JON SHAPLEY'S JOURNEY INTO THE WORLD                             
            OF FOLK SONG, MUSIC AND DANCE

My first encounter of any type of folk was a song, it happened when I was 26 years old and my main interests were still cars and motor sports and my music tastes were a curious mix of what is now called Prog Rock and Classical.   Unexpectedly it was through motor sport that I met Ken and Clare Penney in 1979;  around this time I had sold my autocross car and trailer with a view to using the funds as a deposit on my first property.  A mutual friend of mine and the Penneys suggested that we do an overnight stay at Westland (Ken and Clare's home) in Devon before servicing on a rally in Taunton the following day.  It was a crazy plan as we were based around Hertfordshire, but I went with it and arranged to have the Friday off work.  Quite simply, meeting Ken and Clare changed my life!  At Westland, while we were still eating, Ken decided that he had eaten enough, took a swig of wine and burst into song:   he was a very good singer - I had never heard or experienced anything like it!

That same evening we visited the Cruwys Arms pub and I met the owners, Len and Cissy Christopher.  We had a great time and drank far too much!
The following morning Clare asked me to visit again a few weeks later for a CND fundraising event they were holding in their yard.  She said that another pair of hands would be useful and I could stay for the weekend.  I agreed and we duly left, both of us with thumping hangovers.  Not an ideal state to service the rally car!

I can't remember much about the fund-raising weekend, but I do remember going into the Cruwys Arms, being greeted warmly by Len who not only remembered my name, but also what I drank;  this was a very different world to the one I knew growing up in North West London.  Before I left Westland, Ken and Clare encouraged me to visit again in a few weeks time for an event called The Song and Ale.  .  I protested that I didn't know any songs, but they insisted that I would enjoy it even if I only sang along with some choruses.  It was the second Song and Ale held at Westland, as the first had been, and was being run by Tom and Barbara Brown.  Sadly on the Saturday afternoon Tom and Barbara were involved in a serious car crash and were both hospitalised.  This, of course, changed the atmosphere, but Ken took control of the situation and all of us that were left continued and had a great weekend.  

Sometime after that weekend, I got my first property and started attending Luton Folk Club and sometimes other clubs such as Hitchin, Watford and The Herga folk club.  The local radio station Chiltern, had a folk programme hosted by Pete Castle'  I enjoyed his music and song choices and occasionally heard a song that interested me.  The fourth song I learnt came from this source - A Country Life from the singing of Walter Pardon and I still sing it.

Around this time the interest rate soared and in order to hold onto my property I became extremely poor, I got through it, but there was no money for holidays or other luxuries.  I remember going to give blood regularly;  having a long connection and involvement in motor sport, I never knew when I might need some.  This time, however, they refused to take any as I had become anaemic, meat was expensive so I had virtually cut it out of my diet.  I think the political and social situations that caused the problems of the time, combined with getting to know Ken and Clare a bit better, moulded my political thinking turning it a bit further left.  This, of course, fitted in very well with an interest in folk.

Through the early 80s I visited Ken and Clare several times a year, one of the regular meet ups was for New Year;  a wonderful sociable party event with lots of us staying at Westland, many of us sleeping on floors.  Amongst the frequent Westland guests were Ken and Lee Stevens, through them we went to an event on board the Foudroyant at Gosport.  I think the events were  called Folk Afloat.  One of the acts on there was Harvey Andrews and one of the song he sang was Otter in the Water which he had written.  I liked the song and foolishly thought it would be easy to do.  I bought his tape with this song on and took it home to learn.  I wasn't completely wrong about it being easy, the words are relatively easy because of repeated phrases.  However it is a song sung at pace and with an unerring rhythm so actually very hard for a novice to sing as there is nowhere to breathe without breaking the rhythm.  Regardless of this difficulty, it became my first song to sing in my adult life.

The next two songs I learnt were ones that I already partially knew, Because I Were Shy was something my mum used to sing around the house;  mum had been a professional song and dance girl and this song was one that her mentor, an older man named Horace used to sing, sometimes in competitions, which he frequently won.  The next was the Flanders and Swan Hippopotamus song, this had a slightly more tenuous family link, Claudia Flanders, by then Michael Flanders's widow, is believed to have been the driving force that got my father awarded an OBE for services to disability.  At the do after the ceremony I met her and mentioned that I sang it, she was pleased and made a joke about royalties!  Together with A Country Life, the song I mentioned earlier, I then had four songs, all of which were tried out at Westland, sometimes round the table, sometimes at the annual Song and Ale.  I wasn't brave enough to sing any of them at a folk club, and even round the table at Westland, sitting comfortably amongst friends, I found i extremely difficult to control my nerves.  

