Background History
In the early years of the twentieth century folk song collection was going on all over England following the lead given by Cecil Sharp in Somerset and Ralph Vaughan Williams in Essex and Sussex. In the years before 1914 more than 12,000 tunes and songs were collected from some 2,000 people, rescuing the musical heritage of the common people just in time.
The main folk song collector in Hampshire was George B. Gardiner (1853-1910), a Scot who taught classics at Edinburgh Academy and made a systematic study of European folk music. He joined the Folk Song Society (founded in 1898) and began collecting early in 1905. Gardiner concentrated on Hampshire but also worked in Cornwall, Surrey, Sussex and Wiltshire until increasing illness sent him back to Scotland in 1909.
Gardiner worked with a number of collaborators including Henry Hammond Hammond (1866-1910: pictured here with his brother Robert) was also a classicist. He worked with George Gardiner at Edinburgh Academy until being sent to Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) to set up an education service. Fevers contracted there ruined his health. He collected with Gardiner in Somerset and Hampshire in 1905-6, then searched for folk songs in Dorset until 1909.
Other collaborators included the composer Henry Balfour Gardiner (1877-1950) whose great-nephew is the conductor Sir John Elliot Gardiner. They met up to 250 people in Hampshire, though we only have names for 210. In 1909, Vaughan Williams visited the county to re-collect from some of them, and four phonograph recordings survive so that we can actually hear how our ancestors sang.
ystaelens@bournemouth.ac.uk
cbearman@bournemouth.ac.uk
