ECHOES OF A NORTH COUNTRY TRILOGY
The great Yorkshire conurbation was a tough industrial environment. Daily working life there presented a history of hardship and struggle. The ‘dark satanic mills’ of the industrial revolution still cast a long shadow. The war memorials standing in every village and town square, with weathered names in one panel and freshly carved names in another, were a constant reminder of the tragedy and loss of the two world wars. The betrayal and defeat of the general strike and the haunting recollections of the Great Depression were never far from memory.
Colin Dryden's boyhood world was a world recovering from the rigors of the Second World
War and at the same time battling rationing, savage winters, nationalization,
de-nationalization, factory closures and unemployment.
He attended junior school and later Lepage Secondary School in Bradford. After finishing school, being strong, fit, and not afraid of hard work, he had a number of very physical jobs with International Harvesters, a local tractor company. When not working for a living he worked at life. He loved the outdoors, particularly camping, walking and climbing, east of the Pennines in the Yorkshire Dales and far west of the Pennines in the Lake District of North West Lancashire, Cumberland and Westmoreland.
As he grew through and out of his teen years music became his greatest and most enduring passion. His early influences included Bill Broonzy, Huddie Leadbetter and Django Rhinehart; later influences Davy Graham and John Renbourn were largely inescapable. He was a totally self-taught guitar and fiddle master and he played at every opportunity.
Although extremely important, music was not his only diversion. In the early nineteen-sixties he followed his actor director brother Donald and turned to acting for a while. He appeared in several plays, including Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas and, with Bradford Civic Playhouse Drama School, Green Fingers productions, The Mad Woman Of Chaillot by Jean Giraudoux, Knit Yourself A Lost Weekend by David Climie, and Working To Rule by Michael P Walker at the Bradford Playhouse now The Priestley.
He was naturally adventurous, questing almost, and when the opportunity to travel to Australia came to him he accepted the challenge with some enthusiasm. Colin Dryden departed the United Kingdom by air on May 20th 1965. He travelled as a ten quid tourist under the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme and he brought with him to Australia his observations and experiences of working life in the North of England and his talent as a songwriter and musician.
One of his earliest recorded involvements with the popular folk movement in Sydney, in the middle nineteen sixties, was with the Friday Night 'Sydney Folk Song Club' at the Hotel Elizabeth, a small agreeable hostelry near to central Sydney's green and pleasant Hyde Park. There, for a while at least, he performed and he shared the organisational load with Mike and Carol Wilkinson and Mike Ball.
The Wilkies built a reputation for their English folk song harmonies, for their uncompromising attitudes towards material presented at their folk club, and for Carol's occasionally incendiary letters to various folk publications. The influential and renowned Mike Ball, concertina virtuoso and fine singer, claimed a place in folk-time for his intuitive musical setting of Charles Causley's evocative poem 'Timothy Winters'. In time Wilkie, Wilkie and Ball moved back to Old Albion, the Albonion’s gain was our loss. Colin Dryden, however, soldiered on in the antipodes.
For a time, after the departure of the peripatetic three, there was a slight hiatus in smooth running but there were willing workers to help bridge the Friday Night gap until expatriate Liverpudlian Derrick and expatriate Highland Scot Morag Chetwyn joined Colin Dryden on the all-singing, all playing management team.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday Night at The Hotel Elizabeth the irrepressible Australian Irish tidal wave ebbed and flowed in rebellious sheep shearing chorus. The Wednesday Night had several organizers; they came and went, some like lions and some like lambs.
It was about this time that 'The Leaf - The Sydney Folk Song Magazine' made a brief but interesting appearance. Colin Dryden wrote the editorial, a couple of articles and a couple of record reviews, Keith Finlayson wrote about Huddie Leadbetter and Derrick Chetwyn of the Sydney Folk Song Club, John Francis of the Jug of Punch Folk Club and G R Tomkinson of the Bower Folk Club, Bankstown, provided activity reports and comments on their neck of the woods. It was a good read, pity it didn't run to a second edition. Too many other interesting things to do, I suppose.
The Chetwyn, Chetwyn, Dryden team eventually made way for another expatriate Englishman, the highly focused Mike Eves. Under his direction the club consolidated Friday Night and expanded into Saturday Night. He proved to be one of the most able folk club organizers in the western spiral arm of the galaxy. He was also one of the prime movers of the 1970 Port Jackson folk festival.