Learning songs is a very long, slow process for me, possibly because of dyslexia, possibly just because I have always had a terrible memory.  In recent times, I have established a method to speed things up a little.  Using the printed text, I hand write the song, adding my own marks where I want emphasis or a pause or sometimes a flow from one line to the next, this page develops the more times I sing it to myself.  I then go back to the printed text, fold it up and put it in my pocket;  I can then refer to it at any time, but my favourite time to learn a song is on a long walk on my own.  If/when I really want to nail a new song I will often arrange things so I can do a few hours' walking to get it established.

I had the great pleasure of befriending Jackie Oats in the 90s, she was a brilliant fiddle player when she arrived at Exeter University, but she had never sung in public.  The first time Jackie did sing out, was at a Pennymoor Singaround Wednesday evening, which I had taken her to.  She is now well known as a fabulous singer.  In the sleeve notes of her first two albums I get a personal thank you, and Pennymoor Singaround also get a thank you, which is rather nice.  More recently , Jackie told me that she learns songs extremely quickly, she can perform something on stage just a few hours after having first sight of it.  I guess we are all blessed in different ways.

With my slow ability to learn, I have never had a huge number of songs to choose from and I have always been very selective about that I do choose to learn.  One of the regulars at Westland parties and at the Song and Ale was Gez Overington, a great singer with a wonderfully warm, honeyed voice.  Gez had poor eyesight from birth but became completely blind in his teens.  He came to Devon to be a pupil at The Blind School in Torquay;  he was a very good pupil and as soon as he finished his schooling he was offered a job teaching at the same school.  Gez had an absolutely huge repertoire of songs, many hundreds if not thousands.  Ken Penney had a large quantity of songs, but nothing close to the number that Gez had.  I can only dream of having such a choice.

As time moved on into the mid 80s, my finances improved, the interest rate reduced and I got a job with a company car and fuel.  My visits to Westland increased and slowly my confidence in singing was improving.  Ken and Clare loved to pick a pub, drive to it and try to get some singing going.  This was never going to be easy, but it was a time before televisions and big screens in pubs.  Both Ken and Len had the personality to get things going and they had the right type of songs, but it was always a lot easier to get the singing going if we had a bit of music to start things off.  The main person in the group who had the talent to play that part was Ken Stevens, who was often with us.  However, sometimes Ken would refuse to play which used to infuriate Ken Penny.  In 1986 several of us were gathered at Westland, but Ken Stevens wasn't there.  Ken Penny suggested that we ought to learn to play tunes, thus avoiding the reliance on Ken Stevens.    After discussion it was agreed that we would learn piano accordion.  Tish Stubbs was a friend of ours and had done her music degree on accordion and she agreed to teach us in group lessons, without notation, all learnt by ear.  Sometime in the autumn of 1986 we had our first lesson at Westland on a Sunday afternoon after a Sunday roast provided by Clare.  As I was still living in Bedfordshire, I soon worked out that recording the monthly lesson saved me a lot of time, I could effectively get Tish's help whenever I needed it.  The first recording is in November 86 and I recorded every lessons after that;  I still have all the tapes and they are hilarious to listen to.  The lessons suited me very well.  To me, music notation is like a page full of tadpoles swimming around, so learning by ear was ideal.  We all managed to learn, but to varying degrees;  with hindsight I think some of the group would have benefited from notation.  Our first attempt to play in front of people was quite surprising to me.  The Jan Stewer evenings run by Pennymoor Singaround had been running annually for a while at Puddington and as a group with Tish leading us, we played for the paying audience.  I expected to be equally as nervous as I had been when I first sang in front of people, but I wasn't;  it felt like the box was protecting me, people were looking at it, not at me.  Being in a group also helped of course.

Several people took turns to host the lessons and of course provide wonderful meals, including me after 1990 when I moved to Devon.  The most memorable meal/lesson happened at Westland and caused a ban of alcohol at the meals, which didn't last very long.  Basically we all drank too much wine, we did have a lesson, the recording of it is very funny and actually became useful at the next lesson as Tish had no idea what we had covered.  I think we all managed not to drink at the next meal, but then all agreed to only have beer or cider - the wine ban stayed.

Pennymoor Singaround's Song and Ale became part of all the Shapleys' life, my parent, my 3 siblings and even some of their offspring came to it at least once.  Joly, my younger brother, got heavily involved when he took on the role of organising all the food for the weekend, a big job considering that sometimes we had nearly 100 people.  In those days, everybody that came was expected to put their name down for a few duties over the weekend.  This mostly worked well, but sometimes failed because people had fallen asleep or were too drunk!  The Saturday nights tended to get extremely busy at the early Song and Ale weekends;  Ken loved to invite colleagues and students from Exeter University that he thought would enjoy it, or just people that he fancied!

