The Copper Family
Coppersongs2
Notes by Bob Copper
The first three decades of the present century were critical times in the history of one of our most treasured inheritances: English traditional singing. Since the beginning of time men and women of this island have been lifting their voices in song: urging their young men into battle, praising their brave deeds in the field or on the ocean, or eulogising the delights they find in their sweetheart's company. The subjects of their songs knew no bounds. They sang about their work as enthusiastically as they did about their leisure. Their babies were lulled to sleep with cradle songs, and they beguiled the long winter evenings with ballads and comic ditties. In their songs they found their only approach to the arts as we know them, for they provided their music, their poetry, their drama and their humour, and they treasured them.They sang at work, they sang at home and they sang on Saturday evenings in the tap room of their local inns. Singers became known in a locality by their choice of songs and no one would dream of singing those songs if the usual singer was in the company. In this way something of the singer himself was revealed in his choice, whether sweet and idyllic, red-blooded and boisterous or just plain funny.
My grandfather, James "Brasser" Copper, who was born in 1845 in Rottingdean, a small village on the Sussex coast just east of Brighton, had followed the example of his father, "Honest John" born in the village in 1817, and was well-known locally for his singing. Together with his younger brother Tom he was always made welcome at Harvest Suppers, Ploughing Matches and Sheepshearing Feasts or other occasions for rural merry-making, because of their ability and readiness to sing their old songs. "Oh aargh, they could sing" said old "Budge" Wickens one day, "Tommy would sing the song, like, an' ol' Brasser 'ud come on the bass, look. That sounded a real treat, Ye-e-agh."
In 1897 the two brothers were invited to sing some of their songs for a lady visitor to the village, Mrs Kate Lee. She noted down the words and music of "about half a hundred" of their songs and on her return to London it was largely as a result of her enthusiasm about her musical discovery that the English Folk Song Society was formed in 1898. "Brasser" and Tom were made honorary founder members for their contribution of songs. But this distinction they promptly forgot and the first my father and I heard of it was in 1950, more of which later.
From the turn of the century certain changes began to come about, but it was the world-shattering events of the Great War 1914-18 that were the catalyst for change on a wider scale. Apart from the tremendous upheavals in governmental and international issues it had many side-effects on social behaviour and this, combined with the technological advances in transport and communication hastened the speed of change. There was a greater interchanging of populations between towns, and even small villages were no longer isolated. The emphasis was on progress and advancement, particularly from the younger generation, and the old customs and ways of life were being dropped and rapidly forgotten. As the old folk gradually went to their rewards they seemed to be taking their songs with them.
This pattern applied to English traditional songs in particular. Our Irish and Scottish neighbours were suffering less from the so-called "urban-sprawl" which emanated from our big towns and cities and was rapidly spreading its influences, as well as its suburban boundaries, across the country. And they were more determined to hang on to their national characteristics.
Probably the most significant event at this particular stage of the process was the introduction of the wireless in the early '20's. With music of all descriptions - classical, sacred, light and even jazz from across the Atlantic - being fed into practically every home daily, the doom of traditional singing seemed to be sealed. True, in the late 19th century several stalwart musicologists with an interest in preserving the English tradition - Butterworth, Broadwood and Baring-Gould to name but a few, had, like Mrs Kate Lee, preserved many of the songs in print. But the results of their commendable efforts lay fading entombed in filing cabinets and seldom saw the light of day. The once vibrant, living singing tradition of the English was on the point of extinction. But the singing tradition is as tenacious as it is varied and small pockets of resistance remained up and down the country where it persisted.
I first saw the light of day in a farmworker's cottage in Rottingdean and in January, 1915 my name was added to the long list in the church records of entries relating to our family, which went back to September, 1593 when Edward Coper (sic) married Cysle Baulde. Grandad, who had just become widowed, lived with us. He was a man of the soil and as earthy as a sack of potatoes and though he fitted easily into the domestic scene he was still a force to be reckoned with. He had started full time work on the hills overlooking the sea at the age of eight as a shepherd boy on the farm of which he finished up as bailiff 62 years later, when he handed the job over to his son Jim, my father. He had a deep, powerful, bass voice and a forthright manner and was never loath to voice his opinion as to whether the forty-acre piece should be put down to oats or marigolds next year, or if the spotted-Dick pudding we had eaten for dinner could have done with another handful of raisins.
My earliest memories are of winter evenings sitting round the fire in the kitchen range. Mum would be on one side of the hearth darning socks or otherwise busy with her needle, Dad on the opposite side making rabbit nets, and Grandad in his favourite chair over by the dresser. The men would be talking about farming matters but there were also long, clock-ticking silences. Presently Grandad would say "Best 'ave a song, 'adn't us?" Then, after a few preliminaries like deciding what to sing and the note to start it on, away we would go, everyone joining in and adding a homespun harmony here and a little adventuresome descant there as we went along. There was no fear of the songs dying in our house all the time Grandad was alive.
By that time the 20th century was beginning to flash past on the main coast road on the cliff-top at the southern end of the village, but up here where we lived near the church, the village green and the duck pond, the steady, peaceful rhythms of rural life were still prevalent and there seemed to be a marked reluctance to leave the old century behind. The carters would lead their plodding teams down to be shod at the village forge, and while they waited would "moisten their clay" with a pot of ale in the Plough Inn opposite and watch through the window for the signal that would tell them the job was finished.
These were the men that in their younger days had ploughed the fields with teams of oxen, sowed their seed-corn by hand from seedlips slung across their shoulders, reaped the harvest with scythes and sickles and threshed out the grain with flails, precisely the same as had the Saxons on the self-same lands a thousand years before. In fact a number of the fields were still known by their Saxon names and this gives us some idea of the leisurely pace of progress during the millennium up until about 1900, and provides a yardstick by which we can compare it with the changes made in the century that has ensued.
But to get back to the songs. My father, Jim, born 1882 and his brother John, a shepherd, had the same love of them as had their father and uncle Tom, and they loved nothing more than to get together and sing them. The four of them would be invited to the big houses in the village to sing for the gentry from time to time, but always to Down House the home of Mr Steyning Beard, the Master of the local Brookside Harriers, when the hunt returned from the hills at teatime following on Boxing Day. There, round a "damn gurt steaming bowl of punch" they would sing first Christmas carols and then hunting songs late on into the evening.
Many of the old songs are about life on the farm and the different jobs that the unfolding seasons demanded, and it speaks eloquently of a deep contentment of mind on the part of the singers that after a long winter-day at work on those windswept hills they could sit in the evening and sing about the jobs they had been doing, while Uncle John's sheepcrook stood in the corner by the mantel and their wet boots lay steaming on the hearthstone. There were no protest songs in the family repertoire.
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