manx celtic music and dance

The afterlife of the Clague tunebooks by Stephen Miller

05 Mar 2013

“THE TUNES WERE MY ABSOLUTE PROPERTY”  THE AFTERLIFE OF THE CLAGUE TUNEBOOKS by Stephen Miller

In 1935, the Journal of the Manx Museum mentioned that “[f]our books in which are transcribed in Dr Clague’s own hand more than three hundred tunes collected by himself which are of special interest havae been deposited in our Library.” It went on to add that:

These books were bequeathed by his widow to his intimate friend, the Ven. Archdeacon Kewley, who, being confident that it would be in accordance with the Doctor’s wishes, handed them over to Mr J.E. Quayle, B.Mus., who, having examined them very closely, says that while not all these tunes are Manx in their origin—many being so only by association—they do form the foundation upon which practically all later activities in the field rest.

Quayle went on to declare:

They are, he declares, a valuable contribution to the body of European Folk Music, and an imperishable monument to the memory of a great Manxman. In view of this, with the concurrence of the Archdeacon, Mr Quayle has deposited the books in the Library of the Museum.

Now the Manx National Heritage Library, the four tune books are to be found at MNHL, MS 448/1–3 A and MS 449 B. This note, certainly authored by William Cubbon, then the Director and Librarian of the Manx Museum, narrates an essentially genealogical afterlife of the Clague tune books. They pass first to his widow on Clague’s death in 1908, then on to the Rev, John Kewley in 1911, next given to J.E. Quayle at some unknown date, who later decided alongside Kewley to deposit them in the Manx Museum Library in 1935. However, as all the parties knew, there was another afterlife of the tune books, one that was not as straight forward as presented here, and one that had led to strife between all the parties involved.

Kewley was indeed a close personal friend to Clague as he wrote to Sophia Morrison in 1908, “I shall miss him very much indeed as I used to see a great deal of him. Only three days ago before his death he spent between 2 and 3 hours here with me.” He continued:

He has left an enormous quantity of Manx in the way of many scores of note books &c. I have been with Mrs Clague 5 or 6 days already sorting them out from among his papers. I fancy that some of them are practically ready for publication, but it will be some time before I shall be able to report on them.

Clague’s papers and his personal library passed to Kewley, and they were sizeable in the extreme as a letter from 1911 shows:

We had to take to our house, as far as I can judge, 6 or 7 tons of books & papers, & our house is only a small one. Consequently with books, papers & so many other things we scarcely have room to move among boxes, hampers, drawers & piles on the floors.

It was only in 1913, that Kewley was in a position to start literally shelving Clague’s library writing to G.W. Wood that “I completed the furnishing of the library 5 or 6 weeks ago, but I have not begun to put things in order. I wanted to know how your treasures were arranged & how far I could adopt your methods if allowed to do so.”

The understanding that Kewley would inherit Clague’s library and papers was informal, one between him and Clague’s widow, Margaret Eliza, as there is no provision made in her will about this. He later explained the position to Wood in a letter from 1917:

As you know, Mrs Clague left to me all the Doctor’s books and MSS. She was anxious that they should be dealt with according to the Doctor’s wishes, and she did not allow anyone to get any of the unpublished tunes. I knew how great regard he had for J.E. Quayle, B.Mus. and I told Q that he would be the first allowed to make use of them.

He went on to recount what had happened earlier in 1913:

One day, 5 Sept[emb]er 1913, Miss Morrison and “Cushag” came just as I was going from home. They suggested publishing some of the tunes in Mannin. I promised to consider this and I lent Miss M. 4 MS books to peruse and to make a list of such as had been published, as there were no marks on the MSS to shew what had appeared. Of course I meant to consider the others in conjunction with J. E. Q.

Kewley was certainly unprepared for what was then to transpire. Reading the second number of Mannin that year, he came across the statement that “[t]he Ven. Archdeacon of Mann has handed over to the Manx Language Society the highly interesting collection of Folk Airs left by the late Dr Clague.” His reaction was no doubt a predictable one: “I must say that I was amazed when I read Miss M’s report that I handed over the MSS to the M. L. S. I was furious over it.” He then came to the nub of the issue:

The tunes were my absolute property and I found that she had taken and retained copies of them and went on publishing them with[interlined out] consulting me at all about them. J.E. Q. thought that I had broken faith with him, and the position was unpleasant.

