by Colin Harper
MacColl’s new venture, in Soho Square, was grandly proclaimed but he was a leader of men, not an organiser of events. The launch had been left in the hands of Eric Winter, who failed to turn up on the night. Bruce Dunnet, a MacColl disciple from the Ballads & Blues days, was in a pub around the corner with Paul Carter, who ran the Collector label, ‘and Ewan came in absolutely bloody furious and fuming because, he said, “We’ve got hundreds of bloody folk singers and no organisers.” And Paul Carter says, “Well, here’s Bruce. He’s the best organiser of the lot.” Ewan said, “Will you help us?” I said, “Yeah.” They didn’t know what to call their new club, so I said, “It belongs to the singers – call it the Singers Club.”’ They did just that.
Focused around the ‘godfathers’ – MacColl and Seeger, Dominic Behan and Bert Lloyd – the Singers Club, initially operating only on Sundays, soon relocated from the ACTT building in Soho Square to the Plough in nearby Museum Street. It would move its premises on a more or less yearly basis thereafter: a particularly celebrated era at the Pindar of Wakefield from October 1962, open on both Saturday and Sunday; a financially fraught period at the Prince of Wales’ Feathers from September 1963 (with an additional Wednesday night Singers Club operating from March ’63 at the King’s Head, Twickenham); a Saturdays-only relaunch at the Royal Hotel, Woburn Place, February 1964; a switch back to Sundays at the New Merlin’s Cave, Margery Street, in January 1965; and a conscious move back into Soho, where a new breed of more liberated all-nighter folk clubs were by then thriving, in April 1966 at the John Snow in Broadwick Street. The venue may have changed with alarming regularity, but the Singers Club as a ‘brand’ became established across the land as the spiritual heart of the folk revival and its ever-expanding club scene.
In January 1961 Eric Winter had been able to revel in the breakthrough of a folksong event in London every night of the week – albeit only for one particular week filled out with a couple of special events at Cecil Sharp House, home of the English Folk Dance & Song Society (EFDSS). On a more regular basis, London’s key venues at the start of the year were the ‘Blues & Barrelhouse’ at the Roundhouse on Thursdays; late night sessions of ‘jazz, folk, blues and poetry’ at the Partisan over the weekend with residents Martin Winsor and Redd Sullivan; the ACTT building in Soho Square with Malcolm Nixon’s ‘Ballads & Blues’ on a Saturday (all of the above being in Soho); and Tuesday sessions with Martin Carthy’s new outfit the Thameside Four at the Troubadour in Earl’s Court.
The (Skiffle) Cellar in Greek Street had recently closed down, but the Partisan continued that venue’s tradition of two Saturday night sessions, one running well into the early hours. The Gyre & Gimble coffee bar began a new club on Sunday afternoons in April. The Singers Club opened in June. Folk nights at the Witches Cauldron in Hampstead and the Red Lion in Sutton announced their existence in September. By the end of the year there really was somewhere to go every night of the week, and a healthy choice come the weekend. And if Soho was the hub of all this activity, the suburbs were not far behind: from Streatham to Potters Bar, and Bromley to Richmond, venues were springing up in rapid succession.35 There was nothing if not variety, and the spirit of adventure was abroad.
‘Looking for and not finding a hall to hold 2000,’ wrote Eric Winter in October 1961, ‘Bruce Dunnet of the Singers Club took a deep breath and booked the Albert Hall for Pete Seeger.’ The hall’s capacity was 5000 and, bar the annual festival of the EFDSS – an occasion Martin Carthy recalls as ‘just a pageant of country dancers in felt skirts and boring, boring shite basically’ – had never been used for anything like a folk concert before. Co-sponsored and assisted by pretty much all the key club organisers of the day in the Greater London area together with stalwarts of the hard left Topic Records and Collet’s Bookshops, the Seeger concert of November 16 1961 was the first great gathering of the folk movement. The hall was packed and the atmosphere electric.
‘That was the first concert I ever did,’ says Dunnet, who still displays a mixture of shock and pride on the matter. ‘There was nothing of that size before it. The largest folk concerts had been St Pancras Town Hall [now Camden Town Hall], which seats 960 and it was very seldom full. But it was politics: Pete Seeger needed his passport back. I signed his work permit for the Royal Albert Hall. How we did it I don’t know. It was the folksong people, the Communist Party, Labour Party, wood-craft folk from the cooperative movement – every bloody organisation you could think of.’
