Music to watch hills by: Songs of The Wrekin

From Scarborough Fair to New York, New York, plenty of places have been immortalised in music through the ages. But have you ever heard a song that celebrates The Wrekin, or a dance dedicated to Wellington? I hadn’t six months ago, but then I visited the British Library and stumbled across half a dozen.

In an earlier article, I wrote about the 19th century Wellington-born composer Henry Gauntlett, hailed by some as the father of modern church music. The Victorians were a pious bunch, and there was always plenty of demand for the hymn tunes that men like Gauntlett produced. A much less well-known Wellington organist of that era, Samuel Corbett, made his own small contribution to the religious music of the day with a ‘Magnificat’, in 1878, and an ‘Anthem for Harvest Time’ which appeared two years later.

But Corbett’s earliest published work, penned when he was just 18 years old in 1876, reminds us that church wasn’t the only place Victorians enjoyed music. Entitled ‘The Wrekin Polka’, it was designed for dancing to, and written for that must-have home entertainment system of the Victorian middle classes, the piano forte.

For over thirty years by this time, publishers had been churning out sheet music for Britain’s budding amateur pianists – and Corbett’s Polka wasn’t the first to celebrate The Wrekin. With jobbing composers keen to appeal to emerging civic pride, it wasn’t unusual for light-hearted piano music to exude a specifically local flavour. The Wrekin – and even Wellington – received this ‘parlour music’ treatment several times in the middle years of the 19th century.

The earliest example I could find in the British Library is ‘The Wellington Quadrilles for the Piano Forte’ written by Thomas Hayward in 1840. A quadrille was a kind of square dance that had been popular at the court of Napoleon, and, as the name suggests, was set out in four movements. The first dance in Mr Hayward’s collection was named ‘Wellington’, and the three that followed took the names of nearby estates; ‘Apley’, ‘Eyton’ and ‘Cluddley’. For a musician trying to appeal to a rising middle class market, it can have been no coincidence that these three particular places were home to the town’s most distinguished families (the Charltons, the Eytons and the Cluddes). The finale of the piece was a chorus ‘To All Friends Round The Wrekin’. This evoked the famous Wrekin Toast of the same name, and simply went like this:

We’ll dance and sing and merry, merry be,

We’ll give the toast and join the glee,

We’ll drink the toast and join the glee,

To All Friends Round The Wrekin.

Three years later in 1843, Mr Hayward came up with ‘The Wrekin Waltzes’ for similar party entertainment. This was divided into six short waltz tunes, the first entitled ‘The Wrekin’, and the four that came after honouring ‘the noted rocks on the mountain’, comprising of ‘The Raven’s Cup’, ‘The Cuckoo’s Nest’, ‘The Needle’s Eye’ and ‘The Bladder Stone’. The collection was rounded off with the ‘Wellington Galop’, a fast-paced dance designed to tax the pianist and exhaust the dancing couples.

As his adopted hometown and place of business, it is not surprising that Thomas Hayward acknowledged Wellington in the titles of his dance collections. He advertised his shop on the front page of the Wrekin Waltzes: ‘Musical Instruments of All Kinds, and all the most fashionable music, sold by T. Hayward, Wellington’. Living at No.29 Church Street, Mr Hayward described himself as a ‘Professor of Music’ in the census of 1851, where he was listed alongside his wife Caroline and three children. A native of Shifnal, he had married and started his family in Broseley, perhaps moving to Wellington because its growing importance seemed to offer better prospects. Certainly producing his own sheet music with a distinctive local feel would help him win favour amongst his new Wellington clientele.

In 1847, four years after Hayward’s Wrekin Waltzes, George Jackson was tapping into the same vein of local pride when he penned his ‘Lays of The Wrekin’. The front cover of this depicted a well-dressed couple walking arm in arm through an arc of romantically whispey trees, an exaggeratedly steep Wrekin and Ercall in the background, along with Christ Church and the windmill that gave Mill Bank its name.

Light-hearted and nostalgic, the Lays of The Wrekin were not dances but songs, and ideal for an after-dinner recital or sing-along. The first song, ‘Ah who when in childhood’, was ‘respectfully dedicated to Mrs Cludde and the Ladies of Shropshire’, and the second song, ‘When the wine sparkles bright’, dedicated to ‘His Grace the Duke of Cleveland and the Gentlemen of Shropshire’. Like Hayward, Jackson was appealing to proud Salopians with his eulogising of The Wrekin – ‘our proud native height’ – and was also making more explicit attempts at gentility by association, dedicating his work to such high-born local dignitaries as Orleton Hall’s Mrs Cludde.

Neither of these two songs stand out for their musical quality, but the lyrics do give us a perfect taste of the times. The first song, for ladies, was wistfully romantic and reminisced about innocent youth and young love, whilst the second, for gentlemen, had a heartily patriotic tone. With its references to British liberties and brave Salopian sons, it fused local identity with national pride, adding a mention of wine and beautiful Shropshire girls for good measure. Most importantly of all, both songs treated The Wrekin as an emblem of home and old friends, a symbol of safety and happiness – particularly prescient at a time when the Empire was taking so many Britons overseas to the ‘wild desert climes’ that one of the verses refers to. to see the lyrics in full.

Finally, fast-forward seventy years to the First World War, and again The Wrekin was revisited in song as an icon of home. There must have been thousands of Shropshire soldiers longing to set eyes on it when Whitchurch-born composer Edward German wrote his solo song ‘All Friends Round The Wrekin’ in 1917. It began with the following verse:

“There never blows a wrong wind,

On Stiperstones or Long Mynd;

Fair is the face of summer morning over the hills of Clee;

Caradoc tells of old renown,

Haughmond smiles on Shrewsbury town,

But joy and pride of Severn side,

Is the Wrekin, crowned in majesty.”

This work by German is the last Wrekin song that I know of to have been published, and there don’t seem to have been any locally themed dances written since Corbett’s Wrekin Polka well over a hundred years ago – well, all except one. There’s a troupe of Morris Dancers in the North East of England who perform a dance called the ‘Wrekin Havoc’, and that’s how they spell it, so it must be something to do with the hill. Maybe we should bring this dance back ‘home’ and start dancing it in Wellington. I bet they’d love it at Pussycats on a Friday night.

So, whilst rhythmic tributes to this part of the world are pretty thin on the ground these days, there was a time in the 19th century when Salopians could stand around a piano and assert their local pride through music. Perhaps you know some that I’ve missed? Perhaps, better still, someone out there will feel inspired to compose one or two new tunes of their own.