He went on to add “[o]f course, I could not do anything. She had the copies of the tunes. I could only grin & bear it. I do not know whether they are correctly copied or not.”

It was Edmund Goodwin who was to copy out the Clague tune books and Morrison certainly wasted no time, Goodwin writing the next day after she had borrowed the tune books from Kewley, “[i]t will be a great pleasure to me to copy out Dr Clague’s very interesting collection & do what I can with them. I shall return them as soon as possible.” Goodwin certainly set to work at once, writing on 10 September:

I have been spending every spare minute examining & copying Dr Clague’s grand collection of folk tunes. I am sending today four of them [interlined which took my fancy &] which may perhaps be suitable for your next number of Mannin. I have others also in hand & if you can spare the MSS books for another week or two I shall have most of the collection copied.

At the beginning of October he was still at work, “I am doing something at the copying of Dr Clague almost every day, but it will still be some little time before I have all finished.” It was to take him longer to copy out the material than he expected, as his letter from 7 December showed, “I hope to finish the copying of Dr Clague’s extensive collection of tunes soon. I am putting them in something of a connected order as to the subject of the songs—putting the sea-songs near one another &c.” His copying was seemingly finished by the end of the month as Morrison sent it on to John Curwen, the music publisher: “Herewith I enclose the late Dr Clague’s Collection of Manx Folk Airs. Will you kindly let me know whethir [sic] you would feel inclined to publish the MSS.” The reply from Curwen does not survive. There is no hint in Kewley’s correspondence that he ever learnt of this approach—in any case, the appearance of the tunes alone in Mannin was hard felt by him:

I have not looked at them in Mannin, and I suppose that I have finished with them now, & to a large extent with the M. L. S. too. I am a passive member only, and I fear that my interest in the Society is only a thing of the past. I cannot say anything about my grievance as Miss M. is gone, and she did splendid work.

Morrison died in 1917, and that threw into question the continued existence of Mannin, the small press magazine founded and edited by herself, and whose financial shortfall towards the end of its run was paid for out of her own pocket. Wood offered to take over its running, whereupon Kewley hearing of his approach wrote in reply:

I am very sorry indeed to hear of the rebuff you received in connection with your offer to run the M.L.S. magazine, but this is only in keeping with many other things. The Morrisons are only maintaining the family reputation, and I do not desire to have anything to do with or their magazine.

Evidently, Morrison’s actions still rankled with him and the whole Morrison family were thereby damned in his eyes.

Kewley, as seen, thought that Morrison’s actions were underhand (to say the least) but a letter sent to W.H. Gill in October 1913, gives something of her view on the matter:

When the Archdeacon gave me the MSS. he said that it was the late Mrs Clague’s wish that the Collection, if ever published, should be as Dr Clague left it—just the melody as jotted down in the cottage from the old Manx body who sang it to the doctor—he gives the name of each person who gave him a melody—we should also give the name just as Dr Clague does.

Being generous, one could say that she took Kewley’s words as carte blanche to do with she would with the Clague Collection—on the hand, she can be seen as being underhand in her actions with Kewley and more than dubious in claiming that he had gifted the tune books to the Manx Language Society and further so in seeking to publish them with Curwen without discussion even within the Society itself.

However, what she did needs to be seen in a wider context and then her actions can be better understood. In 1903, she wrote to Karl Roeder:

Mr Kermode has behaved very badly about your MS. I cannot understand how any person can be so culpably negligent with papers not his own. I am disappointed. I hoped some day to have read it, for I know its value from the thorough conciseness [sic] of your writings[SM1] .