The stone barn at Westland was the main venue for all the song sessions at the Song and Ale, it had fluorescent tubes for lighting and a mud floor; to create a better atmosphere, we would put up coloured lights and a huge number of maritime signalling flags, a very few chairs for the old people and a few tables for booze and glasses.  In the run up to each year's Song and Ale, Ken and mostly Clare, would host a few working weekends.  Sometimes the tasks were fairly basic clearing and cleaning, but some were very focused.  The biggest job was changing the mud floor to concrete.  Another big one was building the substantial bar!  Len took on providing the beer and running the bar;  I was usually one of the other people frequently serving the beer, often with one or two other people who had put their name down on the job list to do an hour or two of bar work.

At the Song and Ale we ran in 2023 we got through 2 firkins of real ale plus a few bottles, cans and whatever non beer drinkers got from the bar at The London Inn.  At the height of the bars that Len ran at a Westland Song and Ale we got through 14 firkins!  Almost everybody stood up, there were few place to put down your pint so most of us had drinks in our hands and we drank a lot.  Len would usually choose just one real ale each year, it had to taste good, but not be too strong;  it didn't always go to plan in the first few years that Len did it.  One year the beer was definitely too strong but the one year that sticks in my mind most, was when the beer was just right;  except it made everyone fart!  Being in the barn with about 80 people farting was quite an experience - the smoking ban didn't exist then, but I think that all the smokers went out just to be safe!

Another annual event that Pennymoor Singaround was organising was the Jan Stewer Evenings.  As several of us were around to set things up for the Song and Ale it made sense for the timing of these two events to be brought close together, so it became usual to have the Jan Stewer Evening a few days before the Song and Ale weekend.

The Song and Ale ran successfully at Westland for a long time, but it was a great deal of work for Clare, Joly, Len and me.  We got to to know Peter Fagg and his wife who owned and ran the Black Dog Pub;  the Cruwys Arms had gone through several different landlords, the last one had failed to sell it on and it had closed down.  The monthly Pennymoor Singaround moved to the Black Dog pub and we were treated very well there.  Eventually, the Song and Ale moved there, they had a camping field and were very happy to do all the bar work and cooking.  The skittle alley we used for the sessions was long and narrow, so we hired staging from Crediton Arts Centre to make raised seating at one end of the room;  we still decorated the room in a similar manner to how we had done it at Westland.

Both the Jan Stewer evenings and the Song and Ale are continuing to be successful and popular at the time of writing this piece in 2024.  They have both changed and developed over the years.  Since Covid 19, the Jan stewer has moved out of the hall that Jan Stewer taught in;  a lovely place to have it but very small, the event is now held later in the summer in a marquee just round the corner.  When the Song and Ale had to leave Black Dog, it had a brief spell at The Cruwys Arms, but has for many years now been held very successfully at The London Inn, Morchard Bishop and is still the main source of income for Pennymoor Singaround, as it always has been.

Getting back to my personal experiences, in 1988 I was made redundant - a big shock, but I soon came to realise that it was a blessing.  I had not been enjoying the situation I was in and had lost faith in the products that I was selling.   I had been saving up money with a view to moving to Devon, which I then decided would be better spent giving myself a little time off.  I spent quite a lot of time at Westland, not working was strange, but it gave me time to really develop as a musician, often spending 3 or 4 hours a day playing, which made a huge difference to my skill level.  After around three months, I was asked by a friend if I could help out for a while in his car accessory shop in Hemel Hempstead.  I worked there sometimes part time and sometimes full time until 1990 when I got a job in Crediton and moved to Devon.

While I was selling my flat, but already working in Crediton, I stayed with Pat Barker in West Sandford.  Pat was a long time stalwart of Pennymoor Singaround and was very kind to let me stay, especially as there was a downturn in the house market and it took longer than expected for me to sell.

Everyone at Pennymoor Singaround made me very welcome in Devon;  when I had bought a house, Len and Cissy Christopher gave me some furniture and a few bits of cutlery as I had stupidly left all mine in a kitchen drawer back in the then sold flat!  Colin Waite did a brilliant job to remove a fireplace, reveal where the original 1950s range would have been and fit a second hand Rayburn that I had bought from Len.  Tony Worthington, another long time stalwart of Pennymoor Singaround, helped me move the Rayburn from the house that Len was restoring to my house, ready for Colin to fit it.  Gerald and Margaret Palmer gave me a couple of radiators, so Colin could get some heat to the bedrooms.  Penny moor Singaround really was a great network of lovely, very talented and generous people.

My good fortune with my move to Devon continued with the people I worked with.  Mike Sanders who owned the car accessory shop had been a customer of mine in 1988 and remembered me;  Jenny who is now his wife, was lively and fun to work with;  I'm still friends with both of them.  Another colleague was Tim Denman who knew just about everybody on the music scene in and around Crediton and I was introduced to lots people and sessions by Tim.

