that one or more verses had been forgotten, leaving a gap in the narrative. What struck me was that some of these gaps turned out to be very potent, a bit like silence in a piece of orchestral music. Listeners were forced to hurriedly work out what had happened on the basis of the evidence at their disposal. Any other songwriter, looking at those two verses of "The Oggie Man" next day would, have recognised that there was an obvious need for at least one intermediate verse. Instead, being heavily into the Sharp collection, I said to myself: "Why not leave things as they are? There's enough evidence in verse two to reveal the whole story, if the listener works at it. A sailor said goodbye to his girl at the Albert Gate. She promised to be faithful and said her love would last as long as the Oggie Man, who at the time seemed almost as permanent as the Rock of Gibraltar. When he returns home from his tour overseas, the first thing he discovers is that the Oggie Man has been displaced by the hot dog stands. Going in search of his girl he discovers the second change: she hasn't kept her promise to stay faithful. After a night drowning his sorrows he arrives back at the Albert Gate. Then he realises that, quite unknowingly, she'd been telling the truth when they parted. Her love could be compared with the Oggie Man after all."
So, under the influence of real folk songs, I decided to let the song stand exactly as it was written on my way home from the Blue Monkey in the drizzling rain, unfinished, with a 'missing' second verse that was never written.
The style of the song was suggested by a recent performance I'd heard by Shirley Collins of an American song about a mining disaster, "Pay Day at Coal Creek". I've an idea that the slow, drawn-out rendering was Shirley's own idea, but against her fast frailing banjo it was extremely effective, and that was the atmosphere I was trying to re-create in "The Oggie Man".
© Cyril Tawney 2002
** In 2004 a franchise chain called
"The Oggy Oggy Pasty Shop" opened. Based in Cornwall and run by a
Cornishman, it is spreading throughout Britain.
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Back in the early 50s two young amateur film makers, I can't remember their names, decided to make a short documentary about sailing on the Norfolk Broads. They called it "Ha'penny Breeze". The only thing the film lacked was music, but instead of simply dubbing some out-of-copyright recorded piece on to the soundtrack, they had the temerity to approach the man who was probably the leading writer of film music in Britain at the time, Philip Green, and ask him if he could write and record something original, but of course for very little reimbursement. Their cheek paid off, and Phil Green wrote a charming piece called after the film title "Ha'penny Breeze". His generosity was rewarded in a way, because the recording got plenty of broadcasts, and that was how I came to hear it. I immediately went out and bought the record. The theme itself was played on a solo concertina. Years later I was to discover that the concertina was played by the renowned Alf Edwards, who became a broadcasting colleague of mine in the 60s and 70s. There's a general atmosphere of "Shenandoah" about "Ha'penny Breeze", and both pieces were very much in my mind when I came to write "Sammy's Bar" in 1958. The full original title, by the way, was "The Ballad of Sammy's Bar", though in EFDSS circles it is known to this day as "The Last Boat's A-leaving", which was never my title.
"Sammy's Bar" was one of a bundle of songs concerning unrequited love which I wrote around that time. For me and several of my fellow-submariners in Malta in the mid-50s love hadn't been too kind, and in this particular song I thought we'd all feel a lot better if I had the girl killed off in a car crash. Although I didn't write it until I was back in the UK, the scene was set in Malta and centred around a popular submariners' rendezvous actually called The Old Bar but always known as Sammy's Bar, after the proprietor. Sammy sold a very cheap and nameless rough, white wine, which you could call the Mediterranean's answer to English farmyard scrumpy. It was sold in fivepenny or tenpenny measures, and even with hardened drinkers it was customary to dilute it with lemonade.
The reason it was so popular with subariners was its nearness to the Submarine Depot ship, HMS "Forth", tied alongside in Msida Creek. Sailors were paid fortnightly, so finances were usually rather thin during the second week. If you didn't have enough cash for a full-blown run ashore you could always nip round to Pieta Creek, quaff three 'tenpenny Sammy's', as they were called, and return to the ship quite mellow for a total outlay of half-a-crown.