A name that resonates across the years from that formidable festival is 'Ex-Tradition' beter known as 'Extradition' - Colin Dryden, now at rest in Bradford, Yorkshire, UK, Colin Campbell, now residing in England, and Shayna Carlin, now in Brisbane Qld - were at that time far ahead of their time. All I can say is 'Hush' you had to be there.
Colin Dryden rejoiced in both the traditional and contemporary songs he had learned from others but told a more personal series of stories in the songs of his own devising. For ease of identification I have taken to describing three of his songs as a North Country Trilogy. I list them as Sither, Factory Lad and Pit Boy because in this order they came to me.
The trilogy captures enduring impressions of the industrial North of England. The cotton mills, coalmines, terraced houses, cobblestone streets, and clogs, are all here. He has captured an echo of race memory and recorded a culture and life style fast fading into history.
In the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, Colin Dryden had a voice among voices. His interpretation of folksong, both traditional and contemporary, made him a leading folk activist of the day. Working alone, with a partner or in a group, in a great hall or small folk club, he had the power to charm and capture an audience and keep it working with him from introduction to encore.
Colin Dryden's North Country Trilogy has a readily definable place in the common song stock of Australian singers singing on. The songs pass from one to another, in the main, by oral transmission or by hastily scribbled notes. Some singers aim at an accurate performance of a known writer's works, in text, tune, and style. Others add their own stamp of individuality to tune and style. That is the nature of things.
The folk process, in its way a force of nature, is always with us and a few word changes have occurred in some performances over the past thirty years or so. Even in the presentation of the songs by the most diligent of singers.
Transcription errors, copious quantities of amber fluids or the ravages of time and the failing of memory account for minor accidental changes. The only changes, that I have encountered, that I find worthy of comment are those where the delicate and contemplative North Country 'were' is replaced by the harder antipodean 'was'. To me, at least, the 'was' accidental modification disrupts the flow and diminishes the strangely ethereal quality of the original words of one particular song.
The words, structure and order of verses of the three songs as written down here come from direct contact with Colin Dryden and have been tested for accuracy against the aging audiocassettes of his recorded singing.
So... moving right along, there I was, sitting at what became my favourite table in the Sydney Folk Song Club, otherwise known as the upstairs lounge of the Hotel Elizabeth, in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, one surprising Saturday evening early in nineteen seventy. Mike Eves started the entertainment, as usual, and we all joined in with Three Score and Ten, Poverty Knock and Rough Tucker Bill. The Port Jackson Folk Festival was still resonating in the background and there was an air of excitement around all things folk, especially at the Sydney Folk Song Club.
I was there to hear and enjoy everybody but I had a particular interest in Colin Dryden. I had met him at the festival, at an impromptu session after a riveting Sunday night concert. On stage his songs of choice were: Lord Franklin, Lassie With The Yellow Coatie, High Germanie, and Silver In The Stubble. Maintaining an after-part song list was too hard. Performing alone or in a group, on stage or in the corner of a noisy, smoky, boozy room Colin Dryden was impressive. His appearance at the Sydney Folk Song Club was my first opportunity to hear him in such an intimate venue.
Colin Dryden, introduced by Michael Eves, came to the small stage and sat for a moment in silence. Then, in his characteristically unhurried way, he told a story. He checked the tuning on his guitar as he spoke, quite softly. The good audience listened attentively. Everybody laughed in the right places. His first song, Pleasant and Delightful, selected to allow the audience to share the moment, and a chorus, worked well, then he introduced Sither.
This is a song in which he remembers, with obvious affection, his paternal grandfather, James Dryden. It tells a simple and engaging story of the old man's retirement from fulltime work in the mill. It recognises the dialect of the time and place and it bears, as title, his grandfather's nickname. Sither, or Zither, translated perhaps as 'see thee' or 'look here' was the name the family used for James Dryden because it was one of his catch phrases.
SITHER
Colin Dryden © The Dryden EstateForty years are in the mill,
your day's near done, but it's going still.
Time to be thinking of making your will,
for you've nowhere to go, no intentions.Weft and weave it was your game,
ten thousand hours upon the frame,
then walking home in the driving rain,
with a brand new watch and a pension.Time now to bide, to sit and to dream,
on bygone days and the changes you've seen,
in coal and in diesel, the power of steam,
black shawls, coal stockings and courting.Clogs on the frost on a cold winter's morn,
the smell of the grease and oil on the loom,
and the wife wi' the kids by the gateway at noon
stand waiting for your wages on Friday.Six in the morn, it's time to rise,
sleep on, old man, you're weary and wise,
to the ways of the mill, aye, and all of the tries
for a part time job in the doffing.Puffin' and panting past the mill,
up to the local to get all your fill,
though you've only got enough brass for a gill,
there might be a job in the offing.But the shuttles have flown, it's time to roam,
back to the armchair and fire at home,
and leave all the mill hands and weavers alone
to their beer and their laughter and joking.But many's the time why you've stood with the best,
although the looms have near turned you deaf,
they've all got a few miles of weaving as yet
before they'll have bested old Sither.
