Introduction
A sailortown, as the name suggests, is the region of a port city or town frequented by sailors, typically associated with excessive consumption of alcohol, prostitution, popular (‘low’) entertainments, poverty and crime (the sailors representing both perpetrators and victims), and ethnic/racial diversity. Sailortowns developed in response to the needs and desires of the sailor while onshore; in many accounts, it is implied that they developed with the sole intention of relieving a sailor of his pay – whether through legitimate or nefarious means. Previous scholars documenting the history of sailortowns around the world have emphasized the unusual status of the sailortown, occupying an in-between, other or liminal space belonging to neither land nor sea. In an early-twentieth-century account of sailortowns, maritime author Cicely Fox Smith described the sailortown as ‘a queer [unusual], amphibious country’, while historian Graeme Milne has more recently noted that the distinctiveness of the sailortown came from the collision between the maritime and the urban that characterized the area.Footnote 1 This article explores London’s sailortown through the voices of the sailors themselves, preserved in the lyrics of the sailors’ work songs, known as shanties. By tracing recurring themes and their connection to the urban landscape of London, I reveal how sailors actively shaped cultural meanings of place and negotiated their relationships with the city. As opposed to simply echoing nineteenth-century moralistic portrayals of London’s notorious Ratcliffe Highway (its sailortown area), shanties offer an insider’s perspective that acknowledges the complexities of life ashore, including themes of danger, exploitation and community. Through this approach, the article demonstrates how maritime music provides a critical lens for understanding the intersection of maritime culture and urban space.
A common attribute of sailortowns, described in contemporary reports of the nineteenth century, was that the region represented an area of vice – a den of iniquity – where sailors indulged their darkest fantasies and which the respectable member of society would do well to steer clear of. The sailortown’s connection to prostitution, crime and loss of inhibitions saw it serve as a moral warning to readers about the perils of vice, as well as providing ‘shocking’ stories designed in equal parts to entertain and outrage audiences. By portraying the sailortown as disorderly, corrupt and debauched, and those who frequented its businesses as at once simple-minded and dissolute members of a morally bankrupt working class, commentators were able to speak to wider political and social movements for reform. Graeme Milne alludes to this when he notes:
Much mid-nineteenth-century commentary came from those seeking to blame mariners for sailortown excesses, or to portray them as innocent dupes and victims, exploited by a parasitic underclass. It was a favoured case study for social reformers campaigning against drink, crime and prostitution in the Victorian city, and for xenophobes and eugenicists who feared immigrants, foreign workers and racial mixing.Footnote 2
As the capital of a major colonial and economic power during the nineteenth century, London’s port represented a maritime stronghold, receiving the highest amount of maritime traffic passing through its docks compared to any other port city or town.Footnote 3 London’s sailortown area ran along the length of Ratcliffe Highway, through the parishes of Shadwell, St George’s and Wapping in London’s East End. It was the site of several infamous sailors’ drinking dens that appear in both written accounts of the sailortown and also in the lyrics of the songs that the sailors sang about their time ashore. London is one of the most oft-referenced ports in the lyrics of shanties, second only to New York and Liverpool, revealing its significant role in the development of shantying traditions and repertoire. From the frequency with which the city appears in print, we can also ascertain that sailors travelling to and from London (who were consequently intimate with London’s sailortown) were key contributors to the shanty collections of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Shanties provide crucial insight into how maritime traditions intersect with urban environments. As the work songs of the merchant sailor, the shanty’s function was varied and the origins of its repertoire complex. Shanties drew on folk song traditions, printed ballads, music hall and minstrel show songs, and popular tunes of the day, which the sailors then adopted and adapted to suit both the rhythms of shipboard labour and the social atmosphere of the fo’c’sle. Shanty repertoire encompasses a diverse creative range of humour, complaint, memory and parody, offering insight into the emotional and imaginative lives of sailors during the nineteenth century, as well as the practical demands of their work. The surviving body of shanty material owes much to the efforts of early-twentieth-century collectors such as Richard Runciman Terry (1864–1938), Joanna Colcord (1882–1960), Captain William Boultbee Whall (1846–1917) and Frank Bullen (1857–1915).Footnote 4 Although still referred to as amongst the greatest authorities on nineteenth-century sailor repertoire, these figures were heavily influenced by contemporary folkloric thinking – often prioritizing an imagined ‘purity’ that deprecated commercial or theatrical influences. Captain Whall, for instance, writes in the introduction to his critically acclaimed collection of sea songs and shanties, ‘I have been asked why ‘The Banks of Sacramento’ is not inserted; this was nothing but an old Christy Minstrel song turned into a shanty, and for that reason I omitted it’.Footnote 5 Songs that bore traces of popular music, especially those from the music hall and minstrel show, were often dismissed as evidence of a degradation of the shanty tradition. While the interpretive frameworks of twentieth-century folkloric ideology continue to shape the versions of shanties preserved in print and performance, a critical reading of their content (mindful of the distortions such frameworks can impose) can still yield valuable insights into the cultural world of the sailor, often neglected in maritime historiography.Footnote 6 Sailors sang for many reasons: to pass the time, to amuse one another, to bear the burden of immense physical toil. Within these songs, lyrical references to specific streets, venues and individuals capture knowledge and experience that rarely appear in official reports, emphasizing the significance of shanty repertoire as cultural artefact.