The bar was little more than a hole in the wall, more like a little cave than a bar, and a couple of dozen people would fill it. It also had good acoustics so it wasn't long before I found my way in there with my guitar. I sounded like Paul Robeson. It had also been patronised by Royalty when Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip were stationed in Malta a few years earlier, so it had become an 'in' place for the 'top people' to go slumming. Diplomats' ladies could be found sitting shoulder to shoulder with stokers' wives and getting on famously. Sammy's was indeed a unique place, but, alas, it's no longer there.
"The Ballad of Sammy's Bar" was deliberately written in shanty form, of the type that has a two-line refrain spliced into two-line stanzas. To appreciate the predicament of the fellow in the song, you need to know the importance of the car hire business in Malta at the time. The buses were grubby bone-shakers, and you wouldn't impress a girl by taking her on one of those - besides which, buses would only take you to the popular overcrowded beaches. To get to the more secluded parts of the island a car was essential. If you had the money you could hire some marvellous cars, real American limousines with electrically controlled windows and so on, but these were generally beyond the means of an ordinary matelot. The basic situation in the song, then, is that two lads are after the same girl, but one of them earns more money than the other and can afford to hire a 'Yankee car'. Many people have mistakenly assumed that one of the rivals is an American and the other British, but that isn't the case - they're both British.
As a young man about this time I got it fixed in my head that all girls were fundamentally gold-diggers. It was easy to get that impression in Malta, because available men outnumbered the Wrens by a colossal proportion, with the result that a large number of these hoity-toity young ladies wouldn't be seen dead with anything other than an officer, even though they themselves were, and were likely to remain, non-commissioned. Some of them were in for a nasty shock when they got back to UK, but others by then had secured wardroom husbands. Snakes and Ladders wasn't in it folks! Also some of the lads in the fore-ends of my submarine who were looking for pen friends made contact with some nurses in a hospital back in England. In order to establish a pairing-up of the sexes they sent the girls a sheet of paper for them not only to write down their names but also the type of lad they'd like to correspond with. Their response was pinned up on the notice board, and it served only to reinforce my notion about girls. So many of them had made it clear that they were only interested in gold braid (they didn't realise that officers weren't even on offer) with entries like "The Boss!!", "Whoever's in charge" and "Any handsome young officer will do!" I can see now that I took it all far too seriously, and I've since had ample personal evidence that there are indeed women who are prepared to endure protracted penury for their chosen man (the lyrics of "She's Funny That Way" say it all), but at the time I felt that even the obviously jokey tone of those nurses' remarks revealed an underlying serious preference for the well-heeled man.
The girl in the song is more interested in impressing her friends than in making a comparative assessment of the young men's qualities.
The car crash actually happened to me, not to any girl friend, and it was a 'Yankee car'. It wasn't hired, it belonged to a US Navy friend stationed at an airbase. The accident wasn't serious, no-one was injured, but it was my first car crash and it made a long-lasting impression on me. It was still on my mind when "Sammy's Bar" came to be written, hence the woman comes to a tragic end in that fashion.
There are two features in this song which I used again in later songs. One was the completely artificial term 'real love', an invention of my own, for no other reason than that 'true love' was so overworked that I couldn't bring myself to use it. You'll find it again in "The Grey Funnel Line". It never caught on with other songwriters or poets and, as far as I know, it hasn't entered the English language.
The other feature was that of a concluding scene where the thwarted 'loser', being in possession of more than his customary amount of money through the process of getting the girl, in this case by going on the wagon for a fortnight in order to hire a Yankee car, is now seated in a bar spending it on drink. I used this again in the 'civilian' song "New Names for Old". The two-line refrain, "Hey the last boat's a-leaving/ Call away the di-so", is actually linked to this last scene. In addition to the official liberty boats provided by the Navy to ferry sailors back to their ship, it was also permissible to use the numerous di-sos, a Maltese equivalent of a gondola. The liberty boats were free, but of course you had to pay for the di-sos. If you missed the last liberty boat you had to hail a di-so (they were available all night) and that's what is happening in the song. His shipmates are calling to him that the last liberty boat is about to leave, and he's replying that he prefers to carry on drowning his sorrows and return to the ship by di-so. This refrain has been corrupted down the years by imperfect hearing, so that we get 'the last boats are leaving' and 'haul away the di-so', both of which statements you will now recognise as being absurdities.
