It looks as if these latest ramblings of mine are going to be mainly concerned with words and their etymology. I know that word because one of the brightest people I know studied the subject at Cambridge (or Cantabrigia as it was once known).
I was brought up in Shrewsbury. The locals pronounce it Shroosbury, or sometimes Shroosy. The posh people – either the monied class or the boys (in my time) and now girls of the school – call the place Shrowsbry, as in ‘low’. The former never in their lives begin to call it Shrowsbry; and they also would not be seen dead doing so. And the latter wonder why the people who live there don’t pronounce it properly. For myself, I have always felt a little uncomfortable saying it wrong, because I lived in the town. I hope it’s different now, but in those far off days, dayboys (i.e. those ‘from the town’) were rather thought of as outcasts. The word ‘scabs’ was used on occasion, sometimes perhaps when we beat one of the boarding houses in some sporting event or other. In a strange way, some of these childhood things stay with me. I hope that they are the events from which I learned good lessons. President Trump has just said – re: the abduction of Venezuela’s president – ‘Life is a big deal.’ I admit that, in this specific, I’m very shocked to find myself generally agreeing with him.
However, on the subject of words, I continued to wonder about these different pronunciations until, in the 1980s, I, together with the great tenor Neil Mackie, the best enunciator of the sung word I know, took part in a Manchester Midday Chamber Concert on the radio (the older I, however, get the more average I realised I used to be) and one of the four pieces on the programme had the words
Come be with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove
They were written by Christopher Marlowe. He was born in 1564 and died very young in 1593. It seems to shew (sic) that in those days the words ‘love’ and ‘prove’ (and later in the poem, ‘move’) were designed to rhyme. There appear to be no other pronunciation anomalies in the verses.
Shrewsbury was originally spelled in various forms of Scrobbesbyrig (fort in the scrubland), and it is unclear when the name eventually reached its final version – Shrewsbury. But it does seem to partially explain how the ‘Oh’ sound gradually became an ‘oo’ or ‘u’ sound. It does not explain how, in some quarters, it became the ‘oh’ sound, though, except for the possible posh adoption of the stray ‘o’ in the mediaeval word.
There are street names in Shrewsbury, as in many towns, that hint at what was sold in the area. In Shrewsbury, there is Butcher Row and Fish Street, which are obvious, but we also have Grope Lane. This name existed in earlier times in numerous places, especially in London, but across the country as well. In the 12th century, the thoroughfare became shortened by law, from its original full title, Gropecunt Lane, not because of the fact that prostitutes no longer plied their trade there, but that it was considered too rude a description by the local worthies. Thomas Phillips, in 1808, described it as still a street of ‘scandalous lewdness and venery.’ Cleaner minds optimistically said that ‘grope’ meant it was simply too dark to walk down safely. Other towns changed the name to Grape Lane as the fruit had been introduced into Britain since Roman times.
Away from words for a few minutes, and back to the town. Henry the Eighth, after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1540 (including the Abbey in Shrewsbury) wanted to create 13 new Church of England Bishoprics, which were to sport his new cathedrals. The one church chosen might have been St. Mary’s in Shrewsbury, as there had been a place of worship on the site for a thousand years. Shrewsbury would therefore become a city. My father ran a very good choir there for 13 years from 1951. But the town worthies neatly (and rather bravely) turned his idea down, rather like a Tudor bedspread. Strangely, Derby’s All Saints Church became a cathedral in 1927, and Dad had also worked in it as organist before we moved to Shrewsbury. But this is of interest only to me, and not the general public.
The only cathedral in Shrewsbury now is the Catholic one on Town Walls, consecrated much later, in 1856. It was designed by Edward Pugin, the son of Augustus Pugin, who was an architect in the Gothic Revival Style.
The Catholic Shrewsbury Cathedral holds only 300 people and could not be extended because its sandy foundations were deemed as unsuitable for the structure as well as the faith in which it is practised. The elder Pugin was a Catholic convert, and my father had forthright opinions on his work, especially the new Houses of Parliament and what is popularly called Big Ben.
