Sandgate Lass's Lament, The

DESCRIPTION: "I was a young maiden truly, And liv'd in Sandgate Street; I thought to marry a good man... But last I married a keelman, And my good days are done." The girl lists all the men she thought of marrying, and then contrasts her ill-formed, evil keelman
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1900 (Stokoe/Reay-SongsAndBalladsOfNorthernEngland)
KEYWORDS: marriage abuse lament work
FOUND IN: Britain(England(North))
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Stokoe/Reay-SongsAndBalladsOfNorthernEngland, pp. 162-163, "The Sandgate Lass's Lament" (1 text, 1 tune)
ST StoR162 (Full)
Roud #3170
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Keel Row" (subject: Sandgate women and Keelmen)
NOTES [250 words]: A keelman is not one who is involved in shipbuilding; Lindsay Marshall explains that "A keelman [had] a very specific job on Tyneside in the north-east of England where Sandgate is located on the Newcastle quayside. A keel was a the boat used to ferry coal from mines to larger ships ('colliers') which could not get up the shallow undredged river.
It is interesting to note that "to keel" also has been used to mean "to mark down as worthy of contempt." So this may be a pun, or it might be simply that the singer has a truly low opinion of her husband.
Marshall also points out the web site https://twsitelines.info/SMR/6706, which says among other things, "Behind the beer-houses, lodging houses and shops on Sandgate there were numerous alleys, chares or entries, described by Knowles and Boyle in 1890 as 'dark' and 'dingy'.. 'crowded with the miserable dwellings of the very poor'. The keelmen colonised the Sandgate area in the eighteenth century. Bourne recorded that several thousand people, mostly those who worked on the river, lived in Sandgate and the lanes off it."
William Watson published a piece "Sandgate Lassie's Lament" in T. Thompson, J Shield, W. Midford, H. Robson, and others, A Collection of Songs, Comic, Satirical, and Descriptive, Chiefly in the Newcastle Dialect: And Illustrative of the Language and Manners of the Common People on the Banks of the Tyne and Neighbourhood, (John Marshall, Newcastle, 1827), p. 70, but it doesn't appear to be the same poem to me. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.4
File: StoR162

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