['di-so' is a phonetic representation of the English pronounciation of the Maltese word 'dghaisa', as is 'Inetuffeya' of 'Ghajn Tuffhieha' in verse 4 of the song]
© Cyril Tawney 2002
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Quite early in my Navy career, about the time I was emerging from my Technical Apprenticeship, I had the feeling that I was destined to be a poet, so in those days I read a fair amount of poetry, something I rarely do now. One of the poems I came across was W.H. Auden’s “Roman Wall Blues”. In content it was a soliloquy by an obviously ‘chokker‘ Roman sentry on a lonely Northern outpost, presumably Hadrian’s Wall, but what fascinated me was that its structure was in the form of an American Negro twelve-bar blues. Like any other admirer of the blues I had always assumed that its lyrics could only be imitated, not developed. Whether you were being serious or only writing a send-up, the words had to sound as if they were coming from an ordinary Southern American Negro. But now, reading “Roman Wall Blues”, I realised for the first time that a blues with a purely ‘English English’ diction was both possible and acceptable. At this point I don’t think the problem posed by the blues melody was bothering me too much. I wasn’t thinking about the obvious necessity of breaking away from the standard chord sequence of the blues and how I was going to do it.
What turned out to be another important strand in the creation of this song was the atmosphere of a deserted Navy dockyard. The Gene Kelly/Frank Sinatra film “On the Town” opens on an American Navy yard before the day’s work has begun. A lone crane driver arrives and sings a slow introductory piece: “I feel like I ain’t out of bed yet“. I was totally smitten with this very short episode, and it stayed in the back of my mind until one summer day in 1958, when I too found myself walking through a deserted dockyard.
It was early on a Sunday morning in Portsmouth and the untypical tranquillity of what was usually a very noisy place brought the American crane driver and his lament leaping back into my mind. I felt an urge to start a similar song of complaint myself, but it came out as yet another song of unrequited love and, believe it or not, “Sally Free and Easy” was virtually completed by the time I reached my ship, HMS “Murray”, tied up alongside near North Corner. It couldn’t have taken more than a quarter of an hour.
Although my melody didn’t derive from the crane driver’s song, its mood, its free-flowing style certainly did, which is why the structure of the words follows the pattern of a standard twelve-bar blues yet the blues chord sequence is avoided. What burst into my head between the Main Gate of Pompey Dockyard and North Corner in 1958 may not have been an English blues, but it was certainly a strong contender to be the first English equivalent to the blues.
For my own part I’ve always treated it as a loud protest, more like a ‘holler’, but every other singer, from Davy Graham onwards, has approached it in a very introspective, brooding fashion. Another peculiar thing is that I’ve never settled on whether the last line of verse three should be 'Then I’ll take the tideway for my burial ground' or 'to my burial ground', or for that matter whether it should be 'burial ground' or 'burying ground'. I think in recent years I’ve begun to be more consistent but, actually, anything can happen.
As for the guitar accompaniment, or non-accompaniment if you like, it is derived from the throbbing of a submarine’s diesel engines, and I claim that it’s the first example of minimalism in music after Ravel’s “Bolero“, coming well before John Adams et al.
“Sally Free and Easy” has been adapted. A miner was heard singing at the coalface:
Think
I’ll wait till shiftend
See trepanner cut back
Then when Deputy’s gone
Death in t’ gob I’ll tak'
It’s also been inadvertently hi-jacked. A large chunk of the words can be found in Rory McLeod’s “Love Like a Rock”. He thought it was traditional - we’ve come to an arrangement. “Sally Free and Easy” has been mentioned in at least one work of fiction, a novel by the Irish writer Clare Boylan.
