'JOHN PEEL'

Evening Star, Issue 20316, 26 October 1929, Page 5

'JOHN PEEL'

STORY OF FAMOUS SONG [Written bv Cykano, for the ‘ Evening Star.’] Last week word wont round the world by newspaper cable message that the centenary of the writing of the famous hunting song John Feel,’ had been celebrated in Cumberland. Everybody knows ‘ John Peel ’ —everybody, that is, who has not been completely corrupted by unclean syncopation—but by no means everybody knows the story of the song. It is one of the curiosities of literature and music. Here we have a most striking example of the caprieiousness of fame. Men meditate the muse all their lives and she remains thankless. They write volumes and the- dust of oblivion collects up in them. . Industry and sincerity may bring no reward of popularity; yet a man in an odd moment may scribble off a few verses and thereby give the world something that it will not let die. Consider the case of John Woodcock Graves s who wrote the words of ‘John Peel ’ in .1829. The rest of his long life , seems to have been quite undistinguished. He was born in Cumberland in 1795 -born a lover of fox hunt-ing-managed a woollen mill, and after quarrelling with everybody went off to Tasmania and died there in 1886, at the age of ninety-one. He was always irritable and wayward, and the one bright spot in his career was the success of his song, which (1 quote from the late Sir Theodore Cook’s account, to be found in ‘ Character and Sportsmanship) burst into sudden fame many years after it was written. But he never forgot Cumberland, and he wrote letters lull of vivid descriptions of Peel and his hounds. The words of the song came by accident, and Graves never thought they would go beyond his neighbourhood. Graves was sitting by the fireside one night, when his daughter came in and said something about an old air that granny was singing to his eldest son. This was a very old Border “ rant,” called ‘ Bonnie Annie.’ There were oen and

ink on tho table, and tho idea of writing words to tlie air came to him. Thus was written ‘John Peel.’ Immediately afterwards Graves sang it to his friend, Peel, “who smiled through a stream of tears,” and Graves said to him jokingly, “ By Jove, John Peel, you’ll be sung when we’re both run to earth.”

It was not until George Coward published his ‘ Songs and Ballads of Cumberland ’ in 1860 that the words were read in print, and another three years passed before the song was published. Some had learned it by ear. It is recorded that at an entertainment after Havelock’s troops had relieved Lucknow in 1858 a Yorkshire private sang ‘John Peel.’ The. familiar setting from the old Border tune was the work of one William Metcalfe, a member of the cathedral choir at Carlisle, who hoard tho song sung at a public dinner and at once realised its possibilities. Tho song quickly took London by storm, and in the intervening sixty years has become part of the heritage of British peoples. Its adoption by the Border Regiment (55th and 34th') as its regimental tunc helped to popularise it. The air ..was played in Cologne at the end of the wai, when the regiment, as part of the victorious army, marched past Sir Herbert Plumer.

Who was John Peel, and why is this song that bears his name so stirring? Peel, says Lord Lowther (ex-Speaker of the House of Commons and member of a famous Border family), “is one of those individuals who have been immortalised by a turn in the wheel of fortune. ff Graves had not written the song, and had not selected a catchy tune for it, few poisons outside a small district of Cumberland would ever have heard or known of him.” He was a rough old Cumbrian yeoman. He was born in 1777, the eldest of thirteen children, eloped with the daughter of a “ landed proprietor ” to Gretna Green when he was twenty, and spent the last thirty years of his life on hjs wife’s property. Probably it _ was her _ little fortune that enabled him to maintain his pack of hounds. For hunting he seems to have had a real passion Graves says that in the middle of a hunt he rode so determinedly that “he would have leaped into' yawning hell and ridden over all the devils or frightened them’ out.” He writes of “ Peel’s whole’ soul on fire, while his spirit was fit to burst from his cheeks and jugular.” Peel stood over six feet, with finely chiselled features and piercingly blue eyes. Rut the first lino, in what is apparently a widely current version of the song is incorrect. His coat was Stay, hot gay; according to Sir Theodore Cook, he never wore pink in_ his life. Nor was the scene cf bis activities Troutbeck. The correct version of the song is the one that was published in 1866: the revised manuscript was sold at Sotheby’s ten years ago. And why does ‘ John Peel ’ move ns? The words are not great poetry, lerhaps they are not poetry at all. ]

It is, however, a sincere and vivid piece of writing, and it is about a subject that has an extraordinary interest for millions who have never seen a fox or even a pmk coat. There is something exhilarating, something thrilling about a Fox hunt. There are added to the elemental excitement of the chase the love that most of us have for a horse, and tho sights and scents of mother earth. The wind was westerly, hut still, The sky a high fair-weather cloud, Like meadows ridge-and-furrow ploughed, Just glinting sun, but scarcely moving. Blackbirds and thrushes thought of loving, Catkins were out; the day seemed tense, ft was so still. At every fence Cow parsley pushed its thin green fern, White violet leaves showed at the burn. Besides, in England hunting is riding over strewn history. Consider tho names in'‘Reynard the Fox’:— By the Roman road to Braickes ridge, Where the fallen willow makes a bridge, Over the brook by White Hart’s Thorn, To the acres thin with pricking corn; Over the sparse green hair of the wheat. By the Clench Brook Mill at Clench Brook Lent; Through Cowfoot Pastures to Nonely Stevens, And away to Pcltrewood St. Jevons. Past Tott Hill Down all snaked with menses, Past Clench St. Michael and Naunton CTucis. Fox hunting is cruel? Perhaps it is. but that does not rob it of all its romance and poetry. Certainly it inspires literature. Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘ Memories of a Fox Hunting Man ’ has just been awarded the Hawthornden prize. But we are forgetting tho music. Where would ‘ John Peel ’ be without that haunting half-grieving tune? I confess I feel a lump in my throat every time I hear it, even when it is played as a quick march, ft should be played slowly—rolled round the tongue, as it were. To mo it suggests old things—“old. unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago;” something of the unbearable sadness and the equally unbearable beauty of common life. Beside it most modern popular tunes are unbearably vulgar.