Cyril Tawney's Birthday

Cyril Tawney was born on October 12, 1930, in Gosport, Hampshire, into a Royal Navy family. He joined the navy himself in 1946 and served thirteen years, three and a half of them in submarines. In the early 1950s he heard traditional singers from the British countryside on the BBC’s folk song program As I Roved Out and was hooked for life. On Christmas Day 1957, while still a serving sailor, he sang on a BBC broadcast put together by the American collector Alan Lomax. In 1959 he bought his way out of the navy to sing for a living.

The last song he wrote before leaving was The Grey Funnel Line. Sailors called the Royal Navy the Grey Funnel Line, as if it were just another shipping company, and the song is about a sailor leaving home once more. The hardest time, he sings, “is to watch the sun as it dies away.” Tawney wrote that the refrain, “It’s one more day on the Grey Funnel Line,” came from a shanty chorus, “Rock and roll me over for one more day.” His Chicken on a Raft, a sailor’s grumble about fried egg on toast and the officers above him, is packed with navy slang.

Tawney settled in Plymouth and became known as the father of the West Country folk revival, collecting songs from traditional singers between tours. In 1965 he opened the West of England Folk Centre at Devonport, but running it on top of his touring led to a breakdown in his health, and it soon closed. From 1958 he also collected the navy’s own songs, and in 1987 he published them as Grey Funnel Lines, a book of the songs and verse sailors made up in the Royal Navy between 1900 and 1970. He died in 2005.