If Sither records working life observed from the outside, then Factory Lad records working life experienced from the inside. Cold early mornings in winter, the cruel demands of the alarm clock, the desire to remain warm and snug in a cocoon of blankets are experiences shared by many. The early shift at the engineering workshop or factory is calling and you have to go. Travelling to work at dawn, on shank's pony, bicycle, or double-decker bus, hurrying to clock-on almost before waking up is a way of life, if not a rite of passage. These may be memories best forgotten but they can't be.
Here too, indelible and indestructible is the manufacturer's mark made by the mind-numbing and soul-destroying ordeal of bondage in the factory system. So many people who have shared this song can say, 'been there done that'. Others, of a different generation perhaps, can enjoy the song and gain some insight into the work-a-day life of a fitter and turner. Although this begs the questions: Who would want to, and why?
Factory Lad surfaced, for me at least, at a fairly quiet drink, chat and sing a round night in a cockroach castle in Chippendale in May or June 1970. I can date the event with reasonable ease because I had recently received the first ever copy of the New South Wales Folk Federation newsletter. It was a foolscap sheet folded in half to give four small pages and it carried in its masthead, in small print under the larger print of the main title, 'incorporating the Port Jackson Folk Festival Committee'.
We discussed it as length. It contained as much useful event information, local and interstate, that a journal that size could. Very useful, we decided unanimously. However, the editorial was a little disturbing in one respect. There was an aura of 'we've done good and are on our way to glory' leeching out of the page. 'Big is good and bigger is better' we inferred. A dark omen indeed, we agreed. The curse if the folk scene, we decided, was the ambitions of some people to turn a popular music movement into a three-ring circus. Time, we prophesied, will tell. Then we consumed a little herbal tobacco, made several jokes about camels being horses designed by committees and got back to singing and drinking or was it drinking and singing?
Colin Dryden sang Factory Lad. He didn't say as much but I gained the impression that it was a relatively new song that had had come to a performable completion during his Kings Cross sojourn during 1969. In any event it achieved instant acclaim and there was something of a scramble to get the words. Factory Lad entered the song stock and became a favourite and the 'Turning Steel' chorus always gets a powerful response.
FACTORY LAD
Colin Dryden © The Dryden EstateYou wake up in the morning
and morn's as black as night.
Your mother's shouting up the stairs,
and you know she's winning the fight.
So you venture out of the bed,
me lad, for you know it's getting late,
and it's down the stairs and up the road,
and through the factory gate.Turning steel, how do you feel
as in the chuck you spin?
If you felt like me you'd roll right out
and never roll back in.Sleet and dark the morning,
as you squeeze in through the gate,
as you clock in aye yon bell will ring,
eight hours is your fate.
Off comes the coat, up go the sleeves,
and "right lads" is the cry,
with an eye on the clock and t'other on your lathe,
you wish that time could fly.But time can't fly as fast
as a lathe, and work you must,
the grinding, groaning, spinning metal,
the hot air and the dust,
and many's the time I'm with me girl
and I'm walking through the park,
whilst gazing on the turning steel
or the welder's blinding spark.Well old Tom left last week,
his final bell did ring,
with his hair as white as the face beneath
his oily sunken skin.
Well he made his speech and bid farewell
to a lifetime working here,
but as I shook his hand I thought of hell
as a lathe and forty years.So, 'when my time comes' has come,
if must, I'll leave this place.
I'll walk right out past the charge hand's desk
and I'll never turn me face,
out through the gates into the sun,
and I'll leave it all behind,
with one regret for the lads I've left
to carry on the grind.
Pit Boy, the third song in my ordering of the trilogy, is evocative and lyrical, a song at the edge of memory. I can only recall hearing Colin Dryden sing it ‘live’ twice. The first time was in the winter of 1970 at a Sydney Folk Song Club Saturday night after-party at a very interesting house in Cambridge Street Paddington. The second occasion was at the Sydney Folk Song Club a year or so later.
The Cambridge Street after-party had a very special resonance. Colin Dryden hadn't appeared at the club that night, although he was expected, but he had a sixth sense when it came to party locations. He arrived just after midnight with a tall fair-haired girl from a different planet and a guitar swathed in a tartan car rug, because it was bloody cold out there.
