by Colin Harper
Pronounced ‘Janch’ by Bert and his immediate family and generally ‘Yanch’ by media folk and those familiar with the workings of European languages, it would be hard to imagine more than one family of that name settling in Edinburgh at the turn of the century. One may speculate that even in the Germanic nations it is less than common.1 Nevertheless, in the quiet Liberton area of Edinburgh where Bert’s sister Mary and her husband Bob currently reside there is at least one other Jansch family, personally unknown to Mary, with several others around Scotland and, most curiously, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the North East of England. It would appear that the siblings of Daisy Jansch were not idle in their furtherance of the line. Neither, it is believed, was/is her son.
Herbert Jansch was born out of wedlock in 1911 when Daisy was twenty-two. There is no father listed on the birth certificate and, as was the norm in those days, the child was put up for adoption. ‘As far as I understand it, and I don’t have any proof of this, he was adopted by people called Luff,’ says Mary. ‘He came from a place called Tillycoultry, not far from Stirling. That’s where my mother met him, at a dance. I never met the Luff family and neither did my mum. I don’t know if they came to the wedding – all I know is that my mother met Daisy, his real mother, once. Daisy eventually married a Mr Walter Robb. My mother’s story is that my father looked like this Mr Robb, but I don’t know. This is all just stories.’ Daisy Jansch and Walter Robb were indeed married, in Edinburgh in 1914 ‘according to the forms of the Scottish Episcopal Church’. Another vestige of a story tells of Herbert’s grandparents, Carl/Charles and Jane, being interned during the Great War, but Herbert himself disappeared from view in 1949 and little else of the Jansch family history is known. It is painful for the family, but it is believed that Herbert Jansch may well be living and very possibly in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Margaret Henderson Robertson Winton was born in Leith, a docklands area just outside Edinburgh, in 1912 – the fourth youngest of nine. Her father Thomas was a boxmaker, from a long line of working-class craftsmen who can be traced back as resident in the Edinburgh area to the early years of the 1700s. Margaret Winton and Herbert Jansch were married, aged twenty-two and twenty-three respectively, at a registry office in Edinburgh on New Year’s Eve 1934. Herbert was described as ‘the son of Daisy Jansch, waitress, subsequently married to Walter Robb, waiter’. The address given for both bride and groom was the same: 45 Sandport Street, Leith. A couple of neighbours witnessed the proceedings and within nine months the first of their three children was born.
The recurrence of forenames within Scottish families is well established. By tradition, the eldest son is named after the paternal grandparent, while the eldest daughter and second son are named after the maternal grandparents. Curiously, this is true for the first two but not the last of Margaret Winton and Herbert Jansch’s three children: Charlie (born 1935, after his late grandfather (Carl/Charles/Jansch); Mary (born 1937, after her late grandmother Mary Winton). By the same tradition Bert, born in 1943, should have been Thomas, after his grandfather Thomas Winton. Instead, he was registered as Herbert Jansch, after his father, and known thereafter as Bert.
Bert Jansch was born on 3 November 1943 at a place now known as Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow. At the time the family were living in Glasgow, at 247 Bernard Street. Herbert senior’s occupation is given dually as ‘contractor’s labourer’ and ‘Private (Royal Army Service Corps)’. The Second World War was still in progress. This was a difficult time for the family. Margaret was ill both before and after Bert was born, and neighbours looked after the three children for a period. As for their father, ‘he was mainly a coal miner,’ says Mary, ‘but he did change his job quite a lot’. Three months after Bert was born the family moved into a house owned by Bert’s grandfather in West Pilton, one of the poorest areas of Edinburgh, on the city’s north side. ‘Tenement buildings, six on a stair,’ says Mary. ‘We were on the first floor. Apart from it being a poor area, you really lived a lot differently than you do now.’ With his father’s employment situation at best changeable, Bert’s mum took various cleaning jobs at private houses and at the city’s telephone exchange, and later worked at a litho printer’s.
If money was always a problem for the family, it was not the worst. ‘My dad walked out on us several times,’ says Mary. ‘And when he did leave it was usually in circumstances that were very difficult to get out of financially. It’s commonplace today, but although it was a poor area we were living in it was very family oriented. We had a pretty hard time – we lurched from one financial crisis to another, really. Our mother did her best but she was just an ordinary person. I honestly don’t know why my dad kept walking out but they couldn’t have been compatible.’
