Louie Saunders

Louie Saunders: was born in Woolwich, London on 6 June 1914 where her father worked at Woolwich Arsenal.  The family was living in West London, around Ladbrooke Grove in the Thirties, but she moved to Newchapel in Surrey with her Traveller husband at the outbreak of war to avoid the bombing.  She wanted her mother to join them, but she remained in London where she worked at Cadby Hall in Hammersmith, the HQ of Lyons Tea Houses.  There was a direct hit on the factory where her mother worked and she was badly traumatised and never got over it.

Steve Pennells remembers: I went to see her at home - a DIY bungalow of wood, felt and corrugated iron on a small scrap yard deep in a copse reached via a long narrow track near Newchapel.  The whole set-up was rather like a smaller scale version of Joe and Phoebe Smith’s place at Melton before they built their brick bungalow.

Her husband died in the early seventies and she remarried - to his best friend - so that it was as Louie Fuller that she appeared on Topic’s LP Green Grows the Laurels, in 1976.  Mr Fuller died in the 1980s and she moved from Newchapel to a Council house in Lingfield where she still lives.

She went to a number of Ken Stubbs’ singing sessions in the Seventies, and has been heard more widely in the Nineties since Jim Ward started taking her out to events, including the National in 1998.

Louie learned songs from both her parents who, like many Londoners, took her hop picking in Kent during the late summer and there she spent her leisure hours singing and story telling at hop-picker gatherings and family parties.  She also learned most of her songs there, although many of them are short or fragmented versions.  She was a singer of great spirit and style and her enthusiastic, smiling delivery of her songs won her admirers wherever she chose to perform them.  Her version of Hopping Down in Kent enjoyed enormous popularity.

--RodStradling 17:51, 26 March 2007 (BST)