Lastly, you may be interested to learn that, according to Admiralty records, the song was never written. Their evidence indicates that HMS “Murray” never visited Portsmouth while I was serving on her. I found this out, to my surprise, when I tried to pinpoint the actual date in order to celebrate the song’s 35th birthday. So it isn’t just the first English blues, and virtually the first piece of minimalism - it’s also the world’s first phantom song.
© Cyril Tawney 2004
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Though I did go to sea for a living, I'm no sail freak. Don't ask me about knots and splices or a sailing ship's rigging. For twelve years I was a 'tiffy' in the Royal Navy. Our full title was 'artificer'. We were tradesmen who, in addition to our technical training, served a full apprenticeship, usually within the Navy itself and most commonly as a fitter and turner. The main idea was that, on a ship far from a maintenance base, we should be able not just to diagnose what's gone wrong but have either the skill to manufacture a replacement or the ingenuity to improvise one. We 'Tiffy Boys' joined straight from school at around the age of sixteen and were bound to the Navy until our thirtieth birthday. Even at 16 we were regularly mustered and reminded that there was a string of offences for which we could "suffer death or such other punishment as is hereinafter mentioned". We were not taught seamanship. If we wanted to take up sailing little boats as a hobby, that was our affair, but it was not part of our four-year syllabus. Even on the electrical side, as I was, our job had more to do with oil, grease and carbon dust than with sea-spray and billowing canvas.
Now I wouldn't want you to think I was ever a student of Shakespeare in my Navy days, but a Dictionary of Quotations did once pass through my hands, and I was amazed to find that in King John, Act IV Scene 2, Shakespeare has Hubert refer to "Another lean and unwash'd artificer". I've often wondered why the editor should have regarded this as quotable. Maybe he'd been a tiffy too. As always the Bard has found just the right words. As young men most of us were built like greyhounds (though, at recent reunions, time seems to have played funny tricks with our silhouettes) and, caught during working hours at least, we were often very grimy.
As a songwriting tiffy it was a chance too good to miss. I wrote a verse using the quote, with 'tiffy' substituted for 'artificer', and I usually employ this not only as the first verse, but as the chorus too. It's quite arbitrary, though. If you've plenty of time you sing it after every verse as a chorus, if there's not so much time you use it to top and tail the song, or just bung it in whenever you feel like it. This was yet another 1958 composition, and about that time I'd just picked up a graphically bawdy verse of "The One-eyed Reilly", a couplet that expanded into a four-line verse and softened, so that the young lady is only kissed standing and lying.
Portland gets a mention simply because my ship at the time was based there. Although the spirit of the song is light-hearted the storyline follows the well-worn jilted lover theme. In the last verse the sailor declares his intention of returning to Devonport Barracks for the remainder of his Naval career. This is nonsense, of course - it's the Navy that makes these decisions, not the individual. Early in the last century a warrant officer named Alphonso Jago introduced a new system of messing at Devonport Barracks which was a great improvement on the earlier system and was later adopted throughout the Navy. With waste and corruption reduced to a minimum the quality and quantity of the food became such that Devonport Barracks earned the nickname 'Jago's Mansions'
However, until the introduction of computerised central drafting in the 1950s there was still a lot of corruption in certain quarters. Each time a sailor returned to barracks he couldn't help noticing many faces that were still there from his previous spells ashore. Even in wartime, perhaps especially in wartime, there were some people who earned the nickname 'barrack stanchions', the suggestion being that if they were moved away the barracks buildings would collapse. The sailor in the song is resolved to join this happy band.
