George Gardiner
George Barnet Gardiner, Scottish folk-song collector, c.1852-1910.
With a collection of over 1,400 songs, Gardiner should be ranked alongside the major collectors, but his collection fell into obscurity after his death in 1910. He was 'rediscovered' by James Reeves and Frank Purslow in the 1950s. Frank Purslow did a gargantuan job collating the collection and publishing about 150 of his songs in the excellent 'Marrowbones' series of songbooks 1965-1973. The books, however, were a mixture of Gardiner's and Henry Hammond's material, and Gardiner still did not quite receive the prominence he deserved. The present centenary of his collecting is doing much to further restore his reputation.
George Gardiner was born in Kincardine-on-Forth, Perthshire, and was educated at the University of Edinburgh, he then taught at the Edinburgh Academy from 1884 until 1896. H.E.D. Hammond joined the staff of the Academy in 1890, and the two men became friends. Gardiner retired from the Academy to translate and publish textbooks. He travelled widely on the continent during this period, and in 1903 he made an extensive study of the folk song of Europe. In 1904 he began collecting English folk songs, at first with Henry Hammond in Hammond's native Somerset. Hammond then concentrated on Dorset and Gardiner concentrated on the county of Hampshire, continuing until his death in January 1910.
COLLECTING IN HAMPSHIRE.
Hampshire has the rural villages and market towns found in all counties, but it also has the industrial and maritime towns of Portsmouth and Southampton. It also has a strong military and naval presence. Gardiner was thus able to collect from singers who had a wide range of occupaton by concentrating on this county.
WHERE HE COLLECTED.
George Gardiner collected his first Hampshire song in the Twyford area near Winchester, which he called his first 'happy hunting ground'. He went on to explore the Itchen valley, noting songs in Ropley, Alresford, Bishop's Sutton and Itchen Abbas. He was then caught out by the classic townsman's mistake of forgetting the country cycles of labour. First haymaking, and then the various harvests of summer took the whole attention of all of the country people. Everyone was totally exhausted with this labour, and no one had energy to sing. (Cecil Sharp apparently persuaded some country singers to sing in this season, but Gardiner was a very kindly man, and would not do this). So he collated his material and planned better for next year.
1906. Gardiner started much earlier in April. He continued in the Itchen valley and Winchester, but he alternated this with collecting in Lyndhurst and Southampton. I think that he made much use of the railway. There is a note to remind himself which railway company to take for a particular village in his archive. He had a modern outlook and he used whatever transport was available. (Hampshire is well-endowed with railways, and this was even more so in Gardiner's day. There was even a Meon Valley line running down from Alton). Gardiner had now found another source of songs: the workhouses. This was very useful to him in the summer when country people were tied up with the harvests. It was mostly older people who had the songs, and Gardiner could meet lots of old people in the workhouses. In 1906, he visited the workhouses of Lyndhurst, Romsey, Andover, Southampton, Fareham, Winchester and Basingstoke.
1907. Gardiner collected again from Marchwood in the New Forest, and then again from the northeast, including Preston Candover and Axford. (Bob Copper of the Copper family followed in his footsteps about 50 years later, and he tape-recorded a few people who still sang songs in the area around Axford and Cheriton). From July onwards, Gardiner visited the workhouses again, including Portsmouth where he collected over 100 songs. He wrote about this in some detail in the Hampshire Chronicle 4/1/1908.
In 1908 he visited a number of workhouses from August, including Petersfield and Catherington, and he also visited villages in the northeast.
In 1909 he visited villages in the New Forest and the northeast. He went just over the border to Farnham and Westbourne workhouses. But he also seemed to be spreading his wings further to Wiltshire workhouses, getting right over to Troubridge and Westbury. He does not seem to have realised that this would be his last year alive. If he had, I think he would have finished collating the songs he had collected already, and attempted to get them published before his death. But we do not know for certain: he may have thought it more important to save more songs for posterity, and to bequeath them to the Folk Song Society.
If Gardiner's singers are plotted on a map, it becomes clear that many singers were found in some areas and few in others. Gardiner does not seem to have collected in the southern New Forest or the Isle of Wight. I think this is because another collector, Alice Gillington was collecting there. It can be seen that there was a large area of singing communities in a rough triangle from Winchester to Alton to Basingstoke. There was also another strong cluster in the northern New Forest. But there were large areas where he found no singers. The area to the north and east of Winchester looked promising, but he says he did not find a single song there. There are even a number of workhouses where he seems to have found no singers (eg Romsey and Droxford). So the fading singing population had already died out in some places. This shows that Gardiner was only just in time.
Gardiner seems to have collected at least until September 1909. He appears to have been suffering from kidney disease in his final year, and probably for longer. He sadly died in his native Scotland in Melrose Hydro on 10th January 1910.
see VWML Online