Run in Pennymoor Singaround's name, Clare Penny was the main driving force to start a Sunday lunchtime music session at the Ring of Bells, Cheriton Fitzpaine.  We had run occasional mixed music and song sessions at the pub before this and the Sunday session seemed to fill a need for a relaxed session that welcomed all skill levels.  We called it Live Rehearsal and it ran for several years.  One of the regulars there was Jane Hutton who encouraged me to join in the English music sessions at The Radway held every day of Sidmouth Folk Festival;  this was a big step for me, the level of musicianship was high and the tunes came with a high frequency because so many people wanted to lead.  This suited me fine as I wanted to play along, hopefully not upsetting anybody else;  it is quite easy to upset other musicians with an accordion.  Roger Hahn hated it as a session because he wanted to lead more often, he wrote it off as too competitive.  This was a time when my playing and musical sensibility really developed.

Ken Penny was an economics lecturer at Exeter University and he got himself onto what I believe was an exchange marking scheme, which meant that he needed to visit Ireland.  Somehow this work that Ken needed to do turned into fairly large groups of us all holidaying together and of course having a fabulous time in Irish towns and cities.  I think the first two we did were based in Dungarvan on the south coast;  we got a coach from Devon, went as foot passengers on the ferry and were met by an Irish coach, which we used for day trips while we were there.  One day we asked to go to Cork, we went the right way and the driver pointed out Cork as we drove straight by and he took us to a pretty touristy seaside village!  We enjoyed ourselves, but had wanted to see Cork.  After a lot of questions we managed to get the truth from the driver;  he liked us as a group but because we were English he was concerned about how we would be treated in the city.  At that time the Black and Tans was still within living memory for some Cork people, a truly awful and shameful part of relatively recent English history.  I had never heard anything about it in my schooling.  Anyway the following day, as we got on the coach we made it very clear that we definitely wanted to go to Cork, for the coach to stop and us all to have time for a good look round the city, the driver was nervous, but did comply.  we didn't encounter any hostility and a lot of people were educated at the Black and Tan museum.  I enthused about the first of these visits so much that when we went the next year, my mum arranged for my sister to look after my disabled dad and came with us.  She absolutely loved it, a real one of for her.

After two successful and music filled visits to Dungarvan, we visited Limerick.  We did this in several cars instead of the coach, but still in quite a large group of mostly singers and musicians.  A very different vibe, a lovely city but with a considerable drug problem and at the time had a nickname of Stab City!  We didn't have any difficulty finding music sessions and were lucky to fairly quickly find Dolans pub on the dockside.  It is now quite a famous pub and music venue, but Val and Mick Dolan had only recently bought it when we arrived.  They already had live music on every night, plus lunchtimes on Saturday and Sunday.  The table reserved for musicians had a single microphone suspended above it and the music and songs were broadcast through the entire pub;  there were some fabulous  musicians and singers, but the people in the bar took no notice of them, occasionally a nod from somebody but no applause.  These musicians were paid and given free booze, so a group of English people with instruments was a bit of weird situation for them  Tact and diplomacy were need  Fortunately Mick Dolan was keen to find out about us and when he had, he introduced us to Batt O'Connor who had the role of booking and co-ordinating the musicians.  Batt was sometimes the lead musician and he would always make room for roger Hahn and Jason Rice around the table and encourage the rest of us to join in sensitively from nearby seats.  What really surprised all of us was when the musicians took their normal break, we were given full rein to pay our English tunes;  we were nowhere near as good as the Irish musicians, but the pub went quiet, they listened, they clapped and clapped loudly;  we were something different and fresh to their ears!  Val, Mick and Batt are all still facebook friends of mine and when the rare opportunity to meet up does happen, we enjoy remembering those early days at Dolans.

Cheriton Fitzpaine also became the first home to a new venture;  an Anglo-Irish gathering.  Through all our trips to Ireland we had made friends with some wonderful musicians and singers in Limerick.  The idea was that we would run an event and then encourage the Irish to ask us to something they organised the following year.  This was a few years on from our first visit to Limerick and Val and Mick were able to get away from their very busy and now very successful pub, Mick gathered a group of suitable people and we all got together in the Ring of Bells.  It was a great success and the bonds grew stronger, the pub loved it too - the Irish were even bigger drinkers than we were!