The last time Herbert Jansch abandoned his family, never to be seen or heard of again,2 it was 1949. Mary was twelve and Bert five or six. It was major, formative incident in his life and perhaps the root of the ‘angst’ that many would later identify in his early musical work and in his personality. ‘I’ve got a very bad memory for things I don’t want to remember,’ he said later, in his mid-twenties and in the supposed comfort of his relative fame.3 Being a close-knit community and desertion a then rare domestic circumstance, the neighbours rallied round Mrs Jansch and her family. Mary recalls one neighbour, a Mrs Mercer, as being especially good to the family. Years later, in 1967, Bert recalled the same woman vividly in ‘A Child’s Hang Up’ – one of two short poems contained in a generally curious sleevenote he wrote to accompany Roy Harper’s album Come Out Fighting Genghis Smith:
‘Bertie, what have you been doing
up the backstairs?’
‘Nothin’ Maw.’ ‘Ask Mrs.
Mercer fir some sugar.’
Spotless linoleum, shining
and slippery. Roaring fire,
apples and oranges, a long
flowered apron,
white hair. ‘Tell yer
Mum she can give it
back tomorrow.’
As far as can be gleaned, the Jansch family had had no great history in music. Within genealogical documents the closest they come is the marriage of Bert’s great-aunt Charlotte to a Mr Galbraith whose father was intriguingly described as a ‘music seller’. There is, nevertheless, some family lore on the Winton side concerning a substantial, if not professional, involvement with a musical variety theatre in Leith and Mary Jansch, though not Bert, remembers their mum being able to play piano by ear. Within months of Herbert walking out Margaret Jansch invested what little spare money she had in giving her children a taste of music-making. She bought a secondhand piano.
‘This was just a battered old thing with cigarette burns on it,’ says Mary. ‘It must have been one that somebody was throwing out, but she decided we should go for music lessons. Mum didn’t really have the money so in the end we were both sort of giving it up – we only went for about three months. I fell away but the teacher came after Bert, said he showed ability at music and she would come to the house to teach him. But he wouldn’t stay in for her!’
At the time, in concurrence with so many other restless children then and now, gifted or otherwise, Bert was simply bored with the idea of taking lessons in piano. But he was still fascinated with music. He would regularly accompany his older sister, now earning and spending her own money, on record-buying trips to the city centre on Saturdays. For Mary and her friends in the mid-fifties, music was a big social emollient: ‘In my generation we went to the dancing and that was our interest – dancing and buying records. My elder brother liked traditional jazz and country and western. There was a lot of that at the time, Hank Williams and that sort of thing. I mainly bought big band jazz – Ted Heath, Chris Barber, Stan Kenton … So Bert would be listening to all the records we bought. Actually, it wasn’t a record player we had at home, it was an old-fashioned cabinet, my grandmother’s originally, with a handle. It was 78s that we bought, and when we played them you had to run and wind it up before the end of the record!’
Bert was intrigued by the records his sister played. Aside from the British jazz bands ‘she was listening to Frank Sinatra and Johnny Ray, but she was also into Elvis Presley and Little Richard so I kind of picked up on that’.4 Saturday morning picture shows were another part of growing up in those days, recalled many years later with clear affection in ‘The Saturday Movie’5– the rush of imagination from seeing cowboys, indians, pirates and dragons. The new wave of rock’n’roll movies was also coming to the local cinema. Asked once about who or what had set him on the road to folk, Bert offered Presley as the unlikely inspiration: ‘He was folk as well,’ he explained. ‘All his early songs were from the old blues singers. I rejected Bill Haley and stuck to Elvis. Then I left school and started going to folk clubs and it was there that I slowly became aware there was a lot more music than was being pumped out on the radio.’6 Jimmy Shand, the unsmiling king of Scottish strict-tempo accordion bands, made the first record Bert ever bought. It was a present for his mum. Bert was never a record buyer himself – they were unaffordable luxuries. The first record he would own, and the only one ever recalled, was a 45 rpm EP by American blues singer Big Bill Broonzy. It was purely by chance – a school friend had found it in a shop, and something about the name must have appealed to Bert’s imagination. As the discovery occurred during his brief time as an apprentice nurseryman, he had the money to investigate. It would prove to be a most illuminating investment.
