William Sabine Baring-Gould
Born: January 28, 1834, Exeter, England.
Died: January 2, 1924, Lew Trenchard, Devonshire, England.
Buried: In the churchyard across the road from his home at Lew Trenchard.
The
Reverend William Sabine Baring Gould (1834 - January 2, 1924) was a British
Victorian novelist, collector of folk-song and an eclectic scholar. His family
home, Lewtrenchard Manor, has been successfully preserved and is today a hotel.
He was the author of many novels and also the biographer of
the eccentric poet-vicar of Morwenstow, Robert Stephen Hawker.
Baring-Gould is particularly remembered as a writer of hymns,
the best-known being the classic, Onward, Christian Soldiers.
Baring-Gould's grandson, William Stuart Baring-Gould, was a
noted Sherlock Holmes scholar who wrote a fictional biography of the great
detective - in which, to make up for the lack of information about Holmes's
early life, he based his account of Holmes's formative years on the childhood of
the Reverend Baring-Gould.
In 1889, the first part of a wholly remarkable book was
published. That book was "Songs of the West" and had as it's subtitle
"A collection made from the mouths of the people". The man who wrote
it was himself a remarkable character, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, the
Squire and Parson of the parish of Lewtrenchard in West Devon. Baring-Gould was
also a scholar, antiquarian, collector and a prolific author of both fiction and
non-fiction. He was a man who was, in many ways, out of step with the rest of
his generation.
Baring-Gould was born in Exeter in 1834 to a father whose
career with the East India Company had been cut short by a carriage accident.
His childhood was unsettled since his father preferred to escape the boredom of
England by traveling through Europe for the greater part of the year. This meant
that Baring-Gould had little formal schooling but this did not prevent him from
scraping through Cambridge, though he could never get to grips with mathematics.
His unconventional views and behavior were obvious even then and he was a
persistent critic of the establishment (particularly that of the church)
throughout his life. Tales of his eccentricity abound and it is well documented
that he taught at Hurstpierpoint with his pet bat on his shoulder. Another of
his admirers, John Betjeman, said of him:
"What curate in an industrial parish in the North today would dare to single out a millgirl and have her sent to a place where she could learn to speak in an educated style and then marry her? What local council would allow a squire today to rebuild his house in a Rhenish style as did Baring-Gould in Lewtrenchard? What vicar and Diocesan Advisory Committee would allow a squarson to remove tablets from other churches and put them up in his own, as Baring-Gould did at Lew?"
Yet for the greater part of his life Baring-Gould was content to settle in Devon
where he was responsible for the welfare of the few hundred people that lived in
his parish and his manor. This left him time to spare for traveling regularly as
he had when he was a boy, for raising his large family, for renovating his house
and his church and for writing the astonishing number of books, pamphlets and
magazine articles that actually paid for these other activities. No totally
reliable list of his publications exists, but the best available estimate
credits him with 211 publications excluding any of the magazine articles. To
most people who have heard his name it is as the writer of a favorite hymn -
probably Onward Christian Soldiers, but of all the achievements of his 90
years on this Earth, he himself rated most highly that of collecting the folk
songs which were published as "Songs of the West".
He worked on the collection for a total period of 12 years
and traveled over a large part of Devon and Cornwall. He visited old singers in
their homes and in the fields. When touring he would stay with friends and
invite the old singers to join them. He was not, himself, a good musician and
was helped in his work by two other men, Dr Fredrick Bussell and the Reverend H
W Fleetwood Sheppard. When time permitted, one or other would join Baring-Gould
on his visits and take down the melodies while Baring-Gould noted down the
words. Baring-Gould could not, in his era, have published the songs as recovered
since they were too robust for Victorian ears. Rather than publish with blank
spaces or dotted lines as some other collectors chose to do Sabine took the
course of modifying the words where necessary. He has been criticized for this
over the years but it is hard, in reality, to see what other course of action
was open to him.
It was originally intended that the book would be
published in three parts but, in fact, it ran to four. It was not, of course,
the first book about folk songs since there had been several collections of
ballads published in the 17th and 18th century. It was not even the first book
of songs collected directly from the singers since the Reverend John Broadwood
had published his Sussex Songs privately in 1843. It was, however, the most
ambitious collection made to that date and the book set the pattern for the
first folk revival at the end of the last century. The conventions devised by
Baring-Gould were to become the standard practice and, in particular, his
recognition that the songs were linked to individual singers who were usually
identified in the text. This, coupled with the way he writes about his singers
as friends, if not actually equals, is what is special about Baring-Gould.
That first edition was written in association with Fleetwood
Sheppard and this led to the peculiarity of the collection in that Fleetwood
Sheppard would not work with any of the songs collected by Baring-Gould's other
collaborator, Frederick Bussell. This was on the grounds that he felt unhappy
arranging any song that he had not "pricked down" himself since he
felt that he could not catch it's special character unless he had heard it sung
himself. The second edition of Songs of the West, published in 1905, was very
different to the first since Cecil Sharp took over the musical editorship and
reintroduced a number of Bussell's contributions, arranging many himself, as
well as using some of Bussell's own arrangements. He also re-arranged many of
Sheppard's songs.
For a few years at the beginning of the century Sharp and
Baring-Gould worked closely together and Sharp was a regular visitor to
Lewtrenchard. As well as Songs of the West they produced "English Folk
Songs for Schools" in 1907 and in the same year Sharp dedicated his
"English Folk Song - some conclusions" to Baring-Gould. What exactly
caused their friendship to fade is unclear but certainly Baring-Gould's
references to Sharp in later years became less flattering. He certainly believed
that Sharp's arrangements were not generally as good as Sheppard's but it is
most likely that he was unhappy about Sharp's success in setting up a Folk
Establishment in London. Baring-Gould was constitutionally unable to get on with
establishments of any kind whether of Church, State or the Folk Song Society.
Baring-Gould died in 1924 at Lewtrenchard and was buried in
his own churchyard just across the road from his house. In West Devon there are
still old people who remember him and most of those do so fondly. To Folk
Revival singers in Devon and Cornwall he has left a legacy that will be a source
of joy for centuries to come.
Hymns
Translations
Music