He was in good spirits. He was going to sing, he decided - there was no doubt about that - there was no stopping him when the urge was on him, not that anybody wanted to. He was in good form and in good voice and sang several songs. Lark In The Morning, Cocaine and Pit Boy come to mind. Time, I regret to say, has hidden the others.
PIT BOY
Colin Dryden © The Dryden EstateThe times are hard; the days are long,
I wish I were a farmer's son -
out in the green fields all day long -
away from the dark of the day.When the sun is hanging in the sky,
the days are long, long are the sighs,
down in the darkness, where we bide,
passing our lives away.And if I were a robber bold.
I'd rob the rich of all their gold.
And if I were caught, well, I've been told,
it's better down Botany Bay.When the sun is hanging in the sky,
the days are long, long are the sighs,
down in the darkness, where we bide,
passing our lives away.And if I were a sailor, I'd sail the main,
I'd rob the ships of France and Spain,
now if we lost, perhaps we'd gain,
for the French might raise our pay.When the sun is hanging in the sky,
the days are long, long are the sighs,
down in the darkness, where we bide,
passing our lives away.Like pit ponies, down the mine,
going blind without sunshine -
though if we do well, never mind -
'cos we'll never want the sun no more.When the sun is hanging in the sky,
the days are long, long are the sighs,
down in the darkness, where we bide,
passing our lives away.
In terms of performance by others of a North Country Trilogy - in total, Sither, Factory Lad and Pit Boy - the only Sydney folk activists I can recall singing all three songs at one time or another, are the late David Alexander and the encyclopaedic Robin Connaughton. However, I have encountered several other singers and groups of singers presenting one or other of these eminently singable songs on numerous occasions stretching over thirty years.
Only one performance caused me to recoil with horror. That was at a chorus cup session, when a gathering of ponderous choristers managed to turn Factory Lad into a turgid facsimile of a high church hymn. It was the dark side of harmony singing. Choirs, I thought, belong in far distant cathedrals, with the doors locked and bolted on the outside.
The clock’s ceaseless ticking counted the folk at the Hotel Elizabeth on a pace through the early and into the middle nineteen seventies. Changing fortunes hurried the departure of the Irish Musicians club and brought a new team, David Alexander and Kery Levi to the Wednesday Elizabeth. Within weeks they made way for Darts Kelimocum - Dermott and Alison Ryder, Tony Suttor Maureen Cummuskey, with Kery Levi to ease the changeover. Competing ambitions saw Mike Eves, a most able man, move on from the Friday and Saturday ‘Sydney Folk Song Club’, and the merging of the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday operations under the Darts Kelimocum banner as the ‘Elizabeth Folk Club’. Folk organizations always suffer the attrition of competing objectives; Kery Levi’s stay was short, and later Tony Suttor and Maureen Cummuskey sought different roads to travel. That left yours truly and partner to run the three nights a week ‘Elizabeth Folk Club’. It was a time consuming, challenging, rewarding experience.
A significant event in the folk life style of Sydneysiders, Andrew Saunders reminded me, was the closing down of Tommy and Joan Doyle’s pub, the Wentworth Park Hotel in Ultimo, and inner city suburb of Sydney. This ever-hospitable couple had made the pub a home from home for folk musicians for many years or, as Declan Affley put it on several occasions, from time immoral. The last day, Saturday 27th November 1976 at Tommy Doyle’s was an almighty wake. The pub and Tommy and Joan Doyle had a mother and a father of a send off. One of Colin Dryden’s contributions on the evening of the event was an English folk song that seemed to fit the passing of an era wonderfully well.
WHAT'S THE LIFE OF A MANAs I was a walking one morning at ease,
A-viewing the leaves as they hung from the trees,
They were all in full motion or seeming to be,
And those that had withered, they fell from the tree.
What's the life of a man, any more than the leaves?
A man has his seasons, so why should he grieve?
Even though in this wide world he seems bright and gay.
Like the leaves he shall wither and soon fade away.
Did you not see the leaves but a short time ago?
How lovely and green they all seemed to grow,
When a frost came upon them and withered them all,
Then a storm came upon them and down they did fall.
What's the life of a man, any more than the leaves?
A man has his seasons, so why should he grieve?
Even though in this wide world he seems bright and gay,
Like the leaves he shall wither and soon fade away.
If you look in the churchyard there you will see,
those who have passed like the leaves from the tree,
when age and affliction upon them did call,
like the leaves they did wither and down they did fall.
What's the life of a man, any more than the leaves?