Bert’s obsession with the guitar as an object and as a device to make music began at school. The second Genghis Smith poem, ‘The Writing’s On The Wall’, was a recollection of school days – ‘sports day rave ups’, hearts and arrows on the walls, playground fights, the fascination with girls and ‘the morning parade in the open square, where the smokers are weeded out’. In some contrast to the solitary nature he developed in his later teens, Bert was by no means a misfit during the greater part of his formal education. In Mary’s time, secondary schooling in the area was split: girls would go to Flora Stephenson secondary, boys to Ainslie Park; by the time Bert was a pupil, Ainslie Park was mixed. His primary education had been at Pennywell School. Bert was popular with his classmates, played football and had a number of friends he would hang around with outside school hours. He had, in his own words, ‘all the usual childhood friendships and did all the usual childhood things’.7 He was particularly good at woodwork and was considerably more gifted academically than anyone in the family had expected. ‘We didn’t know that Bert was really quite intelligent until he got his last report,’ says Mary, ‘and the headmaster told us he wanted Bert to go further in education. He was actually “dux” of the school – top of the whole school. He got a medal which my mother kept for years.’
‘The first time I actually saw a guitar,’ said Bert, ‘was when my music teacher brought one into the classroom for everyone to have a look. I suppose my interest in the instrument could be traced back to that, because I think it was there and then that I decided I wanted to be a guitarist rather than a pianist. I couldn’t afford to buy a real guitar so I used to try and make them. I’d been trying since I was five years old. I used to get sheets of hardboard, bits of wood, and cut it all out. When I was about twelve or something, really for real, I honestly managed to get one that was reasonably playable. That was from a guitar kit that I’d got for Christmas. At that time skiffle and Lonnie Donegan especially were going full tilt but I didn’t know the first thing about the way to play the guitar, though my six months or so at the piano had given me a rudimentary knowledge of things like keys and scales. I learned to play D on it. The strings were so far off the fretboard it was almost impossible to play – the D was the only chord I could hold down, where the strings were nearer to the frets. I think from then on it was ordained that I should play guitar! It fell apart eventually and I didn’t really play a guitar – a real guitar – till I left school at sixteen.’8
In September 1959 Bert complied with his old headmaster’s advice and went on to Leith Academy. ‘At [Ainslie Park] I had several choices as to what I should do,’ says Bert. ‘One of them was to go to the art college. The art teacher desperately wanted me to go to art college, and I rejected all of it. After that I went to Leith Academy for further education for about three months, but I gave it up. I just couldn’t stand it because it was academic, the emphasis wasn’t enough on the arts. It was purely written stuff, which I just couldn’t handle at all. I remember packing all the books up and saying there you are, thank you and goodbye.’9
In addition to the emphasis of its curriculum, school uniform was compulsory at Leith Academy and Mrs Jansch simply couldn’t afford it. Bert would attend wearing jeans and a blazer, which was not helpful in terms of fitting in with his peers. By the first term of the new year he had left. ‘That,’ says Mary, ‘was when my elder brother got him a job in market gardening.’ Mary had already left home for a job in the civil service in 1953. Her elder brother Charlie’s comings and goings were more complex. Before his statutory period of national service in the early fifties, Charlie had worked in a market garden in Edinburgh’s Comely Bank area, near Queensferry Road. There had been the suggestion of a partnership with the owner or some other enhancement of his position in the business upon his return, but this failed to materialise. Charlie got married, left the gardening and signed up again with the Royal Air Force. But not before introducing the prospect of life as a market gardener to his younger brother.