Getting back to my personal musical journey, in 1995 I was newly single from a long term relationship and I noticed that the Inter Varsity Folk Dance Festival was coming to Exeter University.  For a long time I had enjoyed going to ceilidhs and though it would be fun to attend this weekend festival;  I contacted Sasha Douglas, a friend nearly twenty years younger than me, but I knew that she also loved to dance and that she was also newly out of a long relationship.  Sasha greed to me kipping on the floor of her flat in Exeter which was within walking distance of the Uni.  We both had a great time and strangely Sasha's and my life were changed dramatically by that weekend.  Sasha met her future husband, Bernd Egan a German PHD student who was a volunteer steward;  they have now been married nearly 30 years and have 3 grown up children.  Before leaving the event on the Sunday, I put my name down to get information about the following year's event.  When this came I immediately discounted any idea of going as it was to be held in Edinburgh.  However, a few weeks before the event I got a call asking if I would like to join a group of students from Exeter University who had spare room on the coach they had organised for the trip.  With great trepidation and not knowing any of the people I would be travelling with I agreed to join them.  Very many of the people that were on that coach became friends and I am still in contact with a lot of them and quite close friends with some.

We had a fabulous time in Edinburgh and on the way back had a chat about playing music.  It turned out that quite a few of us had some ability, so an idea was hatched to have an hour of music every Monday evening before the normal 2 hours of dancing organised by the folk society at Exeter University and I was welcome to join them.  This was brilliant for me;  I learnt a new repertoire of tunes and had the opportunity to dance every week of term time.  Shortly after this we formed a ceilidh band, Pigs Might Fly and not long after that we started playing for a newly formed Appellation Dance Troup.  Needless to say, I had a lot of wonderful experiences in these two bands, including playing on the arena stage at Sidmouth, both for our dancers and - more scarily - as the overture for a main evening show.  We started playing to an empty arena then the gates were opened;  by the time we finished there were around 3K people listening to us.  When we played for the dance team we were on stage, but felt invisible;  everyone was quite rightly looking at the dancers.  Doing the overture felt very exposing as everyone was looking and
listening to us!  We had appearances at lots of UK folk festivals, including The Festival of Flowers in Jersey and a wonderful trip to America where we played live on a cable TV channel and visited two folk festivals in America playing for our dancers at one of them,.  We were based in Minnesota and the other festival we attended was Clifftop in West Virginia.  It was a long road trip to get there and it is a strictly Old Time music and dance festival;  not even any Bluegrass music is allowed!  All the instruments were stringed;  my accordion was in the Uhaul trailer that we had rented for our camping gear, but I didn't get it out while were there for fear of being lynched.  On a more grounded level, it has been a privilege and pleasure to have played at the weddings of countless happy couples over the years.

In the 1990s, Clare Penney and Pat Barker visited the Minehead Hobby Horse event and during a walk on the coast path they hatched a plan to have a Pennymoor Singaround Black Dog.  Research was done about sightings of black dogs between Morchard Bishop and Black Dog village.  A hobby horse style Black Dog was built, the frame was lightweight plastic plumbing;  a head was formed with a snapping jaw and teeth, a long tail was made and everything was covered in black cloth.  One person could control this even though from the tip of the tail to the snarling teeth it was nearly 9 feet long.  Vision from inside this beast was fairly limited, but another person - which we called the ticer - was there to lead and when necessary give instruction.

We danced the dog out of the gates behind the London Inn at Morchard Bishop into a waiting crowd.  I would estimate this was sometimes over 100 people.  Dancing would ensue with musicians and drummers and we would then start to process towards Black Dog village.  Different people would take turns in the dog and as ticer, but we tried to avoid changing over where there were a lot of people watching, thus keeping a little of the mystery.  Another display of dancing happened on the junction outside Beech Hill and sometimes some refreshments were given to us there.  A lot of people followed the dog and in order to maintain safety we got help from the police when we could.  On arrival at Black Dog we had another dance display and the reading of a proclamation.  Eventually we all spent the remainder of the evening in the pub.  After one of these events Peter Fagg told us that his takings for an evening had hit a new high, even more than any New Year's Eve!  After many years it became difficult to recruit enough dancers and musicians, also the police had stopped being able to escort us and although nobody did ever get hurt, some drivers were less than sympathetic, so we decided to stop the event.  More recently the dog was handed over to Mark Norman, who is a director of the British Folklore Museum which as yet has no permanent home, but he is looking after it and he brought it to Pennymoor Singaround's 40th birthday celebrations in 2019 where he kindly gave a talk about black dogs.  I am still looking after the drums that we used and the dog and some of the drums are going to be in a display at Crediton Museum in the summer of 2024.

