"The Bonny Ship the Diamond" at Heckington Show 2024

#shanty #whalingsongs

Here is our opener from the day: "Bonny Ship the Diamond performed" by Wayland Smithy at Heckington Show 2024

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This may be best known as a song by The Longest Johns (‪@thelongestjohns‬ ) or Fisherman's friends (‪@FishermansFriendsTV‬ ) , but the song is much older. Some interesting background can be found here: https://mainlynorfolk.info/lloyd/song...

"The Bonny Ship the ‘Diamond’ is a song about the West Greenland right whale fishing in the 1820s.

Sad events lie behind this most spirited of whaling songs. By the 1820s the relativity milder northern waters were fished clean, and whalemen were having to search in more distant corners of the Arctic, notably round the mighty and bitter Melville Bay in Northwest Greenland. In 1830, a fleet of fifty British whaleships reached the grounds in early June, a month before they expected. But the same winds that had helped them also crowded the Bay with ice floes and locked most of the fleet in, including the Diamond, the Resolution, the Rattler (not Battler) of Leigh (not Montrose), and the Eliza Swan. Twenty fine ships were crushed to splinters and many bold whalermen froze or drowned. The Eliza Swan was among those that got free and brought the sad news home. Our song must have been made only a season or two before that tragedy for the Diamond’s maiden voyage was only in 1825. One wonders if the man who made the song was up in Melville Bay, the year of the disaster, and whether he was lost with his ship.

Ewan MacColl sang The Bonny Ship the ‘Diamond’ in 1957 on his and A.L. Lloyd’s Riverside album Thar She Blows! (reissued in the 1960s on the Washington label as Whaling Ballads).

A.L. Lloyd recorded The Bonny Ship the ‘Diamond’ again in 1967 for his album Leviathan! Ballads and Songs of the Whaling Trade, where he was accompanied by Alf Edwards, English concertina; Dave Swarbrick, fiddle; Martin Carthy, mandolin; and Trevor Lucas and Martyn Wyndham-Read singing chorus. This track was included in the Topic Sampler No. 6, Folk Songs: A Collection of Ballads & Broadsides and on the French compilation Chants de Marins IV: Ballads, Complaintes et Shanties des Matelots Anglais. Lloyd noted on Leviathan!:

The Watersons sang The Bonny Ship the ‘Diamond’ in 1965 in their BBC TV documentary, Travelling for a Living:"    • The Watersons "Bonnie Ship The Diamon...