She went on to recount an experience of her own: Edmund Goodwin had written up material on Manx phonology (presumably as a guide to learners of the language) and “I gave the MS. to the Manx Language Society for publication. Our Peel Class guaranteed its cost[SM2] . A literary committee was formed to discuss its merits[SM3] .” No progress was ever reported and William Quayle, the Secretary of the mls, was unresponsive towards her demand that the manuscript be returned after a year’s deliberation. The upshot was one of action, though on Morrison’s own part:

Then when I went to Lonan to take it from Quayle, he coolly told me that the MS. had been sent into him by the Committee 6 months before, but that he thought it must be either lost or destroyed for he could not find the papers. I was “mad.” Occasions like these makes me feel inclined to “use language.” The MS. has never been returned. Mr Goodwin kept no copy, so it is irrevocably lost.

“My papers are so ‘mixed’ & scattered that my sort[in]g of them is almost hopeless.” So wrote W.H. Gill to her in an undated letter. Later he was to seek to organise them and moreover to have them safeguarded after his death. And it was to be Morrison to whom he would look:

Thank you too for the honour you do me in asking me in the event of my surviving you—which I must remind you is only a possible, not by any means a certain contingency—to look after your Manx Music & papers. I doubt my power to undertake. Before I can answer definitely yes or no you must tell me exactly what you would wish me to do so.

This letter dates from 1911; that same year would see Karl Roeder dying, Morrison’s mentor and amongst whose personal papers lay material collected by herself that she had sent to him for reading and copying. Roeder also had other material in his possession as she was to find out when calling upon his sister in Manchester as she recounted to J.J. Kneen: “By the way, I have called on Miss Roeder & she has given me a fat packet of Manx scraps—Faragher’s of Cregneish letters to her brother, also four of F. Note Books, & letters from Hudson (weaver) Surby—letters of yours—two—& many others.” This is the background to the copying of the Clague tune books: a concern over the very survival of such singular and vital material—best then copied for safety, and furthermore published for all to share.

In the end, some nineteen tunes from the Clague Collection were published in Mannin, serialised in six issues. Morrison’s death in 1917, saw the closure of the magazine and the ending thereby of publication from the tune books. But this was not to be the end of the story. “I shall love to avail myself of your delightful offer to lend me Dr Clague’s MS. collection. It is most kind, and I will take every care of the books while in possession [interlined of them.].” This was written by A.G. Gilchrist in 1916, and she would go on edit a substantial portion of the tune books for the Journal of the Folk-Song Society between 1924–26. It was due, of course, to Morrison that she had access to the Clague Collection in the first place. Kewley was involved in this editing venture; if Morrison still rankled with him presumably the chance to see Clague acknowledged in print in such a prestigious publication overcame any qualms he may have had in dealing with her proxy in the shape of Gilchrist.

The editing of the Clague material by Gilchrist was to lead to the recovery of more material relating to folk song from amongst the personal papers of Clague. “Since Part i appeared in Journal No. 28, a fortunate chance has led to the discovery of more Clague mss.” In other words, Kewley had dug into the papers he had been passed in 1911, and brought up this material. She elaborated further in detail:

At the time when Journal No. 28 (Part I of this collection) was printed, it was believed that the words belonging to most of the tunes noted by Dr Clague were unhappily lost for ever. But last spring (1925), by a most fortunate accident Archdeacon Kewley discovered an old exercise-book, formerly in Dr Clague’s possession, which had been used in preparing the catalogue of an Industrial and Art Loan Exhibition in Castletown, a number of pencilled fragments in Dr Clague’s handwriting. These proved to be a the first verses and other fragments of most the songs whose tunes the doctor had recorded separately in the mss. from which the selections in Part I were drawn.*”

The footnote added further that:

* Besides having the use of the fragments preserved in this note-book, I have still more recently had the opportunity of going through a batch of very rough early copies, in pencil, of many of the tunes; some of which are accompanied by the first verse, refrain, or other scrap of the text, in some cases by a title alternative to that given to the tune in the Clague mss. This has made it possible to eke out further the identification derived from the note-book.—a.g.g.”

Where is this material now? Lost is the simple answer and but for Gilchrist publishing it there would now be no trace. Kewley died in 1941, and there is nothing known after this date of the whereabouts (or fate for that matter) of Clague’s personal papers and library. By that date, the Clague tune books had passed to Quayle and (fortunately) on to the Manx Museum Library in 1935. It is still not clear why Quayle deposited them in the end, more than two decades after they had been somehow promised to him by Kewley for his own use and seemingly nothing done by him with them.

