My Father's Castle Wall- Nelson Ridley (Kent) c.1926 MacColl A
[From: Travellers' Songs from England and Scotland by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger; p.115. Various notes from MacColl follow.
R. Matteson 2016]
Nelson Ridley was born in 1913 (d. 1975) in Wineham, Kent. His father, Alfred Ridley, and his mother, Louisa Jems, were both Kent Travellers. Nelson was one of sixteen children, and learned most of hos tradtionasl song by age 12 (about 1926).
Ewan MacColl once told the following story concerning the song The Deserter from Kent. In 1974 he was visiting the singer Nelson Ridley (born 1913) at a camp-site in Harlow New Town in Essex. As Nelson was originally from Kent, Ewan asked whether or not Nelson knew The Deserter from Kent. Apparently Nelson shook his head and said that he knew of no such song, whereupon Ewan began singing it. As Ewan progressed through each verse Nelson continued to shake his head, until, that is, Ewan reached the final verse. "Oh, that song." Nelson said, "I know that one" and he began to sing some of the verses that Ewan had just sung to him. How, we later wondered, could somebody listen to a number of verses, which they clearly knew, and yet fail to recognize the song?
MaColl also says that the singer, Nelson Ridley, was born in Wineham, Kent, and travelled mainly in Kent and Surrey.
A. "My father's Castle Wall" sung by Nelson Ridley, was born in Wineham, Kent, dated circa 1926
1 Now, as I was a-walking round my father's [castle] wall,
I seen one hundred merry boys a-playing at football;
It was one out of the hundered he looked so very small
That I said, 'My bonnie boy, you're young and growing.'
2 Dear father, dear father, do you know what I have done?
I have married to that young lord, I think he is too young;
Dear daughter, dear daughter, if you think he is too young,
We can send him to a college for another year or two.
3 At the age all of sixteen, my boys, he were a married man,
At the age of seventeen he were the father of a son;
At the age of all eighteen, my boys, his grave were growing green,
So that soon put an end to his growing