‘It was a huge moment,’ says Martin Carthy, ‘because there had been this campaign to get Pete Seeger over to England. McCarthy was dead by that time but the House Un-American Activities Committee still lived on and they’d taken his passport away. This campaign had managed to get his passport back.’36
Prior to his Albert Hall triumph Seeger had been up and down the country, appearing in concert in Edinburgh on 1 November and later that same evening at the Howff. Around the country by this stage, though not yet mushrooming as fast as in London, there was a surge in folk club activity. Eric Winter, in a uniquely central position at the Melody Maker, had made it his business to gather information from the reaches. In May he could reveal the existence of ‘a surprising number of folk clubs’: nearly forty. By September he had noted forty-seven. By December it was seventy. Four months later it was eighty-one. Winter’s figures may not have been comprehensive but they illustrate clearly the gathering speed of the revival’s spread. Its breadth is revealed in what was happening in Scotland and the north of England.
Outside of London, a club run in Liverpool by the Liverpool Spinners – later achieving national fame at the light entertainment end of the folk spectrum as the Spinners – was widely regarded as the benchmark by those performers who were travelling.37 The club had begun in autumn 1958, and the group’s move away from skiffle to Liverpool folk songs, sea shanties and the like was taken on advice from London performer Redd Sullivan who thought they sounded like a bunch of schoolteachers singing blues. A handful of other provincial clubs had similarly emerged through and survived the skiffle craze while others could claim a lineage back to the first trad jazz boom of the early fifties. A latter-day folk club called the Wayfarers is believed to have originated in Manchester around 1953, and the Topic in Bradford around 1956. The first inklings of a circuit came in the wake of the Watersons’ club in Hull, itself one of the very earliest in Britain: ‘We started it off in a dance hall in 1958,’ says Norma Waterson, ‘with mirrors on the wall – the Baker Street School of Dancing. It was us and about sixty of our friends, and the woman who ran the dancing school used to make us sandwiches with biscuits and tea at the interval. We stayed there for about a year, and then the male members of the audience started to want drink. So from 1959 through to 1961 we moved between about five different pubs, finally finishing up at the Bluebell and that was “Folk Union One”.’ The Watersons themselves were alone among the early groups of the revival in eschewing the ‘American model’ of the Weavers and creating a largely a cappella, harmony-based approach to English traditional song. Their club lasted well into the 1990s, long after the reins had been passed to a committee.
Nearest to Folk Union One in the beginning was the Topic in Bradford; a little further north was the Newcastle Ballads & Blues, partly run by singer Louis Killen and strongly associated with the union movement. Immediately south, there was nothing at all until a club was opened in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, directly inspired by Folk Union One. By 1961 if not earlier there were contacts and occasional exchange visits between the North-Eastern English clubs and the Glasgow Folksong Club. Outside of any union influence, the Howff was not a part of this camaraderie. But its own influence was spreading and it was part of an increasingly thriving independent scene north of the border.
Inspired by what he saw at the Howff in Edinburgh, John Watt opened the Dunfermline Howff in October 1961. Roy Guest was, of course, among his opening acts. Further new clubs opened that same year in Aberdeen, in Bo’ness, in Perth, and in St Andrews on th
e coast of Fife.38 Two other clubs, at Dundee and Kirkaldy, opened the following year and folk concerts in schools became regular occurrences in the region. Both Archie Fisher and Josh MacRae would come to enjoy a lucrative side-line as part-time teachers of guitar for Fife’s education board.
The pinnacle of the Howff’s existence was the Edinburgh Festival of August 1961. Literally by the eve of the city’s three-week festivities the place had been renovated, redecorated and improved beyond recognition. Eric Winter, the man from the Melody Maker, was still tripping over paint pots and cables on the opening night. ‘The Howff walls have been stripped,’ he reported, ‘almost by the bare hands of Roy Guest and Jim Haynes with a few friends, to reveal some dignified, ancient stonework.’