© Cyril Tawney 2003
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My first submarine was the "Trespasser", a shuddering World War Two veteran dating from 1942. I joined her early in 1954 and we operated out of HMS "Dolphin", the Submarine Headquarters at Gosport. The Queen had been crowned the previous year, and she and Prince Philip were at that period in the middle of a Commonwealth Tour. The Royal Yacht "Britannia" hadn't been completed in time for the tour, but it was ready by the time the Royal couple reached Gibraltar on their way home. "Britannia" picked them up there and brought them back to England. For the voyage up the Channel the Admiralty had prepared a special welcome, consisting of a cavalcade of warships sailing on an opposite course to the Royal Yacht. The idea was that as each ship drew abreast of "Britannia" the ship's company would give three cheers, Navy fashion. Now, on a surface ship this really looks good. By carefully arranging the men along the ship's rails, the impression can be given at a distance that they're all approximately the same height. Then, as their caps are raised above their heads and rotated three times as they cheer, observers see three flashes of white along the length of the ship and around the superstructure. In order to bring this impressive spectacle about, of course, the men have to be well-rehearsed in accordance with a single set of instructions.
And that's where the first element of farce entered into things that day. The Admiralty, inflexible as ever, made every type of craft rehearse these instructions, including the submarines. Now, for safety reasons we weren't allowed to line the casing of a moving submarine, instead we were crammed willy-nilly into the bridge structure, or what's referred to loosely as the 'conning tower'. On the little old "Trespasser", believe it or not, there were 60 of us up there for the Cheering ceremony, all shapes and sizes, and with hardly enough room to get our arms up above our heads. We couldn't have looked smart even if we'd wanted to!
Enter Mother Nature with the second element of farce. It was a warm sunny day, and I reckon we met "Britannia" somewhere off the Dorset coast, south of Lyme Bay, but I could be wrong. As we approached the Royal Yacht, all bunched up in the conning tower trying to look disciplined, we were set upon by a swarm of gnats or midges which stayed with us throughout the ceremony. Trying to carry out the cheering drill according to the book while attempting at the same time to fend off all those midges resulted in near-chaos. The diesel engines were all the time sucking air down into the submarine and when we went down below afterwards there were tens of thousands of dead insects right back as far as the engine room. There were several submarines in the cavalcade and, when we checked later, we found that each one had had her own cloud of midges - but evidently only the "Trespasser" had a songwriter aboard.
I didn't rush away and write "Cheering the Queen" immediately after the event. It wasn't until 4 years later, when a class for songs newly-composed in the folk style was introduced at the 1958 National Folk Festival at Cecil Sharp House in London, that I set about giving an account in song of the 1954 incident, with the kind of minor embellishments that any matelot spinning a well-worn yarn would have added. For instance, at such a distance I've no idea if Prince Philip even noticed what was happening, let alone if he made any comment. And of course, we weren't still waving at nightfall.
The song was very much a beginner's piece, with plenty of 'me boys', or just 'boys' to fill out the scansion, and quite a bit of reaching for rhymes - 'gnats as big as bats', and so on. However, it was a non-competitive festival and the song was sufficiently well-received for me to be invited back to Cecil Sharp House a few weeks later. They wanted me to sing the song for Princess Margaret, who was guest of honour at a special Ball to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of the Folk Song Society. I was still in the Navy, doing a course at HMS "Collingwood", the Electrical School at Fareham, and I had to get special leave for the occasion. There were two men that night who weren't wearing penguin suits, me and the late Kenneth Loveless, both in Naval uniform. The High Society writers, like William Hickey of the "Express" and Paul Tanfield of the "Mail", had a field day. I still have the cuttings. I had a chat with the Princess, who asked me for a copy of the song, which I provided. About 35 years later HRH requested the newly-released Neptune recording and this was duly sent.
With Princess Margaret taking a personal interest it's reasonable to assume that the song has to some extent circulated in Royal circles, especially as the "Daily Telegraph" for 28th June 1977, under the heading "Word that Cheers the Queen", announced that:
"Sailors taking part in the Royal Silver Jubilee Review of the Fleet have been given a special instruction - to cheer 'Hooray' instead of 'Hurrah'. At the Coronation Fleet Review the Queen was cheered with a 'Hurrah', but this year she has asked that she should be given a 'Hooray' instead. Announcing the Queen's preference, the Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, added "I am delighted. I personally feel that way myself."
Maybe he'd heard "CHEERING THE QUEEN" too.
© Cyril Tawney 2003
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