2.7 The Lads in Their Hundreds

...Being a look at AE Housman's Shropshire Lad, and some associated music.

A.E. Housman’s 1896 collection, A Shropshire Lad is morbidly fascinating, dealing as it does with the death of young people, usually young lads in the prime of life and generally due to war. Not always though - suicides and hangings were also popular themes. If he were alive today he would probably be writing lyrics for emo artists. W.H. Auden, said of him that “no other poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent”

The humorist poet and writer Hugh Kingsmill wrote a parody poem in Houseman’s style.

What, still alive at twenty-two,
A clean, upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat is hard to slit,
Slit your girl's, and swing for it.

Like enough, you won't be glad,
When they come to hang you, lad:
But bacon's not the only thing
That's cured by hanging from a string.

So, when the spilt ink of the night
Spreads o'er the blotting-pad of light,
Lads whose job is still to do
Shall whet their knives, and think of you

Houseman said that it was “the best I have seen, and indeed, the only good one." He may have revised his opinion slightly if he had read my piece - Is My Team Still Ploughing?

Housman was fond of lads. He was a gay man who carried a torch throughout his life for a chap named Moses Jackson who he had known in his days at Oxford University, but who had subsequently moved to Canada. He wrote a lot of poetry in remembrance of that relationship, and never had another partner, always keeping the door open for the remote possibility of rekindling the flame. In his poem Because I Liked You Better, Housman, true to his morbid form, imagined himself being dead, and Jackson standing over his grave..

Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word

A Shropshire Lad was a smash hit of a poetry collection. After its release it steadily increased in popularity, getting a big boost during the second Boer War, and by the time of World War One it was the chosen book of poetry in every young soldier’s kitbag. Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that Houseman was an academic and expert in Greek and Latin texts, the poems were written with great clarity, making them easy for the general public to read and understand . People appreciated them so much that composers of the day were very keen to set them to music.

The first of these was Arthur Somervell in 1904, who had also created a cycle of songs from a selection of verses from Tennyson’s Maud. Then Ralph Vaughan Williams (of The Lark Ascending fame) set some pieces to music in 1909. Then there was a chap called Graham Peel who seemed to build a career out of setting Houseman to music, and also an American with the magical name of Charles Fonteyn Manny had a go. But my very favourite Houseman composer is George Butterworth. It’s not particularly that his compositions are better than the Vaughan Williams settings, but the fact that he composed them during World War One, and was himself killed in the battle of the Somme in 1916, gives them some sort of poignancy that just adds to the bittersweet taste of the poetry.

Butterworth was a good friend of Vaughan Williams, and along with Gustav Holst (of the planets suite fame) who, surprisingly for a Gustav was born in Cheltenham, Gloucester, and was known to his friends as Gussie, used to travel around the country talking to old codgers in village pubs and similar¹ collecting folk songs for preservation, and transforming into their own music². There is something really idyllic about what they were doing in those years as Europe slid into a major conflict. They were preserving a slice of life as it was - and would never be the same again.

The poem does the same, and has Housman wistfully watching the young lads at Ludlow Fair. They wouldn’t have taken much notice of him. They were there to drink, chat up the lasses and generally have fun. But he was there, thinking his thoughts, maybe a little lustfully, certainly lugubriously, reflecting on the fact that a great number of them would die young and never be seen in Ludlow again.

The Lads in Their Hundreds

The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair,
There's men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold,
The lads for the girls and the lads for the liquor are there,
And there with the rest are the lads that will never be old.

There's chaps from the town and the field and the till and the cart,
And many to count are the stalwart, and many the brave,
And many the handsome of face and the handsome of heart,
And few that will carry their looks or their truth to the grave.

I wish one could know them, I wish there were tokens to tell
The fortunate fellows that now you can never discern;
And then one could talk with them friendly and wish them farewell
And watch them depart on the way that they will not return.

But now you may stare as you like and there's nothing to scan;
And brushing your elbow unguessed-at and not to be told
They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,
The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

1. Another composer of the period Arthur wood, used a maypole dance in his My Native Heath Suite. It became popular as a tune called Barwick Green. Have a listen. You will know it!

2. I love this picture from the Ladybird History of music, showing a folksong collector, such as Butterworth hearing an honest country fellow singing a little gem as he goes about his labour.

What do you think he is singing? Tell me in the comments.