4 March: Boreham on Charles Dibdin

A Singer of the Sea
No class of poetry has made a deeper or a wider appeal than the poetry of the sea, and, in a really extraordinary way, the sea invariably has rewarded with an ample renown those who have become her laureates and chroniclers. Charles Dibdin, whose baptismal anniversary this is, is a case in point. Katisha, the unalluring heroine of "The Mikado," sings somewhat dubiously of the beauty that some men discover in the bellow of the blast and of the grandeur that others detect in the growling of the gale. But, of all those who have attempted to set that beauty to music, and to render that grandeur articulate, nobody has ever caught more happily than Dibdin the wayward spirit of the restless ocean, and nobody has interpreted it in popular melody more felicitously.

His character and his career were alike exceptional. Born in 1745, the year of the Jacobite rising, he was the 18th child of his parents. His childhood was divided between Southampton and Winchester. Southampton was nautical and Winchester the musical element in him, for at Southampton he learned the ways of sailors and at Winchester he fell under the influence of the organist of the cathedral. Making his way up to London at the age of 15, he wrote an operetta, "The Shepherd's Artifice," of which both words and music were entirely his own. His composition was successfully produced at Covent Garden the following year. At the age of 16, therefore, he burst upon the English stage with meteoric suddenness and brilliance; he invented a form of public entertainment peculiar to himself; he sang his own songs and acted the parts that he had himself created; and he set the whole nation singing the lilting jingles and rollicking choruses so essentially his own.

Singer Of Nation's Songs Shapes Nation's Soul
At Coventry in England, tourists make pilgrimage to the grave of the author of "It's a Long Way to Tipperary." And, on a marble stone above the green mound, one may read the inscription: "Give me the making of the songs of a nation and let who will make its laws!" With all his heart Dibdin would have subscribed to that vital principle. He felt that he was a man with a mission. He stepped from obscurity to fame as if by magic. At 23 he was the colleague and companion of men like Garrick, while his plays were produced on the classic boards of Drury Lane. His haunting melodies swept like a contagion across land and sea. They were shouted in every forecastle and echoed at every fireside. Their effect was stupendous and historic. While the aggression of Napoleon was becoming every day more formidable and more threatening, Dibdin, by throwing the glamour of romance over the sea and the ships, fired young Englishmen with a sudden enthusiasm for a life on the ocean wave. His verses helped to man the navy at the crucial moment at which the navy most needed manning, and, as he himself says in his autobiography, they were quoted in the midst of mutiny and brought ahout the restoration of discipline.

Pitt himself generously recognised the practical value of Didbin's minstrelsy. As Minister for War, that master statesman was grappling with the explosive forces that arose out of the French Revolution, forces that threatened Europe with the horrors of a universal war. "He was struggling," as Lord Rosebery puts it in his biography of Pitt, "with something superhuman, immeasurable, incalculable." It seemed as if some infernal powers were in league with the might and malignancy of men in a horrible conspiracy to undermine and overthrow all ordered government and all beneficent institutions. In that death grapple, under lowering clouds, the hard-pressed minister valued every auxiliary that rendered his chance of saving England a little less dismal, and, in acknowledgment of the assistance that Dibdin had rendered him in the hour of destiny, he rewarded the singer, at the age of 60, with a pension of £200 a year.

The Sea Chanty A Mingling Of Twin Elements
The basic secret of the strength and success of Dibdin's appeal lies in the elemental fact that there is a subtle connection between the oceanic element and the musical element. The sea and the singer belong to each other. There is, about the waves, something boisterous, something exhilarating, that sets the whole world singing. In his famous description of a storm at sea, Mr. John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, says that the wild waters "mounted and shook in a rhythm, in a tune, in a music." In those telling words, Mr. Masefield touches the very heart of the matter! It is this rhythmical, tuneful, musical element about the racing waves that accounts for the fact that, since the world began, sailors have ever been singers. As they watched the gloom upon the dark, broad seas, the mariners of Ulysses sang as the vessel puffed her sails, and, ever with a frolic welcome, they saluted the thunder and the gale. The hardy Vikings of the north sang their lusty songs of courage and defiance as they pushed the frowning figureheads of their rude craft into the crests of strange, uncharted seas.

Even holiday-makers, enjoying the pleasures of boats are conscious of an irresistible impulse to accompany the measured splash of the oars by the tuneful strains of some familiar boatsong. More than any other natural phenomenon, the sea moves the singer to lift up his voice in exultation and in glee. This explains Dibdin. With the sights and sounds of the sea he conjured with the skill of a cunning magician. It was by a flash of genuine insight and of real poetic genius that, at a juncture that threatened Britain's supremacy upon the waves, he caught at the fundamental relationship subsisting between the majesty and the music of the ocean, and, turning it to the highest account, set all the nation singing. None of his work may live among our classics, but, for all that, it was good work excellently done, and he richly deserves that his name shall be honourably and gratefully remembered as the name of one who served the Empire bravely and effectively in an hour of really desperate need.

F W Boreham

Image: Charles Dibdin