When discussing London’s sailortown and its associated songs, it would be remiss not to refer to Brad Beaven’s plentiful and thorough work on the London sailortown and its inhabitants, not least his recent publication, The Devil’s Highway: Urban Anxieties and Subaltern Cultures in London’s Sailortown, c. 1850–1900.Footnote 7 Recent scholarship, though surprisingly scarce, has focussed on the sailortown in the context of nineteenth-century imaginations of the sailor, the working class, and the East End of London more generally, as well as the identity of the region from a commercial, political and economic lens.Footnote 8 Conspicuously absent within these varied accounts, however, is a specific study of the sailors’ perspective, the sailor himself only being tangentially referred to through his relationship to the business of the Highway, although the occasional reference to former sailor Frank Bullen’s firsthand account of London’s sailortown does make an appearance.Footnote 9 An analysis of shanty repertoire reveals how sailors navigated the maritime-urban world, offering insight into their perspectives on London’s sailortown and their immersion in the broader urban soundscapes that shaped these songs. By positioning shanties as historical and ethnographic sources that shed light on the history of London’s sailortown, this work contributes to ongoing discussions surrounding historical understandings of maritime culture, music in relation to place and space, and explorations of the history of the sailortown through contemporary accounts.
Hearing London in the Repertoire of the Merchant Sailor
Examining the origins of the songs that the sailors were singing, many of which were either disseminated or originated in London venues, offers insight into the sailors’ relationship with the city. Drinking establishments frequented by sailors are frequently listed within the lyrics of shanties; namely, the Dog and Bell (‘Homeward Bound’ (Whall) and ‘Across the Western Ocean’ (Harlow)), the Blue Anchor (‘Blow the Man Down’ (Harlow)), Paddy’s Grey Goose (‘Blow the Man Down’ (Harlow)), the Black Arrow (‘Ratcliffe Highway’ (Hugill)), and the Shakespeare (‘Ratcliffe Highway’ (Hugill)). From the vast number of minstrel and music hall songs that appear in shanty collections, we can surmise that sailors actively sought out musical entertainment while ashore – taking these songs directly from the stage, before adapting them to fit the rhythms of shipboard labour. By tracing shanties back to their London origins, and considering when and where sailors might have picked up these songs, we start to create an illustrative map of the soundscape of London’s sailortown from the perspective of the sailors.
Street-Music and Shanties
In studies of music and space within accounts of Victorian London, street-music is often called upon as an example of the role that music played within social spaces and the tensions that arose as a result.Footnote 10 Notably, I am referring to contemporary reports of musicians and singers in the streets of London, famously referred to by Charles Babbage as ‘street nuisances’.Footnote 11 In 1864, an act for the better regulation of street-music in the metropolis was passed with the intention that
Any householder within the metropolitan police district … may require any street musician or singer to depart from the neighbourhood of the house of such householder … on account of the illness, or on account of the interruption of the ordinary occupations or pursuits of any inmate of such house, or for other reasonable or sufficient cause.Footnote 12
The motion was set forward in response to the vast array of street-musicians and performers that could be found on the streets of London, of which Babbage describes the following ‘instruments of torture’: organs, brass bands, fiddles, harps, harpsichords, hurdy-gurdies, flageolets, drums, bagpipes, accordions, halfpenny whistles, tom-toms, trumpets, and the human voice in various forms.Footnote 13 Babbage also lists the ‘encouragers of street music’, to whom he ascribes at least partial blame for the prevalence of ‘noise masquerading as music’ on the streets of London: tavern-keepers, public-houses, gin-shops, beer-shops, coffee-shops, servants, children, visitors from the country, ladies of doubtful virtue.Footnote 14 Not included within this list, though certainly related to many of those listed, is the sailor class, the sailors themselves demonstrably fond of the ‘worst and most noisy kinds of music’ that Babbage attributes to ‘the frequenters of public-houses and beer-shops’.Footnote 15 Another outspoken critic of street-music was the MP Michael Thomas Bass, who was at the forefront of attempts to regulate street-music through legislation.Footnote 16 In his Street Music in the Metropolis, Bass included several letters from members of the public conveying similar views on the troubles of street-music and musicians.Footnote 17 It is noteworthy, however, that when we plot the addresses of the authors of the letters onto a map of London, the sailortown region is one of the areas with no representation from disgruntled letter-writers.