But what then of Edmund Goodwin’s copy of the Clague tune books? At first, this seems straightforward, the Manx National Heritage Library possessing four sets of photocopies seemingly corresponding to each of the four Clague tune books. This is not so—they are, in fact, partial transcripts and so the issue is raised as to the whereabouts now of the full copy made by Goodwin. As Gilchrist wrote in 1924:

The Clague Collection, as I have received it, consists of 315 tunes and variants. […] In 1913 the publication of selections from the tunes still unprinted was begun in Mannin, the half-yearly journal of the Manx Language Society, and in 1916 the editor, Miss Sophia Morrison, with whom I had been corresponding on the subject of Manx music and folklore, asked me to assist her in the [xiii] further selection of the most characteristic and valuable airs, lending me a copy of the manuscript for the purpose.

We know from examining the Clague tune books at MNHL, MS 448/1–3 A and MS 449 B that this count is correct showing that she indeed had access to a complete copy of the collection; incidentally, it also shows Gilchrist’s editorial fidelity, “[t]he Clague Collection, as I have received it […]” (emphasis here), showing an awareness of the possibility that further material was potentially to hand, as indeed she was to find out was the case.

Goodwin’s complete copy of the Clague tune books is now lost—hopefully, one could write misplaced—but what does its copying tell us? Firstly, from Kewley’s reaction, that those involved in the Pan Celtic movement in the Island were not a harmonious group of individuals, egos becoming involved in the relationships between each of them. That this should be so should not be really surprising to us—whilst they can be seen to share the same goal, namely the recording of a passing Manx vernacular culture, that alone did not make them personable to each other. Secondly, what of Morrison’s copying (or, rather, one organised by her) of the Clague tune books, the theme of the piece here? Due to her efforts, a copy was passed to Gilchrist, who was then sufficiently motivated to edit the Clague Collection over a remarkable three numbers of the Journal of the Folk-Song Society, giving a visibility to both Clague and Manx vernacular song culture never enjoyed before or since and one outside of the Island itself. The editorial process itself drew out more manuscripts from amongst Clague’s personal papers, material now lost.

One must wonder what would have happened if Quayle had not deposited the Clague tune books as he did in 1935. Without the full Goodwin transcript, now missing, we would have had to rely solely on the Gilchrist edition of the material, augmented as seen by extra material produced by Kewley, and now lost. Whilst Goodwin’s work is not locatable at present, we must acknowledge the effort of Sophia Morrison and Josephine Kermode in gaining access to the Clague tune books and having a copy made of them. Did the appearance of the Gilchrist edition of the Clague Collection later led to the deposit of the original manuscripts themselves? This is unclear as there is over a decade to deal with between their appearance in print and the handing over of the originals and so any connection at present does seems weak.

“There is no copyright of National Music […],” wrote Clague in 1907. He was here referring to Boosey’s demands for royalty payments if test pieces for the Manx Guild were taken from Manx National Songs (1896) or Manx National Music (1898). This notion of the ownership of the material of vernacular culture was ironically echoed by Kewley’s letter from 1917 with regard to Clague’s own collection: “[t]he tunes were my absolute property […].” Not so, according to Morrison; the tunes belonged to all and, moreover, she would use Mannin to that end, to publish Clague’s own collecting for those who were interested.

Morrison’s copying of the Clague tune books was in the end neither underhand nor duplicitous—it can (and should) be seen as a perfectly necessary act, a safeguarding of the record of Manx vernacular culture as against the loss that she had already witnessed of other papers and manuscripts. And as regards her announcement that Kewley had handed over the tune books to the Manx Language Society, one cannot but admire her, in the forcing of his hand over the issue against his will. That she was mischievous is undeniable—and that adds to her strength of character. Whilst the Pan Celtic movement opened up a space for females such as Morrison to participate in, the boundary of gender still remained; one, however, that she was more than willing to disregard, as Kewley found out to his cost, she being neither decorous nor feminine as expected of the time. At the end of the day, Kewley did nothing to safeguard those papers that he received from Dr John Clague; Morrison, however, did so. And therein lies the difference between the pair.

 

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