Through friends at Exeter University folk society I was fortunate to meet and become friends with Dave Longly.  He ran stalls selling CDs at folk festivals and was extremely good at helping customers find music that they might not have come across.  I started as a customer and his stepson's friend, but we became friends and over the years I have helped Dave on countless stalls.  Through this I often worked backstage at Sidmouth Festival, arranging deals with artists to sell their CDs at big concerts in The Ham and met lots of lovely, highly talented people.  Most were pleased to have us do this for them, but a few did resent it, usually when they got their money from us, but when they realised just how much a more professional approach created sales, they were very happy to have paid the commission.  Helping Dave got me to lots of festivals including several 21 day stays at Celtic Connections in Glasgow, which was probably the highlight.

Pennymoor Singaround has always remained as a Singaround and because of that has never had guests in the way most folk clubs do.  In the 1990s and early 2000s, however, we did occasionally book a guest for a house concert.  Nobody had a huge amount of space, but sometimes we could get 30 people in, at other times only a bit over 20.  The guests had to be comfortable with the intimacy of these concerts and most managed very well;  not easy with a fairly rowdy group of strangers!  We did experiment with having concerts in bigger venues, but they never had the same atmosphere.  

In the late 1990s Ken Penney became ill.  For a while if wasn't clear what was wrong but eventually a diagnosis of Motor Neurone Disease was given.  Ken loved his drink, but was rarely actually drunk.  In the early stages of his illness the slurred speech it caused meant many people thought he was drunk.  Clare did a wonderful job of looking after Ken;  he died in a hospital bed downstairs in Westland in 1999.  This was a huge blow to Pennymoor Singaround, but Len had taken over being the MC for the Wednesday singarounds while Ken was ill and was doing a wonderful job.  Jason Rice had introduced Barbara Hawkins to our singarounds;  she was not a singer but she was a wonderful joke teller.  Len always kept Barbara till the very end of the evening and then gave her free rein to tell her jokes and stories;  this was brilliant as nobody ever wanted to leave until they had heard Barbara's latest jokes.

Around this time, Pennymoor Singaround were asked to play and sing at a twinning do in Starcross Yacht Club.  They had some Breton musicians and singers coming and wanted somebody to uphold the English side!  We were slightly nervous that the venue would be a bit posh for our sort of stuff, but it was great, lots of fun and we had an instant camaraderie with the Breton musicians and singers;  music is an international language!  The main organiser was Bernard le Mayor;  we got on well with him and he invited us to his home town in northern Brittany.  That trip went well and Bernard became an occasional visitor to Pennymoor Singaround events when he did some work in the UK and those bonds grew stronger.

It became necessary to make changes to the way Pennymoor Singaround was set up.  I was on the committee by then and Clare was doing  secretarial duties as she had done from the start.  She was keen to try to get some grant funding.  To do this we needed a written constitution and a full committee (chair, vice chair, secretary, treasurer, membership secretary and committee members).  We did all of these changes and in 2001 obtain £7k in "Awards for All" lottery funding, to run the first After the Fair at Bampton.  This funding changed the Anglo, Irish gatherings into Anglo, Irish, Breton gatherings, the idea being that we ran the first event, our Irish friends who by then were mainly Dublin based would run 2002 and our Breton friends would run 2003.  The earlier Anglo, Irish gatherings had been very successful, but by this time had started to outgrow what was available in Cheriton Fitzpaine, so a move to Bampton where there was much more accommodation was ideal.  Clare and Roger (who by then was Clare's partner) had been running a monthly session at The Bridge in Bampton for a while and had got to know Brian and Julie Smith who owned it.  Brian loved having folk events there and he was on the town council.  He was a huge help to Pennymoor Singaround and his fairly small pub became the main hub for that first festival.

For a while it looked like the 2002 event might not happen;  our Irish friends were keen to put something on but failed to find anywhere suitable and had given up.  Clare decided that we would provide the solution.  Roger, Clare, Jason and I took a car over to Ireland and visited places that we thought looked like they might work.  The second or third town we visited was Rathdrum.  It was ideal, a few pubs, a lovely hostel, some B & B and hotel accommodation and a few shops.  The most important thing to find was a pub that would be keen and capable of having fairly large sessions.  The Cartoon Inn fitted the bill perfectly.  It was a brief visit to Ireland for the four of us, but when we got home and contact the Irish with details of where and when "their" 2002 even would happen, they could barely believe it, but they were very pleased.  The event was a great success, although sadly the Bretons didn't manage to get there.

At the 2001 event Bernard had brought a group called Elliant Paddy over to Bampton, friends of his that played and sang.  Their name was the town they all lived in and around and the Paddy was from their love of Paddy's Irish whiskey!  It was bound to work and of course it absolutely did.  In 2003, the Bretons hosted us all in Henvic and we all had a wonderful time.  There was no right or wrong way to run these events, every event was different and fabulous.