For the sailor frequenters of the streets in and around Ratcliffe Highway, street-music was part of the character of the area, and the sailor voice was often heard within this soundscape. Describing the street sounds of Ratcliffe Highway, Hugill writes,
Other habitués of the Highway were the Negro street singers, the sellers of broadsides, and the ‘chaunters’ who, while playing their fiddles, sang of recent fires, murders, crimes and executions. From over the dock wall would be heard the roaring, lewd stanzas of some lone shantyman, followed by the bellowing choruses of half-cut crews.Footnote 18
Contemporary reports describe London’s sailortown as a mass of sound, in which could be heard the typical noises of dockside labour, the singing of shanties, drunken renditions of popular tunes, cat-calls and shouts, and, of course, the street-musicians hoping to earn a living from the newly paid sailor on shore leave. For the street-musicians, providing custom within the sailortown represented a profitable venture, the nineteenth-century stereotype of sailors including a renowned love of music and an eagerness to acquire new songs.Footnote 19 A good shantyman (the leader of the shanties and arranger of its repertoire, chosen for his quick wit, varied repertoire and loud voice), for example, would keep his ditty-book close at hand while ashore, actively seeking out new sources of musical inspiration that could be brought back to sea with him. We must also consider the element of intoxication that is present in many sailortown stories, where a sailor well in his cups would be more inclined to request a song from an idle musician – and pay him handsomely for the trouble. Journalist James Ewing Ritchie shared a testimony to the fact in his description of travels within London’s sailortown, where, discussing a dispute between a sailors’ lodging-house keeper and the sailor who owed him money, he recalls: ‘Glover [landlord], in his defence, stated that Hall [sailor] had spent his money in drink and treating, keeping a couple of bagpipers to play to him all the time he was on the spree’.Footnote 20
In terms of the street-musicians’ repertoire, there is evidence that musicians tailored their programme to reflect an appropriately maritime atmosphere, as Ritchie asserts, ‘Everything [in the sailortown] has a nautical adaptation’.Footnote 21 Ritchie gives the example of hearing an elderly woman singing ‘The Saucy Sailor Boy’ to a crowd of sailors during a trip to Ratcliffe Highway, which is itself a prime example of a song that the sailors likely first heard sung on the streets of London, and was then brought to sea as a shanty.Footnote 22 Other shanties of this type include the numerous marches, ballads and popular tunes that were played by street-musicians around London. ‘John Brown’s Body’, ‘Cheer’, ‘Boys, Cheer’, and ‘Sebastopol’, for instance, were adapted from popular marches of the time (the first in an American civil war march, the latter two from the Crimean war), while ‘The Huntsman’s Chorus’ from Der Freischütz and ‘The Anvil Chorus’ from Il Trovatore likely made their way into shanty repertoire through street performances.Footnote 23 There are also any number of street ballads that were sung at sea in the form of shanties, possibly even dating back to the eighteenth century, including ‘Lowlands Away’, ‘The Fire Ship’, ‘Leave Her, Johnny’, ‘High Barbaree’ and ‘Boney’. In London Labour and the London Poor, journalist Henry Mayhew spoke to a number of street-musicians who gave an overall account of their repertoire, encompassing opera melodies (German street-bands and street-organs), waltzes, polkas, dancing tunes and soldiers’ marches.Footnote 24 We can see a notable overlap here between documented repertoire of London’s street-musicians and the songs that were recorded as having been sung as shanties during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Although street-music may have been depicted in contemporary reports as a source of nuisance within an increasingly noisy urban soundscape, for the sailors, the streets of London were a rich source of musical inspiration and represented an opportunity to expand the repertoire of songs that were sung at sea. A hallmark of a good shantyman was that the sailor should have a vast quantity of songs at his disposal, transoceanic voyages involving tedious and repetitive work, which offers us an understanding of the value that the sailors found in street-music.