Most of the work had been done by Roy’s ‘friends’, the most industrious among them being Bert Jansch. Thirty years later Bert re-entered the old Howff to film sequences for the BBC documentary Acoustic Routes. The premises were in the process of being revamped once again, this time to be used as a council office, and the dignified stonework was shortly to be covered with chipboard. Up the few steps from the street there was a sturdy wooden door leading into the first of the two main rooms nearest to street level. ‘I made that door,’ said Bert, as if reminding himself out loud. ‘Really? Well you can take it with you if you like,’ retorted a bemused workman, not quite understanding the resonance of what was going on. Bert was good with his hands.
‘One room has been timbered to make an attractive coffee bar of the chicken salad and Danish pastry school,’ continued Winter. ‘Upstairs there will be books, tapes and discs, to form a king-size folk reference library with room to browse, talk, listen and sing.’ ‘We shall choose artists in or out of or on the borders of the folk field who have warmth and humanity to offer,’ Guest told me. ‘And we shall present them in the atmosphere and environment that suits them best.”
Around June 1961 Roy had gone into partnership with Jim Haynes, a former USAF serviceman who had been stationed near Edinburgh and who had returned to open up The Paper Back, Britain’s first paperback bookshop. With Haynes’s money he could at last buy out the Sporran Slitters. The place had thereafter been transformed, to bring its physical character in line with that provided on a more atmospheric level by its clientele. ‘You could go there in the early hours of the morning and there’d be somebody making soup you could stand your spoon up in,’ says Owen Hand. ‘In the afternoon you’d get all sorts of people dropping in. There were magazines and newspapers lying on the tables, you could play chess or draughts. It was a hippy club, open every day. Quite an establishment for Edinburgh at that point.’
The thrill of the new was not without its drawbacks: ‘I was competing in the National Mod in 1961,’ says Dolina, ‘and I remember this headline in one of the papers saying “Dolina MacLennan, tipped winner of this year’s gold medal, has been practising by singing Gallic songs in an Edinburgh beatnik club”. I had a foot in both camps I suppose, but that was me stamped for life, a reputation absolutely gone!’
A published memoir by another Howffer, one Jeremy Bruce-Watt, paints an attractive picture of the venue’s heyday: ‘You were liable to meet anyone there. The membership of over two hundred ranged from a distinguished advocate to some very young persons ready to assail any of the world’s most pressing problems for hours on end. Every Friday and Saturday for two years – and often other nights as well – a variety of colourful entertainers stood with their backs to the fireplace, facing the packed wooden benches and the massed flickering of candles stuck in bottles. The big room was lit, never brilliantly, by a row of narrow windows in the thick walls. You could go there after breakfast, dressed anyhow, and have a string of coffees, leaning in the window recess, watching the traffic and the people on the Mile, listening to St Giles’ counting the hours, looking at the walls and beams trimmed with the adze. You could talk or listen to talk. You could play chess. Somebody always seemed to be tuning a guitar.’39
One could hazard a guess as to who that individual may have been. Bert’s own memories of the Howff lack detail but he was very young, naturally withdrawn and happier to be a foot soldier than a general. Only much later, in the light of his success down in London, did anyone piece together mental notes of anecdotes or observations concerning this most shadowy of characters who had seemed, nevertheless, to always be around. ‘He was very, very quiet,’ says Dolina, ‘and he hasn’t changed at all. Very much his own person. I don’t remember any angst, just quietness. I wasn’t aware of Bert’s importance for a long time. Bert an icon! I can see it, but I still have to chuckle because he’s just “Bert” to me – and I still want to break his guitar over his head!’
He may not have been at the epicentre of its activities, but the whole Howff experience – Roy Guest particularly – would leave a strong impression on him. ‘He was a very, very funny character,’ says Bert. ‘His primary role was an actor and, being Welsh as well, he used to act the folk singer rather than be the folk singer. A bit like Ewan MacColl. He had us renovate the place with a view to having it open for the Festival and then he booked all these amazing acts that had never been anywhere near Edinburgh. For some of them I’d be standing in the background, too in awe of them – like most people in the place. I saw Pete Seeger there, and Sonny & Brownie. With Rosetta Tharpe, I was there that night but it was too packed to get in.’