A man has his seasons, so why should he grieve?
Even though in this wide world he seems bright and gay,
Like the leaves he shall wither and soon fade away.
Russ Herman and Tom Zubrycki captured that historical folk event at the Wentworth Park Hotel on film and later transferred it to VCR. It was sad to say farewell to Tommy Doyle’s but the legend lives on.
Community access FM radio arrived in Sydney in 1975 and in early 1976 folk musicians were performing ‘live’ on 2MBS-FM on a regular basis. The Program ‘Burn the Candle Slowly’ a magazine in pages broadcast from Tuesday midnight until 6:00am every week. One of the pages, ‘Looking at it Sideways’ later became ‘Ryder Round Folk’.
Derrick Chetwyn, of Liverpool UK, then Sydney, later Brisbane, performed both Sither and Factory Lad live to air on the 2MBS-FM program 'Looking At It Sideways' in September 1976. Pit Boy, performed by Colin Dryden and recorded live at The Elizabeth, also appeared in that program. Recorded for posterity, and for playing in the car on the way to reunions, this moment in radio history can be found on the 2004 Screw Soapers Guild project CD, On This Michaelmas Eve, SSG-sideway 760928 Z41020.
Sither, performed live to air by Robin Connaughton on the 2MBS-FM program 'Ryder Round Folk' in July 1983, generated a spirited listener response. The program segment also included Sandy Hollow Line by Duke Tritton and Sergeant Small by Tex Morton with a tune by Brad Tate. It was rebroadcast several times and found a home on the 2002 Screw Soapers Guild project CD, Cross-Section Of Connaughton, SSG-RRF-830723.
Factory Lad has become, over the years, the most performed, and recorded, of the songs. In 1977 Sydney singer Andrew Saunders, late of Folk'sle, Steamshuttle and later of the Larrikins, Balmain Light Haulage and the Symbolics, recorded it for the concept album, On My Selection, Larrikin LRF 017. In 1982 the Melbourne group Cobbers included it on their album, By Request, Festival L37919.
The producers of Dave Alexander's late nineteen nineties posthumous CD, Singer At Large, DAS27/24H selected Factory Lad as first track. In live performance, Andrew Saunders included Factory Lad in his set at the Screw Soapers Guild 2003 Christmas convocation. Robin Connaughton of Roaring Forties, in 2004, still sings it occasionally.
Pit Boy is also part of Robin Connaughton's song stock. He remembers that he first heard Colin Dryden sing it at one of the Newcastle folk festivals in the early nineteen seventies. A short time later, in 1972 perhaps, on Connaughton's entry into Sydney's big city society, he heard him sing it at the Red Lion Folk club in the Red Lion Hotel in Sydney. There he got the words directly from the singer. He started singing the song almost immediately and has sung it ever since. He presented it in his set at the Screw Soapers Guild 1997 Christmas convocation. This performance, including Old Ben by C J Dennis and Monday Morning by Cyril Tawney, appears on the Screw Soapers Guild 2002 Limited Edition CD, Another Saturday, SSG-collect-070. Sadly, Pit Boy and Sither are finding quiet times now. I am hoping for a renaissance.
Colin Dryden popularised his own songs, and others, during the nineteen sixties and seventies. His strong, rich voice, his skill as an entertainer, his musicianship and his easy-going personality made him a popular addition to any folk club night. Then our world moved on, tick tock. I have a theory, one of many, that older singers singing Colin Dryden's songs can still hear Colin Dryden singing them and that the younger singers singing his songs wish that they could hear him singing too.
Colin Dryden, in failing health, returned to the United Kingdom in 1986. He and his family were fortunate enough to be able to spend some valuable time together. He died very suddenly of an aneurism on July 28th 1988. He has found a lasting peace at Lidget Green in Bradford, Yorkshire.
Resting there, safe, home at last,
a travelling bard of the hero caste,
in gentle sunlight, in soothing rain,
in whispering winds he'll sing again.
People of my generation remember Colin Dryden, we travelled together for part of the journey, and we shared rites of passage. We remember him for his personal warmth, for his good companionship, for his generosity, for his free spirit, for his delicate touch on the acoustic guitar, and for his singing of those songs many of us will always think of as a North Country Trilogy.
An Appreciation
Folk Odyssey - The Magazine and Dermott Ryder take this opportunity to thank the Dryden family of Bradford, Nottingham and London in the United Kingdom for the help freely given in the writing of this short personal tribute to Colin Dryden [1943 - 1988]. He was to all that knew him, a North Country Gentleman.
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