6. The Slaughterhouse Carol Words by Godfrey Yeomans; Music trad: Searching for Lambs
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The song Searching for Lambs was discovered in Somerset in 1904 by Cecil Sharp[1], a ‘key leader of the folk-song revival in England’. He considered it a most perfect example of a folk song. In the last 50 years around 30 folksingers have recorded it with its varying lyrics, from Shirley Collins in 1971 through the likes of June Tabor, Martin Carthy and Steeleye Span, to Piers Cawley in 2020. This particular lyric was composed by Godfrey Yeomans for Living Archive MK’s musical documentary about Calverton, The Horse and the Tractor[2].
The tune takes on an extra poignancy with the subject matter of this version: at a time when children traditionally receive Christmas presents, youngsters of the 1930s and ‘40s at Calverton Manor Farm were instructed instead on how to kill animals – creatures which had traditionally been arrayed around the manger at Christ’s nativity… Bet Jones (née Webb) who was born in 1927, was the eldest of eight children living with their parents in one of the farm cottages. Her Christmas memories, recorded by Living Archive MK[3], are quite gruesome: ‘We’d have to help with the killing of the cattle and sheep and that - over Christmas! Mr Weston’s farm was just over the road. They’d drive the beasts from there, straight across the road and up into there and then we’d help to slaughter it, poleaxing[4] the cows on the Christmas morning. We used to have to pull the rope, four or five of us, while the poor thing was up there, and Grandad was …. Ugh! ‘And then they’d bring the sheep across, on the ledges. Put down six of them and they were stabbed, and we had to leave them…. ‘Then we’d get the pigs into the boiling water to scrape all the hairs off. We first used the hooves, the toenail part of the cow’s hoof – they’d sharpen that, and we’d scrape with that. You’d see us round this big tub of boiling water with the two pigs in it and we had to get the knives and scrape. ‘Because we was all there, the farmer got it all done, everything…’ Her younger brother Dick Webb was less expansive, more practical in his reminiscences: ‘Then it was hung up and they started to cut it up - and make sausages.’ But for Bet as a child, Christmas brought no respite from unpleasantness: ‘Christmas wasn’t a holiday. We never had any holidays. We didn’t have a party. We didn’t have presents, no way… ‘I remember once we sat round the table at Christmas, just the family with Granny Odell and I was going to ask something and I went, ‘Granny Odell…?’ And a knife come, the blade went across my hand and I was told to shut my mouth and not open it again!’ [1] ‘Cecil James Sharp (1859 – 1924) …was a key leader of the folk-song revival in England as a collector, archivist, teacher and promotor. He gathered thousands of tunes from rural England… and wrote an influential volume, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions’ (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Sharp) [2] Available from www.livingarchive.org.uk. The song is on The Slaughterhouse Carol | The Living Archive Band (bandcamp.com) [3] Calverton Manor Farm – a century of memories edited by Marion Hill, pub Living Archive 2011 [4] ‘poleaxe: a butcher’s axe having a hammer at the back of the head and used to fell animals.’ (OED) |
Bet Jones (née Webb)
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