Dad also despised St Pancras Station, designed by George Gilbert Scott, another Gothic revivalist. Why this was, I am not sure, but he trusted simple things and straightforward attitudes. This ornate approach was anathema to him. He always said that he could not play Bach organ music very well, being not technically equipped for its complexities.
Dad did not appreciate what he called ‘Boogie-Woogie’ or ‘pipsqueak’ (i.e., ‘modern’) music. I have mentioned before the story about him leaving Hereford Cathedral during a Three Choirs concert as soon as ‘Night Music’ (by that lovely man Humphrey Searle) began. Nursing a much-needed restorative pint in the Spread Eagle, after 20 minutes, he saw a member of the audience entering the establishment, clutching a programme. Dad offered him the appropriate words of sympathy, and Humphrey (for it was he) replied, ‘Yes, not one of my finest compositions.’
For my father, music languished after the deaths of Holst, Elgar and Delius. He loved plainsong and its influence over the so-called English Golden Age composers (between 1500 and 1625), and one could hear their influence on him in his extemporisations before a service. We smiled and wondered at his imaginative harmonies for the last verses of hymns.
I think that it was more of the nature of the over-elaborate later Baroque sound world that slightly disturbed him. In more ways than musical, he was an artist to his fingertips, beginning with detailed pen-and-ink drawings of buildings of his youth. Later, he became quite an accomplished amateur landscape watercolourist and then a worker in acrylics in his retirement.
Still on the matter of – I suppose – taste, he intimated more than once that, at the end of his period at Theological College in Lichfield in his twenties, he, as he put it, ‘threw (sic) in the towel’ at the last minute. Later, he confessed that he would have ‘gone over to Rome’more than once, if they’d had any decent choirs in their churches. He even complained to me that the Notre Dame Cathedral organ had been badly tuned. He liked the rules in Catholicism, he said. It may have been a little confusing for him, as the vicar of St Mary’s, the first of the two churches at which he was organist, Father Mackenzie, a splendid man, wore a beretta, in high Anglican style. Talking of language and pronunciation, Father Mackenzie, when putting ‘health’ and ‘wealth’ together in the same sentence, pronounced the second as in ‘real’, thus allying the word to ‘the common weal’, as in the meaning of well-being. Which makes sense to me.
His equally ‘high’ successor at St Mary’s altered my father’s carefully coloured notice – in the church porch – for the annual Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from St Mary to S Mary. This being the final tiny straw, a few weeks later, on discovering a fortuitous vacancy at the nearby St Chad’s, Dad resigned.
In the centre of Shrewsbury town, there is a street – Pride Hill – that I think of for three reasons. One is that it’s a little steep for me these days, and another that one Christmas, there were two very good lady horn players busking outside the biggest shop (in those days), Maddox’s, halfway up on the left. The third reason that makes me smile is that in about 1958, my brother came home one afternoon and said that he’d witnessed a tall be-tweeded gent barking loudly at the poor lady behind the counter in the store ‘I want two rolls of extremely strong lavatory paper.’ He gave equal stress to all syllables.
The market hall at the bottom of the hill, built in 1965, was voted Britain’s favourite Market this year. My favourite market butcher sells possibly the best sausages in the Welsh Marches and a pound of his ‘heart attack bacon’ (yes, it is described as such) is to die for. Well worth the day return ride from Euston.
Butcher Row, nearby, which I have mentioned, goes down toward the River Severn. The Latin word for Severn is Sabrina, and this prescient name was later given to Sabrina, the (nearby Cheshire-born) beautiful glamour model and actress (sorry – actor). She, too, had lovely flowing lines and curves. She was awarded a DLitt from Leeds University in 1958, aged 22. She suffered from a bad back.