Public Houses and Shanties
In contemporary accounts of street-music in Victorian London, reference is also often made to musicians and singers outside public houses, who, according to Mayhew, constituted the worst of a generally low class of performer.Footnote 25 There is a proven connection between the role of the public house within social spaces and the prevalence of street-music, where publicans actively encouraged the performance of street-music outside their venues in order to attract customers.Footnote 26 There is also significant overlap between the street and the public house as performance spaces, evidenced by several accounts of street performers entering the public house to play for patrons. In his discussions with street-musicians, Mayhew talks to a whistle-player, who informed him, ‘When I goes into the public-houses, part of my performances is to play the whistle up my nose’ – a performance method that the whistler states he is loath to do on the streets ‘because if I did there’d be thousands looking at me, and then the police would make a row’.Footnote 27 Contrary to reports by those vehemently opposed to the craft, street-music was seen as adding value to a public house through the setting of character and ambiance created by the music. The sailors, in particular, often frequented drinking dens that boasted either a dance-hall or were known for their music (‘sing-song caves and dancing booths’, as one contemporary commentator described them).Footnote 28 Owing to the fact that street-musicians’ repertoire comprised popular songs of the day and familiar tunes that the sailors would know, the songs that were played in and around public houses played a crucial role in attracting customers. In keeping with the overall maritime flavour of Ratcliffe Highway, in the same way that publicans decorated their establishments with nautical caricatures that told the passerby that this was a sailor venue, music was used as a calling card and represented a way of enabling a public house to stand out amongst its competitors.Footnote 29
Of course, performers in public houses were not all street-musicians. These venues would often host advertised concerts and performances, acting as intimate versions of the larger music halls and featuring similar performers and repertoires. For example, Watts Phillips discusses a series of advertisements in the window of a ‘dram-shop’, which publicized a ‘Grand Concert held here every evening, admission 2d.; Le petit Elisa and le belle Pauline on the tight-rope … Mr. Darley will dance a hornpipe and the celebrated Mr. Towler, as the Maniac!’.Footnote 30 Beaven attributes the scope and ambition of performances in public houses to the fact that the two music halls in the area were both ‘intermittent’ in terms of their opening and closing, as well as being positioned away from the main thoroughfare of Ratcliffe Highway. A sailor was therefore less likely to come across the music hall by chance, this requiring a level of commitment and planning that an impulse-driven jaunt along the Highway did not.Footnote 31 The size and layout of the public houses and music venues in London’s sailortown varied, which also dictated the scope of what was performed. In the ‘Jolly Sailors’, for instance, music and dancing took place in the same space,
perched on a rickety stool was a fiddler scraping with an energy only to be attained by incessant application to a mug of Hollands that stood at his elbow, and to which he appeared to resort frequently. Polkaing in every grotesque attitude were some twenty couples, the males attired for the most part in sea-boots and jerseys … all more or less under the influence of gin or beer; here and there couples, apparently too overcome to continue the giddy joy, were propped against the wall gurgling out blasphemy and snatches of ribald song.Footnote 32
The picture presented in this description is of an informal scene, reminiscent of Babbage’s implication that the paucity of music performed by street-musicians found in and around public houses was directly related to their proximity to intoxicating substances.Footnote 33 On this occasion, the performer was likely a street-musician who had been invited into the establishment to answer musical requests from the sailor patrons of the public house, performing a similar repertoire of songs to those that he would play in the social space of the street. Additionally, the relationship between performer and audience in this example is blurred, referring to an overlapping of song and sound – the polka of the fiddle-player and the ‘snatches of ribald song’ sung by intoxicated sailors and their female companions. Other musical performances in the public houses of the Highway, by contrast, were more obviously staged affairs, where rooms were given specifically to dancing, performances, programmed concerts, and so on. Larger establishments often had a bar at the front of the venue, with a series of behind-bar rooms that were designated for dance and music. A journalistic description of dancing and drinking establishments in Ratcliffe Highway by Richard Rowe describes one such example:
A zany, in a bobtailed, plaid dress-coat, is dancing about the floor, pulling his long, bushy, false moustache, and lifting a tiny drab hat, which, being tied on with elastic, flies back to his head as often as it is lifted; meanwhile the zany sings a lot of gibberish to which not one of the people he has been engaged to entertain condescends to pay the slightest attention.Footnote 34
Evidently the same overlapping of sound and music was present at these staged performances as they were in the performance space of the bar in the previous example, the performer in this case being insufficiently entertaining to draw the sailor away from his other interests.
Considering these descriptions alongside our understanding of shanties, public houses and their associated spaces are synonymous with the sailors’ activities ashore and, therefore, play a critical role within the musical soundscapes that the sailors were immersed in. While it is difficult to attribute specific shanties to the public houses of London’s sailortown, these venues served an instrumental function as places where music was disseminated amongst the seafaring community and, additionally, where sailors were exposed to new songs and genres through informal and formal musical performances by both commissioned musicians and street-performers.
