Thursday 9th October 2025, Southwold Sailors’ Reading Room
Written by Eammon Andrews
Overlooking the beach on Southwold’s East Cliff the Sailors’ Reading Room was the ideal setting for Katie Howson’s presentation celebrating the publication of the 2024 revised edition of Blyth Voices – Folk Songs collected in Southwold by Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth in 1910.
EATMT’s publication of this second edition was made possible through our recent Vaughan Williams project funding. It contains sixteen songs, a toast and an instrumental piece, extending and updating the first edition issued in 2003.
Photo: Katie Howson, photo courtesy of Paul Reid
About 60 to 70 people packed into the small room with its colourful display of model boats, paintings, photographs and other artefacts from Southwold’s fishing and maritime past to hear Katie talk about classical composers Vaughan Williams’ and Butterworth’s excursions to “collect” folk songs and tunes from rural and coastal areas, as was fashionable in the early part of the 20th century, and in particular their visit to Southwold.
The book explores RVW’s and GB’s reasons for visiting, their travel by train and bicycle, where they stayed and who their contacts were, and the singers and musicians that they met in the town and from whom they obtained material and inspiration for their own compositions. Most of the songs were from three members of the Hurr family, all fishermen.
Several of the songs were brought to life by local singers, all regulars at Thursday evening music and song sessions at The Harbour Inn. By good fortune, and with a small element of planning, this just happened to be a “Harbour Inn night”, where many of the assembled company adjourned to for fish and chips before taking part in the session. Several of the songs from the book are still regularly sung these days, albeit not necessarily in exactly the way RVW and GB might have heard them. Without such collecting by RVW, GB and others we can only speculate as to how many of these old songs would still be alive and sung today. RVW was an active member of the then Folk Song Society.
Thanks are due to Steph Burridge, with help from Robin, at Southwold Bookshop who kindly set up and managed the event and the ticket sales, and to Stephen Wells, Trustee at SRR, for opening up and arranging the seating in the Sailors’ Reading Room.
Thanks to all the singers who contributed as follows, to Shirley Harry for being MC, and to Katie Howson for the informative and entertaining talk.
David Cotter – Betsy of Yarmouth; Judy Andrews – Lovely Joan; Tracey Wisdom – The Royal George; Shirley Harry – The Bold Princess Royal; Lesley Neal – Georgey; Rob Neal – Jones’s Ale, and myself Eammon Andrews – The Cobbler, plus a step dance to Katie playing the only tune noted in the book, Robert Hurr’s Hornpipe, which is a version of the well-known tune “Soldier’s Joy”.
The original purpose of the Reading Room, opened in 1864, was to provide a place for sailors and fishermen to meet, read and chat rather than spend the time and money in one of the many pubs in Southwold. It would be interesting to know how the fishermen of 1910 divided their time !
Blyth Voices is available direct from EATMT, or from Southwold Bookshop, price £8.00 plus postage and packing.