The family had never had a garden of their own but one green-fingered relative, Bert’s Uncle Adam (on his mother’s side), lived with them. ‘Dear old Uncle Adam’ made quite an impression, turning up much later on as the subject of world-weary envy in a song, ‘When I Get Home’. Never marrying, never owning a home, working hard, getting drunk – Uncle Adam personified a life of honest toil, no responsibilities whatsoever and every weekend an escape route to oblivion.10 ‘Uncle Adam had an allotment,’ says Mary, ‘like a lot of people during the war, down near the railway in the area we lived in. There was a lot of hardship for everybody, with rationing and so on, and he supplied us all with fresh vegetables – the whole stair. Maybe that’s where Bert got his original interest in gardening.’ It may have had an effect, but certainly, from the age of five until he left school at sixteen, Bert spent a great deal of time visiting his brother at the nursery. On Charlie’s recommendation, his little brother was taken on as an apprentice nurseryman, ‘earning three quid a week or whatever’,11 and although his employment there may have been as little as three months, certainly no more than eight, it was a profound time. ‘My first period of real isolation,’ he recalled. ‘I was completely cut off from the world there – just me and five thousand plants.’12
With his new-found wealth Bert bought himself a guitar on hire purchase. His boss, a man whose name is no longer recalled, signed the agreement as guarantor. Not knowing the first thing about the variety of instruments available or the suitability of the different models to particular styles of music, Bert bought a Hofner cello guitar: a bulky jazz model. In the early weeks of 1960, insofar as can be determined, Bert and one of his pals from school, Harry Steele, discovered a strange and exotic establishment up some winding stone steps, a few feet above the steady incline of the street on the city’s ‘Royal Mile’. It was something called the Howff – a folk club, whatever that was – and most importantly it offered guitar lessons. Bert wanted to sound just like Big Bill Broonzy, the guy on his EP who sounded a million miles away from his sister’s jazz bands, from Elvis Presley, Lonnie Donegan and all those other people on the radio. He would have doubtless been astounded to have known that over the previous few years Big Bill had played concerts in Edinburgh and had maybe once stood on that very spot. It may well have happened in the recent past, but it wasn’t going to happen again. Bill Broonzy was six months dead.
2
London: The First Days
Born in the 1890s in Mississippi, Bill Broonzy had an extraordinarily rich life and in the process, through the rare arti
culacy of his music, became a bridge between numerous styles and traditions – and not only in America. It has been said that Broonzy’s music ‘exemplifies the movement made by the blues from locally made folk music to nationally distributed, mass media entertainment’.1 Even within the black blues context in America he is widely credited with combining a flavour of the Mississippi Delta blues with the more sophisticated urban sounds of Chicago, where he later made his home. Working first as a field hand then as a preacher and then serving as a soldier in the Great War, Broonzy took up the guitar relatively late in life, in his twenties, learning from one Papa Charlie Jackson in Chicago. In what may fancifully be deemed a correlation with Bert’s life, he had already made himself a violin as a kid. Accomplished as a songwriter, vocalist and instrumentalist, he was a mainstay of the ‘race’ record industry right up to its enforced sabbatical during the Second World War. Famously, he replaced the then recently deceased Robert Johnson on John Hammond’s now legendary ‘From Spirituals to Swing’ revue in 1938 at the Carnegie Hall, where he doubtless played up to his onstage introduction as ‘a sharecropper from Arkansas’. While the evolution of British rock in the sixties – the Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin et al. – paid homage to the dark myth of Robert Johnson as its spiritual source, the folk movement seemed content to preserve and aspire to the folksy accessibility of Big Bill Broonzy’s brand of blues.
The folksiness that British audiences saw and loved was something of an affectation, but a harmless one. Broonzy’s style and material adapted regularly to changes in black tastes and, after the war, to the white audiences drawn in from jazz and the gathering folksong revival. In essence ‘his immense talent was always at the service of his audience and their expectations’.2 In 1951, as one of the earliest ambassadors for the blues, Broonzy embarked on a trip to Europe and it was in Germany that he ran into Bert Wilcox, a British jazz promoter who brought him to a Methodist Hall in London to perform ‘a recital of blues, folksongs and ballads’. From blues scholar Paul Oliver’s own recollection, about forty people turned up. That same year Broonzy’s recordings also made their debut in Britain, when Vogue issued no fewer than six 78s, including his civil rights anthem ‘Black, Brown and White’. Between 1955 and the mid-sixties Vogue, Pye, Columbia, Mercury and other labels serviced Broonzy’s rapidly expanding UK market with fourteen EPs and several albums. Few of those who made their names in the British folk/blues boom of that decade had ever seen Big Bill in concert, but he cast one hell of a long shadow. Everyone, not least Bert Jansch, had heard his records.