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Dick Turpin

Johnny Doughty sang Dick Turpin and Let Her Go Back. in a recording made by Mike Yates in the singer’s home in Brighton, Sussex, on 24 August 1976. It was included in 1977 on his Topic album of traditional songs from the Sussex coast, Round Rye Bay for More, and in 2001 on the Musical Traditions anthology of songs and music from the Mike Yates Collection, Up in the North and Down in the South Mike Yates noted:

Many of Johnny’s songs were picked up from elderly fishermen who would sing to themselves as they were net-mending. Unfortunately many of the sailors were loath to pass on their songs to a young schoolboy—as Johnny then was—with the result that Johnny had many tantalising scraps and fragments in his head.

His song Dick Turpin is not the well-known one about Turpin’s encounter with a lawyer on Hounslow Heath, but part of a comic cante-fable that was issued by James Catnach as a quarto sheet in the 1820s, and subsequently issued by T. Watts, a Birmingham printer. Ralph Vaughan Williams found a fragment, similar to Johnny’s in Essex at the turn of the 20^th century, but it appears to have escaped the notice of other collectors, so that this is the only Roud entry.

Let Her Go Back, on the other hand, is widespread among sailors—usually under the title Paddy Lay Back—and versions appear in most of the collections of nautical songs. It can also be heard on My Ship Shall Sail the Ocean (Vol.2 of Topic’s Voice of the People)—as On Board the Leicester Castle, sung by Geoff Ling.

Lyrics

Johnny Doughty sings Dick Turpin / Let Her Go Back

Now Dick Turpin he sailed out one night
With his fortune to deliver
When he met a well-dressed gentleman
And he asked him to deliver.
’Tis your money I want. Fork out your blunt
Or I’ll send this through your liver
With my little pop-gun, any other come
Oh, the oh-de-ido.

Now Dick Turpin and his pals
And a jolly lot o’ gals
I’ve a very fine plan, you must know
For the sky looks pale, we’ll rob the Royal Mail
Before the cock begins to crow-i-oh
Before the cock begins to crow.

Spoken: They only used to sing bits of it, they’d be net-mending and they’d chuck their needles down— then they’d start something else see. A lot of ’em would only hum their tunes, you know, then they’d break into a bit of it. Then they’d hum another bit, see. That’s all a lot of it was.

Now when I was young and silly in me twenties
It was then I thought I’d go to sea
So I shipped aboard the mast in a whaler
We went from California all the way back to France.

Chorus:
So let her go back …. take in the slack
Oh, heave away the capstan, heave a pawl, heave a pawl
Stand fast, boys, and then keep handy
And we’re bound for Calaboriso around the Horn.

Spoken: I can’t get the other bit.