Music Hall and Shanties
The final key aspect of the soundscape of London’s sailortown to consider in relation to shanties is the influence of the music hall on shanty repertoire.Footnote 35 There were two music halls that were known to attract a predominantly sailor audience in London’s sailortown: the East London Music Hall and Wilton’s Music Hall. Within shanty collection efforts and scholarship, music hall songs and shanties are known for their complicated history, early collectors of shanty repertoire viewing the hallmarks of music hall song as indicators of inauthenticity or paucity of repertoire. Many shanties in collected repertoires can be traced directly to the music hall or show clear influence from nineteenth-century popular songs. Shanties such as ‘Poor Paddy Works on the Railway’, ‘The Drummer and the Cook’ (disputed), ‘My Johnny’, ‘Powder Monkey’, ‘Baltimore/Up She Goes’, ‘On Board o’ the Kangaroo’, and ‘Ten Thousand Miles Away/Botany Bay’ are just a handful of the shanties that song collectors credit to the music hall – this is without mentioning the numerous shanties that have melodic and lyrical roots in minstrel show performances. There are several reports of the overwhelmingly maritime composition of the music hall audiences attached to London’s sailortown, which provide insight into the music that the sailor was exposed to and the reception of the songs that were performed. It is important to note, however, that these reports were predominantly written by landsmen authors, which does have an impact on how much credence we give to their accounts. For instance, there is a contradiction seen in sailor evaluations of shore-composed sea songs and landsmen recollections of the sailors’ reactions to this same material. Former sailor Stan Hugill writes,
Shore-composed sea-songs such as Hearts of Oak and Tom Bowling he wasn’t very partial to; in regard to the former probably because of its insincerity … in fact no shore sea-songs, even Dibdin’s, were popular with Jack Salt.Footnote 36
Contrast this with nineteenth-century novelist Watts Phillips’ depiction of the sailors’ reception to the musical programming on a visit to the East London Music Hall:
A young lady now advances – a song and a sentimental one, – Jack is all attention. The words are Dibdin’s, and they go home to the sailor’s heart … Jack gazes with feelings of mingled awe and admiration upon the dazzling creature … and when far, far away those words are sung by rough voices in the forecastle, he will think of thee, beauteous maiden, and thy dulcet notes.Footnote 37
Quite aside from the saccharine tone and romantic embellishment of the latter account, there is an extent to which Phillips’ description should be treated with a degree of incredulity, as, combined with Hugill’s previous assertion that Dibdin’s songs did not find favour amongst merchant sailors, Dibdin generally had an uneasy relationship with seafarers on account of his fanciful portrayal of the sailor class. In any case, Dibdin’s songs are not found within shanty repertoire at all, nor in the fo’c’sle songs that are included in shanty collections. Of the attendees of the East London Music Hall, Phillips writes,
The men are principally sailors, young and old; boys, with the down scarce showing on their chins, yet loud in oath and big with swaggering talk, drinking fierce liquors with women whose vice-hardened faces show strangely beside their own. Able seamen, fine, jolly-looking tar, smoking and drinking too; but, deaf to the noise around, they listen intently to the songs. Old men – ancient mariners – with grizzled heads, and whiskers streaked with frost, who smoke lazily and drink deeply; who seem indifferent to all things, and sit watching the thin smoke as it wreath upwards from their pipes. Negroes are here in plenty, laughing and chattering the loudest in the room.Footnote 38
While Phillips presents a soundscape where music and conversation were intermixed, his account differs from other portrayals of musical soundscapes in London’s sailortown through the attentiveness and respect given to the music by the sailor audience. As previously noted, a shantyman (the able seamen and ancient mariners of Phillips’ account) actively sought out music, contrasting to the passive reception and dissemination of song that occurred in the public houses and streets of Ratcliffe Highway. Again, we return to Beaven’s comment that the music halls were geographically and, we might suggest, culturally, removed from the main thoroughfare of Ratcliffe Highway. Sailors who attended the music hall did so with the explicit intention of seeking musical entertainment, positioning themselves as active and attentive audience members. The purposeful engagement with the music hall stands in contrast to the sailors’ experiences of street-music and public house performances, which tended to oscillate between passive auditory background and intermittent, informal participation.
Viewing the overall programme of Wilton’s Music Hall, situated by the ‘Tiger Bay’ area of the sailortown, during the 1860s, it is striking how similar the genres of music sung over the course of an evening are to those that of the shanty repertoire. Popular operatic songs, such as ‘The Gipsy Chorus’ and a ‘Duet from Trovatore’, are presented alongside traditional folk melodies from across Britain and Ireland (‘Bonnie Dundee’, ‘Coming Thro’ the Rye’, and ‘The Minstrel’), comic songs (‘Ain’t She Werry Shy’ and ‘You’ll Remember Me’) and new compositions (‘I’m Off to Charlestown’ and ‘Sound, Britons, Sound!’). Of particular note, given the location of Wilton’s Music Hall within the sailortown, are the nautical themes running through the repertoire. Programmes reported in local newspaper reports and reviews feature sea-related songs, such as ‘Tom Bowling’, ‘The Sea King’, ‘The Queen of the Sea’ and ‘The Skipper and His Son’. The range of genre and style offered by Wilton’s Music Hall were diverse, and provides an explanation of how a similarly heterogeneous ensemble made its way into the sailors’ repertoire. As Hugill states, ‘the sailing ship man cribbed bits of this song and that, hymns, grand opera, music hall ditties, and so on, all being fish to the shantyman’s net’ and the music hall provided a rich source of songs from which he could liberally draw.Footnote 39 The fact that the music halls of London’s sailortown catered to its sailor audience through nautical allusion and maritime songs was especially advantageous to the shantyman, as it was, in effect, already delivering a programme of songs with particular relevance and appeal to the sailors.
The prevalence of music hall songs within sailors’ repertoire indicates both the importance of the music hall in relation to the soundscapes that the sailor was immersed in and the priorities of the sailor while ashore. While the sailor would naturally have encountered various forms and styles of music along the streets and in the public houses of Ratcliffe Highway, shanty repertoire that originated in the music hall reveals that the sailors also actively sought out musical entertainments while onshore and that music halls were a fundamental draw of London’s sailortown to its transient inhabitants.
