PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to Edith Fulton Fowke, 16 May 1975. MS-2-202 41.25.
Subject HeadingsIn a response to a query from noted Canadian folklorist Edith Fowke about his sources for sea chanties, T. H. Raddall relates when he first heard chanties sung, the major published collections he consulted, how he interviewed old sailors, his role in getting Liverpool resident William Smith to record his memories of the songs he had heard performed, and the discovery of a notebook full of songs sung in a singing contest at the Hatt family forge in Liverpool during the 1880s. For the Smith and Hatt materials, Raddall refers Fowke to typewritten copies located in his papers at the Dalhousie University Archives. He concludes by giving credit to the Hatt and Smith collections for inspiring his short story, "Blind MacNair".
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May 16, 1975 Miss Edith Fowke,5 Notley Place, Toronto, Ontario M4B 2M7 Dear Miss Fowke: I have never deliberately collected chanteys and other songs of sailors, but I was interested in them from the time I went to sea at fifteen in small steamships out of Halifax and Sydney, N.S. In the forecastles I found a number of veteran windjammer men who had "gone into steam". In convivial moments they sang their favourite chanties and ballads, and some I learned to sing along with them, usually in some small gathering place ashore. When I became a writer of short stories later on, I came across Roy Mackenzie's "Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia",1 and recognised some that I'd heard before. In talks with William Smith, the last of the windjammer veterans here in Liverpool, I heard him sing many more. I persuaded his son, T. Brenton Smith, to take down his father's memoirs on the typewriter. They include a collection of chanties, songs, and bits of songs, and they are now in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia at Halifax, N.S. Brenton Smith gave me a carbon copy of the chanties and songs, and it is now in the collection of my papers in Dalhousie University Lib- rary, with some pencilled annotations of my own. From talks with William Smith and other old sailors I knew that in port from time to time there were singing contests between favourite chantymen, and eventually here in Liverpool I found a small treasure. In the 1880's a former sea captain named Fenwick Hatt founded a small ship-refitting business here, and of course it included a forge. Long after the captain was dead and the firm was out of business, his son George told me about such a contest in the forge, and showed me a notebook kept by his father in which the chanties and ballads were written down at the time. The hand- writing showed that many of the songs were inscribed in the book by the singers themselves, some of them barely literate. Mr. Hatt would not part with it but he allowed me to make a typewritten copy, which is now among my papers in the Dalhousie Library.2 The original notebook is now in the possession of a descendant of Fenwick Hatt who spends the summers here and the winters in Arizona. She is Mrs. G. Cecil Day, 10 Waterloo, Street, Liverpool, N.S. The accidental conjunction of some of the songs in the Smith and Hatt collections, notably "The Blind Sailor" and "The Bounty Jumper", suggested my story "Blind MacNair". |
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1. William Roy Mackenzie, Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1928).