In 2003 we received a request from Kelly Beeston, the recently appointed organiser of Bampton Fair.  The fair was by Royal Charter and had been for nearly 750 years.  The original charter was for a 4 day event so our After the Fair idea had caused interest;  Kelly had also learnt that we had successfully got funding for 2001.  Kelly had failed to get lottery funding for the fair and thought that if we teamed up and did a joint application with Pennymoor Singaround as the lead, we might be successful.  At that time, the fair was just a lot of street stalls and the fun fair, all animal sales had ended and even the street entertainment had stopped as there was no money for it - definitely a low point in the fair's long and fairly spectacular history.  By 2003 I had taken on the committee role that nobody wants - that of treasurer.  I had no experience or knowledge, but it was a small club with at most a few hundred pounds in the bank should be easy enough I thought!  Having done the Awards for All application in 2001, Clare had very understandably said never again, but it was precisely her skills that were needed.  We agonised over Kelly's proposal for a while but eventually agreed to give it a try!  Clare worked her magic on the wording of the application and I provided the costings;  from memory I think we asked Heritage Lottery for £30k and were awarded £27k.  Suddenly being treasurer became quite scary;  every penny had to be accounted for and the lottery people check everything very carefully.  I was beginning to curse having a cleaver friend with a law degree and a winning way with words!  This funding made a huge difference to both the joint recipients.  One thing that was difficult about it was that Heritage funding is set up for things like buildings and monuments, as such it was a requirement to spend all the money that year;  in reality both the fair and After the Fair were annual events and would have benefited more from the funding being spread over several years.  Both event in 2004 were spectacularly good and at the end of the year we were nominated and eventually won a different type of award from the lottery for the most interesting completed award of 2004;  Clare and Kelly went to the award ceremony in London.

Bampton now became the place to be every year for the Anglo, Irish, Breton gathering which we ran as After the Fair, but it was now also a free folk festival for anybody that wanted to come along and plenty of people did come.  After the Fair was a great success and although it was a huge amount of work, I think that everyone involved in running it enjoyed themselves.  Occasionally over the next few years the Bretons or the Irish and some a newer group of friends from the Isle of Wight would invite all the groups to gather at a different time of year for a more relaxed gathering and happily these are still happening.  Sadly the last After the Fair was in 2015;  nobody wanted it to stop but the changing circumstances, mostly regarding venues to have big sessions in, made it impossible to continue as we were.

In the summer of 2006, I gave Jim Causley a lift to a folk festival.  During the journey I said how jealous I was of him having done the Folk  Degree at Newcastle, which he had just completed.  He said "Well why don[t you do it?".  I said that I couldn't as I only had 2 O levels;  his response was that it didn't matter.  He must have said it doesn't matter a lot of times that day, because every negative I gave about me doing it got the same response.  Over the next few weeks I looked into it and Jim was right and because of my age and not having done a degree before, I qualified for a grant and a bursary to help me do it.  The timing was brilliant as I was newly free from my mortgage, so I applied.  The next step was for me write and submit an essay and Jim kindly wrote a reference for me.  That all worked and I then had to go to Newcastle for an interview/audition.  I took the day off work and flew both ways on the day;  I had arranged that an accordion would be available for the second instrument part of the audition.  My first instrument was voice.  Vic Gammon was in charge and he was very complimentary about my singing;  when it came to my playing he really wasn't happy.  The accordion was brand new and very tight and difficult to paly;  I played several tunes at Vic's request although I had been told to prepare one tune.  At the end of each one his comments got harsher, almost rude!  It was as if he was testing me to see if he could make me angry;  eventually he said that it doesn't really matter as you can be a complete beginner on your second instrument and offered me a place on the course starting in 2007.

I actually got on very well with Vic once I was on the course, and he was very kind to me, often involving me in extra curricula events in folk clubs and festivals, which I really enjoyed.  The degree was run as a conservatoire course which for historical reasons meant that it was a 4 year course.  For the first 2 years we had not choice about what we did, which inevitably meant that there were modules that I didn't enjoy studying;  the best bit of advice about this came from an unlikely source.  For the first year, we had one hour a week being instructed how to write academically, how to reference our work, punctuation etc., etc.  The woman teaching this had the biggest chip on her shoulder of anybody I have ever met;  every lesson at least once, often several times, she would inform us that she was a published author.  She did say that we might not like every module, but that the pass mark was only 40% and reasonably easy to obtain.  She also explained that doing enough to get a pass was fine in the first two years, where the overall mark made no difference to your final degree mark.  I am not particularly academic so this advice was brilliant.  I worked really hard on things that interested me and just did enough on the things that didn't.    In the 3rd and 4th years, we could chose what modules suited our particular interest.  Mature students were welcomed on this course, but the powers that be had to make sure that the mature students had enough computer skills.  Fortunately for me I had completed a long, free, government funded course in Exeter in the late 90s and had certificates to prove a level of competence.  Another factor that worked in my favour was all the responsibilities I had undertaken over the years with Pennymoor Singaround, especially having been treasurer for After the Fair and coping with a substantial grant.

