This month we’re saying Happy Birthday Alfred Williams!
Alfred Williams was born in South Marston in 1877, so 7 February 2025 would mark his 148th birthday! He started working at a very young age, and by age 14 he was working at the GWR Railway Works. Even though he had little formal schooling, he never lost his love of learning and over his life wrote several volumes of poetry, books about his local area, and learnt several languages, including Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. He was able to use the opportunities offered by working for GWR, and in 1910 he was made an honorary member of the Literary and Debating Society at the Mechanics Institute.
He was celebrated by local sculptor Carleton Attwood in the bust on display in our current exhibition, Un/Common People, on until 8th March 2025. Attwood was a key figure in Swindon’s art scene in the 20th century. He made sculptures for several local landmarks and of local people like Williams and footballer Harold Fleming.
In the exhibition we’re celebrating Williams’ work as a folk song and story collector. Although he worked at the Swindon Works for 23 years, Williams maintained his love of the countryside and its people. He became one of southern England’s foremost folk song collectors. In the late 19th and early 20th century there was a realisation that the world was changing with increasing industrialisation and many people moving to towns like Swindon meant that the rural world was changing. People started to collect the songs, stories and traditions from the people who lived in the countryside. Alfred Williams was unusual in that he collected in the area in which he lived. He cycled 13,000 miles around that area in the 1910s and 20s, collecting over 800 folk songs, folk tales and stories about village life.
He set himself the task of making a record of the ‘language and activities of the district in which I find myself’ – that is the area of the Upper Thames Valley in Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire. He says in his introduction to his Folk Songs of the Upper Thames (1923), ‘what I had in view was nature and life. I have tried to depict the beautiful and the actual. Above all, I wanted to describe how the people spent their days and nights, in what employments, recreations and amusements. In a word, I wished to show how they lived.’
His folk songs and collecting can be found in the Un/Common People exhibition. The archive of his work is held at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, who, alongside Swindon Libraries, have kindly lent material the exhibition. You can listen to one of the folk songs he collected, the ‘Female Robber’, about a woman who goes out robbing on the king’s highway. Williams says, ‘robbers’ songs were always acceptable to the villagers’! This song was collected from Edmund Jefferies of Highworth, and you can hear a story about that Highworth worthy, Squire Crowdy, and how he came back as a mischievous ghost.
Williams believed that folk songs, dance and story had had their day by the 1920s. He knew how much the world had changed, and saw that younger people weren’t very interested in the old traditions. He died in 1930, aged only 53. By the 1960s folk song and dance would have a revival once more, and today there is great interest in folk culture, both reviving traditions of the past and adapting those traditions and creating new ones for today. In Swindon people have celebrated Williams’ work by singing his songs, reciting his poems and telling his stories, in events such as the annual Hammerman Day at the Beehive pub for his birthday, which ran until the pandemic. Williams work in collecting those songs and stories gives us a huge resource on which to draw for now and for the future.
Kirsty Hartsiotis, Collections and Exhibitions Officer