By the side of this river, I had some early fishing adventures. I caught my first eel a few yards upstream from the school boathouse, which (the eel, that is) wriggled so violently that I had to be told that the only way to get it still enough to retrieve the hook wasto subdue it by wrapping it in that day’s copy of the Wolverhampton Express & Star. Talking of that worthy newspaper, I have a framed review from it of an organ recital that Dad gave in Newport, whose headline was:
Sam Baker’s Extremely Competent Performance
Keir Radnedge, the Express & Star’s music critic that night, must have had a day off from other work, which then included football (he has since written numerous books on the Beautiful Game) and other sports, business and politics. As far as I know, he still does. He was very generous to Dad that evening and finished his flattering review with the words, ‘On behalf of the excellent audience, Mr. J S Billington thanked Mr. Baker for the recital. In acknowledging the applause, Mr. Baker delivered a neat backhander, which demolished a flower stand.’ Yesterday, after having discovered his address and writing to him, I had a very kind email from Mr Radnedge, who had naturally forgotten the incident. It was after all 65 years ago. In those days, he was running a folk club in Newport.
On one occasion, I was fishing on the Severn – with pink-dyed maggots from the Wyle Cop fishing shop – some way above the Old Brewery, where I once witnessed a large pike gobbling up a short row of tiny ducks one by one as they were following their mother across the water. On the day in question, I landed what I excitedly took to be an almost record-sized but rather strange-looking roach. I was a member of the Anglers Cooperative Association and sent off some scales (fishy, not Grade V ones) to them to confirm my hopes. They replied and said I had caught a Roach/Rudd hybrid.
Most evenings, when I should have been revising, I went across the railway bridge to the little Rea Brook, which enters the Severn, a mile downstream, at the English Bridge. Its course may have altered or been diverted with the floods of recent years, but in those days, it had lots of small coarse fish – mostly dace, I seem to remember. A little upstrea,m it skirted the edge of Shrewsbury Golf Course, and many’s the happy hour I spent trying to pull out golf balls sliced or hooked into its depths. I say depths, although it was mostly pretty shallow.
One time, though, on the train from Birmingham New Street to Shrewsbury, I got talking to a man who told me that he had caught a five-pound salmon in a pool in the Rea, on the edge of the golf course. He said this salmon must have strayed up the Rea Brook either by mistake, or to escape the weir at Shrewsbury and to spawn. He had caught it on a worm, he said. Although the little stream does contain the odd salmonid – small trout, etc. – it all sounded a little fishy to me, as the gentle art of fishing for salmon with worms or gentles* is rather sniffed at, especially in brooks that are not much wider than seven or eight feet.
I trust that I’ve never boasted about the size of any fish that I caught over the years. I am and they were not worthy. Anyway, I was from a young age, reminded of both the dangers and the possibilities, in the following words:
God grant me strength to catch a fish so large that even I, when telling of it afterwards, may never need to lie
This begs the question: is it ever justified to boast, even of a truth?
And:
I pray that I may live to fish
Until my dying day
And when it comes to my last cast,
I then most humbly pray:
When in the Lord’s great landing net
And peacefully asleep
That in His mercy I be judged
Big enough to keep.
That sounds more like it.
I am happy to admit that we sceptred islanders will find ourselves altering our pronunciation of words and accepting new ones into our language, for it has to be an ever-changing process. We don’t use ‘sidewalk’, but we say ‘truck’, ‘highway’ and subway’ rather indiscriminatingly these days. I can accept that we say hotel where we should be using ‘otel, and only in the US do they say ‘erb as the French do, and we insist on herb.
I have decided that one day I need to start a very overdue movement to keep the English language from being swallowed up by foreign words. I’m calling it The Society for the Preservation of the English Language (SPEL).
We can’t escape foreign words even when we try.
I’d rather be mastering the game of Diabolo drinking champers
In the beautiful Welsh market town of Pwllheli
Than be lying flat on my belly wearing drip-dry pyjamas
In a guru’s bungalow in the polluted city of New Delhi**
There we have mangled Latin, Italian, Proto-German, Indian, Iranian, Old English, possibly Dutch, French, lovely Welsh and occasionally English.
* Gentles are maggots, another good old English word. Derived from a mixture of Proto-Germanic, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Middle Dutch, Dutch, Old High German, German Gothic.
** Don’t get me wrong; the street food is amazing.