The one to one tuition I received on voice and accordion were both first class and we were given surprisingly generous amounts of it.  At the end of the second year, I needed 60% on each to carry on getting this one to one tuition.  I was fine on the voice, but missed out by 3% on the accordion, which was a real shame as I was benefiting from it so much.  The most outstanding tuition I received was from Karen Tweed, a wonderful accordion player but an even better teacher.  Karen was an occasional visiting tutor and I was very fortunate to be allowed to continue having one to one lessons with Karen when she was available.  They came out of my vocal lesson allocation, on the basis that we would work on song accompaniment.  I was very lucky to have all the experiences that I did on the course and managed to complete it in 2011 gaining an upper second degree.

In order to do the degree, I resigned from the Pennymoor Singaround committee.  When I had only been on the degree a few weeks I asked Vic Gammon if I could have a Friday and Monday off in order to attend After the Fair, because of my previous commitment to the festival and he kindly allowed me to have the time.  The 2007 event was an extremely difficult time for Clare;  Roger Hahn, her now long term partner and the love of her life, was by then extremely ill and in a hospice.  Clare managed to spend time with Roger every day of the festival and come back to Bampton to join in every evening.  In just a matter of a few days later, Roger sadly died.  From a young age Roger had worked in the Plymouth Dockyard and his illness came from the exposure to asbestos that he had innocently endured there.

After the degree, I went back on to the Pennymoor Singaround committee and when Bill Crawford no longer wished to be chairman I took on that role, which at the time of writing I am still doing.  We were very lucky as a club after the lockdown that resulted from Covid 19, as we managed to get some outside singing happening again very quickly.  The Stoke Canon Inn is a community run pub and two of the regulars at our singarounds, Alison Bloomer and Paul Holden, were investors in the pub and it had covered outdoor space.  They made us very welcome and we re-started the daytime mixed music and song session that we had started at the London Inn just before the Covid regulations struck.

In 2016, probably mourning the loss of After the Fair, Pennymoor Singaround organised the first Coverack weekend.  This is a music and singing event based in the youth hostel at Coverack, which is on the beautiful Lizard Peninsula.  We also made good use of the facilities at the Paris Hotel.  We block booked the hostel and set up a firkin of beer, organised enough food to cover most of the meals and for the modest price a group of us gathered on the the Friday evening and basically partied until we left on the Monday morning.  Each year we have had a guest act to do a concert and a workshop or presentation of their choice.  Our first guests were Lynne Heraud and Pat Turner, who were absolutely brilliant and fitted in extremely well - so well, in fact that they became members and paid to come to Coverack several times and also became regulars at our Song and Ale weekends.  The other guests we have had the pleasure to host are Dave Hearn, Marianne McAleer, Bill McKinnon, Anne Lamb, Peter and Barbara Snape, Lynne and Pat for a second time and in 2023 we had Carol Etherton and Andrew McKay.  The Coverack events are still run much the same today as the first one.  The increasing cost of block booking over a weekend and the large saving by doing weekdays means that we now run Monday evening until Thursday morning.  Not a problem as virtually our entire member is retired now!

Ken Penney and Len Christopher were both wonderful at running an evening, possibly because of this I tended to shy away from being in charge of proceedings.  However, in more recent times I have become the host for Pennymoor Singaround events and I do now enjoy it.  Possibly the first time I ran anything with quite a lot of people was at my 60th birthday celebrations in Sidmouth;  my birthday usually coincides with the folk festival.  In more recent times, Bill Crawford got me to run an evening session at Halsway Manor and since then suggested my services to Alan Bearman who was looking for somebody to run some sessions at Sidmouth Folk Week;  so since 2019 I have been doing that and enjoying it.  I have also run the song sessions at the last two Dartmoor Folk Festivals which Bill Crawford and Dave Lowry used to do.

From 1996 until 2019 Pennymoor Singaround were blessed to have a fantastic photographic archive built up covering all the main events.  It is a wonderful resource, thousands of pictures, apart from a few early ones, all taken by Dan and Joan Sharp.  At the 40th celebrations we held in 2019, local author Tracey Norman was amazed to see the number and quality of the photographs and strongly suggested that we start writing names on the back of the photographs while there were still enough of us alive able to do it.  Clare and I have made a start on this mammoth task.  Without these photographs I would have been a great deal more vague about many of the dates that i have written about here.

I don't know if this archive will be of interest to anybody in the future, if it is, hopefully this and the other articles on the Pennymoor Singaround website https://pennymoorsing.wixsite.com/devon will help to make some sense of the photographs.

Jon Shapley  
24th February 2024