The sonic re-creation of London’s sailortown developed here from the sailors’ perspective aligns with similar work being undertaken within sound studies that understands urban soundscapes as central to how individuals navigate and assign meaning to urban life. Scholars such as Sara Cohen, Brandon LaBelle and Michael Bull have emphasized how sound shapes space, memory and social belonging.Footnote 40 The overlapping textures of noise, music, labour and leisure in London’s sailortown (where street performers, shantymen, ballad sellers and drunken choruses all competed for acoustic space) reflect a socially constructed auditory environment to which sailors were active contributors – influencing and being influenced by the auditory life of the sailortown. In this context, it is too simplistic to think of shanty repertoire as songs about London, rather, shanties instead signify sonic practices that both absorbed and rearticulated the rhythms, melodies and cadences of the distinctive urban world of the sailortown.
Historical Accounts Versus Sailor Accounts of London’s Sailortown
In his work on sailortowns around the globe from the nineteenth century to the early-twentieth century, Stan Hugill describes the sailortown in general as ‘a world in, but not of, that of the landsman. It was a world of sordid pleasure, unlimited vice, and lashings of booze, but a dangerous place too’.Footnote 41 Hugill is writing from the perspective of a former merchant sailor who had sailed aboard the last of the British commercial sailing ships, as well as a point of contact between the nineteenth-century sailing class and a mid-twentieth century audience. While this may give us an imperfect look at the London sailortown, which by all accounts had changed significantly by the time that Hugill was sailing, Sailortown is, nonetheless, considered to be one of the most authoritative accounts of sailortowns written by a sailor-author. Over the course of this research, I have compiled a London collection of shanties – that is, shanties related to or with a direct lyrical connection to London – which forms the basis of the forthcoming analysis. There are 34 songs that have been identified as ‘London shanties’ (though ascribing shanties a particular nationality or homeport, as I have discussed elsewhere, gives a limited view of the tradition), with an additional nine London versions of shanties (where London is used interchangeably with other port cities), taken from across 16 shanty collections.Footnote 42 Key themes that arise in the lyrics of these ‘London shanties’ include: women, ‘sharks’ of the Highway, public houses and grog-shops, the sailors’ pay, Highway amenities, dangers of the Highway, and, finally, the docks. At a brief glance, the recurring themes that appear in the lyrics of shanties that refer to the London sailortown are notably similar to the themes previously identified and discussed by both contemporary authors writing about their sailortown experiences in the nineteenth century, as well as modern scholars exploring characteristics of London’s sailortown retrospectively. By identifying these themes through the lyrics of shanties, however, we gain new insight into London’s sailortown from the sailor’s perspective. Through comparison, we can now use the portrayal of London’s sailortown in shanties to give credence to (or, in some instances, to refute) depictions of both the sailortown and sailors in landsman accounts of the area. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on one of these key themes, illustrating the differences and similarities between depictions of women in London’s sailortown in the lyrics of shanties, and how women were depicted in landsman accounts of the area from the nineteenth century.
Case Study: The Women of Ratcliffe Highway in Shanty Repertoire
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the sailors’ (historically verified, though stereotypical) reputation as drunkards and womanizers when ashore, two of the most common themes arising in the lyrics of shanties related to London are women and alcohol. The role of women in shanties is often bound within narratives of transaction and exchange. Even in the more sentimental songs, where women are portrayed as lovers rather than just a means to an end, there is an acknowledgment of the ephemerality of the sailors’ life ashore and the ease with which the sailor is distracted in matters of love. In the shanty ‘The Wide Missouri’ (Davis and Tozer), for instance, the sailor sings of the London-based daughter of Polly Brown, named Nancy, who ‘just took [his] fancy’, though later sings ‘Oh! Polly Brown, I love you dearly … My heart is yours, or very nearly’.Footnote 43 For the most part, women in shanties are typically sex workers, as seen in the recurring stock phrase: ‘the pretty young girls come down in flocks, some in petticoats and some in frocks’, which is generally followed by something along the lines of ‘here comes Jack with his ten months’ pay’.Footnote 44 In various accounts of the behaviour of sailors in the London sailortown, the sailor himself is often depicted as simple-minded and oblivious to the dangers that the Highway posed, particularly when it came to women. Ritchie, for example, describes the ‘crew of infamous women’ that resided along Ratcliffe Highway, of whom he writes, ‘against their sober villany poor Jack has no chance’.Footnote 45 Similarly, in Rowe’s description of the same area, his guide informs him that ‘The case is exceptional now in which a sailor allows a ‘siren’ to take possession of him as soon as he is outside the dock gates, and keep possession of him until he has spent on her all his wages for his last voyage’.Footnote 46 When we turn to the lyrics of shanties, however, it becomes clear that the sailor was not so oblivious to think that the women of the Highway sought him out for his merits and charms. Shanty narratives disclose that the sailor was fully aware that female attraction went hand-in-hand with what he could offer her by way of financial recompense – as is clearly demonstrated in the shanty, ‘Santy’ (Harlow), where the imagined sex worker in the song explicitly states, ‘You Santy, I love you for your money’.Footnote 47