Stranger still than any of these legends of folk, blues and gospel was the week-long residency of Viennese cabaret diva Martha Schlamme: by all accounts the runaway hit of the whole ’61 Festival, and appearing exclusively at the Howff. Hamish Imlach was wont to recall that Schlamme ‘could sing in ten languages – badly’. Eric Winter reckoned it was ‘tastefully and entertainingly in sixteen’. A rave notice in the Observer diplomatically described the singer as appearing at ‘a room off the High Street, against a dusty curtain of blue velvet’ while ‘disappointed crowds hang at the door and listen at the window. Her audiences – already fanatical recidivists who struggle back to hear her night after night – feel that their festival will taste like ashes without her.’ The writer marvelled that Schlamme was appearing all week ‘for fun and not for money’. But as Hamish recalled: ‘She was asking £1000 a night. There was all this publicity at the time of Roy getting her for expenses – but there was a suite at the North British Hotel, a hired Rolls, meals at the Festival Club, a fur coat …’40
‘I remember collecting her from the airport,’ says Len. ‘There were no Rolls Royces involved. The Howff was anything but quaint yet this woman, who I take my hat off to for sheer professionalism, didn’t bat an eyelid. Every night she did these shows and I believe Roy had conned her into coming for half the take. As it turned out, because of the amazing write-ups the place was crammed and the take was better than any time before or after. But it shoved out the regular audience. There were people standing down below in the street looking very pissed-off. Suddenly all Roy was interested in was the profit. He was willing to quite literally ignore those who had put him where he was. I think that was the beginning of the end. I don’t think Martha Schlamme bankrupted him, I think he screwed himself out of it.’41
Moral high ground notwithstanding, with a unique venue, a brilliant publicity angle and a week of late-night shows to offer Roy had succeeded in creating a buzz around Edinburgh that would strongly influence the programming of folk music at the Festival and on the Fringe in years to come. ‘She has set the Royal Mile afire,’ wrote Winter, ‘and the critics are talking about an official invitation to next year’s Festival. Festival director Lord Harewood has said he will look in at the Howff before Martha winds up on Friday.’ With all this attention, someone had noticed that the place lacked the statutory requirements of two toilets and two exits: once the Schlamme triumph had come to an end, an order of closure was served. As the story goes, an eminent QC among the Howff’s clientele drifted in that night, in his bowler hat and pin-striped suit, to find a sea of glum faces. He heard the tale of woe, disappeared fo
r a while and returned with the news that nothing more would be heard of the matter. Friends in high places. ‘You couldn’t say that people were folkies at the Howff,’ says Len, ‘because they came from so many walks of life and social backgrounds and were of a tremendous age range. And that, I think, is what made the Howff so different. Things were never the same after it. We were spoiled.’
For the second week of the Festival Guest had booked Dominic Behan, with two paragons of Scottish traditional song, ‘source singers’ Jimmy MacBeath and Jeannie Robertson, appearing subsequently, on three nights each, over the first two weekends in September. MacBeath, an old street singer from the north-east, was a 1951 ‘discovery’ of Hamish Henderson’s. He had been the very first guest at the Glasgow Folksong Club – astonished and delighted to have been paid a fee of £8. Jeannie Robertson, an Aberdeen housewife, was another find of the early fifties. Other specific dates remain lost in the mists, but both artists were frequent visitors to the club and would exert an enormous influence on the Scottish folk scene.
Dolina MacLennan & Robin Gray were now billed as the Howff’s resident singers on Sundays, in addition to their ongoing performances at the Waverley Bar and the Nippon, a Chinese café run by students in aid of charity. Other venues were opening up to folk song in Edinburgh. A pub called the White Horse had started a weekly folk night. The following year, Archie Fisher would be fronting a popular Tuesday night club at the Crown. Folk music in Edinburgh was now quite a scene: ‘We had such a busy life,’ says Maggie Cruickshank. ‘There was a continual round of socialising. It was hectic but it was also very relaxed – you wafted in and out of things and wove in and around each other. I don’t think many people had phones in those days so it’s amazing how anybody found out what was happening! It was a network. You saw people like Archie and Hamish and Josh MacRae as being high up in the hierarchy and us down below. But we didn’t stay there for long – everybody was so encouraging to each other.’ ‘The thing was,’ says Dolina, ‘in those days if anybody got a gig you got as many of your friends in on it as possible to share. So if you got three quid for an evening you’d bring somebody else along and get thirty bob each.’