Twelve Days of Winter #7. Simon and Garfunkel: Silent Night/Seven O’clock News
Twelve Days of Winter #5. Steeleye Span: Gaudete

Twelve Days of Winter #6. Nic Jones: Little Pot Stove

Andrew Curry writes: If it was cold when we visited Alan Hull’s Northumberland a few days ago, it is freezing today, on the South Atlantic whaling fleet in harbour over the winter in South Leith, South Georgia.

We laboured seven days a week, with cauld hands and frozen feet,
Bitter days and lonely nights, making grog and having fights,
Salt fish and whale meat sausage, fresh penguin eggs a treat,
And we trudged along to work each day, through icy winds and sleet.

The Little Pot Stove was recorded by Nic Jones on Penguin Eggs, released by Topic in 1980. The song gives the record its title. It was written by the Scots singer Harry Robertson, whose record Whale Chasing Men is a gallery of songs written from life about the South Atlantic whalers. Robertson also wrote The Humpbacked Whale, which Nic Jones also included on Penguin Eggs. Several of the songs on Nic Jones’s LP feature men who work in tough conditions at the margins of society.

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The song is about the engineers who stayed with the whaling fleet over the winter to repair them for the next season. The weather was so cold that the tools could freeze to the skin. They would take the ‘little pot stove’ with them so it was warm enough to work.

Penguin Eggs has a decent claim to being the best English folk record of the second half of the 20th century. It’s certainly the best from the folk revival.

Jones has a fine singing voice, espcially for this material. and he is steeped in the songs. His guitar style is influenced by Martin Carthy, with a strong bass thump that drives the rhythm along.

The selection of material—some traditional, some written—is of a piece. It also feels perfectly sequenced. It won accolades at the time and later.

It was also his last studio album. Two years later, in 1982, coming home from a gig, he crashed into a brick lorry and was very seriously injured. He recovered, partially, but not well enough to play guitar again.

He did come back to performing, in a low key way, in the early 2010s. I saw one of those performances, in 2012 at Cecil Sharp House.

It was only when I got there that I realised that he was also to be presented with the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s Gold Badge for his contribution to folk music.

Jim Moray played a short set—clearly moved to be there—and then Jones played with Belinda O’Hooley and Heidi Tidow (who we’ll be seeing later in this Winter Songs series), and, if I am remembering rightly, his son Joseph on bass. Shirley Collins, then the President of the EFDSS, made a short speech that underlined the influence Jones had had even in his curtailed career. In truth, had he only ever released Penguin Eggs he would have deserved the Medal.

As for the song, Robertson, who died in 1995, knew of what he wrote. He had been one of those engineers. As he recalled on his website,

my guests stamped into my cabin covered with snow from the blizzard that howled outside — it had been howling for a week. None of us gave it much thought — this was wintertime in Leith Harbour, South Georgia, and the Factory Ships and Transports had departed months ago… The squalor of the Whaling Station was buried under many feet of snow and to some extent it hid its ugliness.

 

 

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