Bracebridge Hemyng, in Henry Mayhew’s ‘London Labour and the London Poor’, writes of the relationship between sex workers and sailors:
Sergeant Prior of the H division … assured me that when sailors landed in the docks, and drew their wages, they picked up some women to whom they considered themselves married pro tem.Footnote 48
Hemyng’s account of a sort of ‘marriage’ between a sailor and a sex worker is alluded to in the unexpurgated (unpublished) version of the shanty Ratcliffe Highway recorded by Stan Hugill, where the sex worker says to the sailor, ‘She told me her fancyman wuz at sea for a spell, so I gave her me flipper an’ we wuz both bound to Hell’. The same tacit agreement of loyalty also appears in a handful of shanties through terminology that implies ownership. In ‘Riding on a Donkey’ (Harlow), the sailor refers to his companion as ‘my gal’, despite heavy implications that he had only met her that night.Footnote 49 On the other hand, there are a number of references across the London shanty collection to the individual sailor on an outward-bound trip bidding adieu to multiple women: ‘At Catherine’s Dock [London Docks] I bade adieu to Poll and Bet, and lovely Sue’.Footnote 50 There is no mistaking that these are sex workers, as the sailor later returns to London, where the narrative continues, ‘And Bet to Poll and Sue will say – “Oh, here comes Jack, with his three years’ pay”’.Footnote 51 Both Hemyng’s report and the narratives depicted in the lyrics of shanties show a different kind of relationship between sailors and sex workers than the villainous, predatory accounts presented by landsman authors. From the sailors’ perspective, communicated through shanties, companionship and understanding between these two groups are revealed, showing that although the women expected financial recompense in return for their time and services, this did not necessarily preclude empathy or affection. Returning to the shanty ‘Riding on a Donkey’ (Harlow), an example of an amicable transactional relationship between sailor and sex worker can be seen, in which the sailor takes his female companion to Oxford Circus to see a show, dressing her up in ‘bright ribbons’ for the occasion.Footnote 52 They end the evening drinking together, which is where the narrative concludes.
The lyrics of shanties were not altogether unsympathetic towards women, though it is true that many served as warnings about the dangers of losing one’s inhibitions around characters of the Highway who sought to rob them. In the shanty ‘Home, Home, Home’ (Hugill), the lyrics take an unusual stance for a sailor song and instead serve as a warning to women (though, it should be noted, aimed at ‘innocent’ women) not to become too close to sailors, as they will leave you high and dry when it is time for them to return to sea.Footnote 53 Parallels can be drawn here between the moral message of the shanty and the work of charitable and religious missions in London’s sailortown.Footnote 54 Intended for a sailor audience, ‘Home, Home, Home’ stresses that the sailors’ actions have consequences, and although his time on shore may be fleeting, there are those left behind for whom his actions have permanent implications.
On the theme of implications, the moral narrative goes both ways – as another function of the London shanties was to serve as a very real warning of the ramifications that might be incurred if the sailor were to visit the women of the Highway. In this objective, the difference between the priorities of landsman authors writing about London’s sailortown and the sailors visiting London’s sailortown are called into sharp relief. A common theme in sailor narratives dating from at least the eighteenth century onwards is the risk of venereal disease when spending time with women onshore. Landsman authors very rarely write about this grave concern for sailors passing through the sailortown, though Phillips, a landsman author, does recall the ‘collection of horrors’ in the window of the British and Foreign Medicine Institution, ‘before which Jack stands aghast, his bronzed face changing to the pallor of ashes’.Footnote 55 The narrative conclusions of many of the London shanties, especially the unexpurgated versions, tell of the ‘surprises’ that awaited the sailors after their time spent with women from the Highway – as can be found in two unexpurgated versions of the shanty, ‘The Fire Ship’, both recorded by Stan Hugill:
But she’d left behind a souvenir, I’d have you all to know,
And in nine days to my surprise, there was fire down below!Footnote 56
Steer clear of lofty fire ships [sex workers], for to me they brought bad luck,
For one burnt off me ol’ jibboom, an’ now I cannot fuck.Footnote 57
The sailors’ concern about venereal disease is also evident in the heavily euphemized approaches of the sex workers when first soliciting a sailors’ attention: ‘What is your cargo, my sweet pretty maid? ‘I’m sailing in ballast, kind sir’, she said. ‘I’m as neat a young skipper as ever was seen’. ‘I’m just fit for a cargo; my hold is swept clean’.Footnote 58
The depiction of the women of London’s sailortown in shanties is conflicting, where women are portrayed as both villains, whose evil machinations would see the sailor stripped of his money and possessions, and also as the sailors’ closest friends when onshore. A critical distinction, however, is that there is negligible moral reflection or judgement of the profession of the women in these songs. In landsman accounts, the women of the Highway are invariable described as ‘harpies’, ‘hideous sirens’, ‘poor lost women’, and ‘miserable creatures’.Footnote 59 From the sailors’ position, while they were aware of the dangers of fraternizing with women who, in some instances, had been known to assault or rob a sailor, for the most part the sex workers of the Highway were instead part of an established transactional – and reciprocal – relationship with the sailor.
Conclusions
One of the difficulties of writing about London’s sailortown in respect of shanties is that, as authors have often stated, the sailortown of the nineteenth century was much the same the world over. In fact, it would perhaps be of greater use and comprehension to those studying maritime music in relation to the sailortown if they took a more general approach, considering the sources and influences of the sailortown as a separate cultural entity (from a global perspective), as opposed to fixing on one specific locality. It is significant within the context of this study that we do not overstate the relevance and influence of this work, showing, as it does, only a snapshot of the ways in which we can think about the land in relation to the cultural expressions of maritime communities. From the perspective of a maritime musicologist, exploring shanty repertoire in relation to London’s sailortown has only served to further highlight the limitations of looking at maritime music through a land-focussed lens. Without doing a disservice to the research involved, considering this London-centric account of shantying alone creates a skewed perspective of shanty repertoire that does not fully appreciate the nuanced multicultural, multilingual elements that were characteristic of the genre as a whole.
While the broader issues of framework and terminology are points that need to be raised more widely in discussion of maritime music, the purpose of this article was to explore the relationship between London’s sailortown and shanty repertoire, revealing how the sailors’ voices that are present in shanties can contribute to our understanding of the connections between maritime culture and urban space. By analysing references to London within the lyrics of shanties and investigating their thematic connections to historical accounts of London’s sailortown area, we attain a new perspective on how sailors experienced and interpreted their time ashore. While Victorian landsmen accounts often frame sailortowns as places of vice and immorality, the London heard in the music and lyrics of shanties provide an alternative narrative – one shaped by the sailors themselves, which reflects their interactions with the spaces that they frequented. A key finding of this research is the presence of recurring themes within shanties that refer to London, specifically those related to women, financial exploitation, public houses, and the general perils associated with Ratcliffe Highway. These themes echo many of the concerns expressed in contemporary landsmen accounts, though with critical differences in tone and perspective. Whereas landsmen often depict sailors as naïve victims or reckless drunkards, the lyrics of shanties show that sailors were well aware of the risks of the sailortown and used their song as a warning to others who might not be so worldly. By analysing the lyrics of shanties, we can see that the sailors openly acknowledged the transactional nature of their relationships with the permanent inhabitants of the Highway, understood the threats posed by thieves and moneylenders, and embraced the entertainments of the sailortown, without necessarily subscribing to the moral judgements imposed by nineteenth-century society.
Beyond the lyrics, this research has also explored the wider soundscapes of London’s sailortown, demonstrating how music played an integral role in shaping the sailors’ experiences. Future research, therefore, may fruitfully consider maritime music as an early, under-recognized participant in the shaping of modern urban-acoustic space. The prevalence of music in street performances, public houses and music halls took an active role in developing the repertoire that the sailors then brought with them to sea, showing how shanties were the products of cultural exchange between sailors and the urban environments they inhabited while ashore. The process of transmission, dissemination and adaptation reinforces the idea of the shanty as a melting-pot of musical genres and influences, which similarly reflected the changing cultural landscapes that the sailors encountered.
Despite its use of broad strokes to colour the lives of sailors in London’s sailortown, this research has primarily demonstrated how London can be heard within shanty repertoire – both in the direct lyrical references to London’s sailortown and in the musical influences that were subsequently seen in sailor repertoire. Through an examination of the working songs of the nineteenth-century merchant sailor, we gain access to a unique historical perspective that challenges dominant land-centric narratives that place the sailor firmly within the context of nineteenth-century societal conventions, as well as offering a more nuanced understanding of how these maritime labourers experienced and navigated life onshore.
Dr Mollie Carlyle is a maritime musicologist whose research spans historical musicology, ethnomusicology and critical heritage studies. She completed her PhD at the University of Aberdeen in 2024, where her dissertation examined the life and legacy of ‘the last shantyman’, Stan Hugill, and the cultural afterlives of maritime song traditions. Her work engages with global music history, the sonic legacies of slavery and colonialism, and the politics of authenticity in folk and vernacular musics. Her forthcoming monograph, From Ship to Screen: The Cultural Legacy of Sea Shanties (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), traces the transformation of shanties from shipboard labour songs to global popular culture. Dr Carlyle’s research is informed by interdisciplinary, decolonial and historically grounded approaches, and contributes to broader debates on music, memory and representation across transnational and postcolonial contexts.
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