The following two fragments were recovered by the Huntingdonshire Constabulary from the contents of a wheely bin in Godmanchester in the autumn of 1962.
The first Fragment:
“.. while Jack was hight in hall and tower
And Joan in cot and hovel,
Full many hoy away their pride
And on their bellies grovel.”
The second Fragment:
“..merrily.
Yet be they dowie and sing not sweet
That lit upon that lea,
But bend their footsteps bright and neat,
Agin the sounding sea.”
Experts in the field have dated their composition, from internal evidence, to 4 April 1962, probably in the late afternoon, although no consensus can be found on the latter detail. The relationship between the two has also become the subject of a, sometimes bitter, controversy. On balance, the use of unrelated media (green ballpoint ink on a beer mat of uncertain provenance for the first fragment and soft lead pencil on the back of a Tesco check-out receipt for the second) would mitigate against a thematic relationship but not necessarily against a single author with access to a choice of media.
The first fragment, with its Middle English overtones and its thinly veiled social engineering undertones, has been confidently (perhaps over confidently) attributed to one Jack Beamish who is on record as having been ejected for mouthing blasphemies from the Public Bar of the Red Bull gastro-pub about two o'clock on the 4 April 1962. Mr Beamish's other surviving works, in particular his "High away my dainty May" being a rhapsody on a certain Pat O'Kelly, one time bar maid at the Red Bull, bear strong stylistic resemblances with the first fragment, sharing its economy of content and taut expression of sentiment.
Attempts to attribute the second fragment to Mr Beamish have encountered a minefield of objections. The circumstantial evidence of their being found among the contents of the same wheely bin has been countered by the marked stylistic divergence. A majority of those consulted agree on the North Anglian flavour of the diction although not all would go as far as to invoke Scots. Jack Beamish is known to have spent most of his productive period in the vicinity of Huntingdon and St Ives and is not on record as having visited the northern regions of the British Isles. It seems unlikely that he would have known and still less, employed a northern idiom to compose the second fragment.
This leads us to consider Jock McCulloch, the much neglected Cumbrian, perhaps better known as the "Swan of Aspatria". Jock was a frequent visitor to the Fenland margins although his work remained firmly rooted among the council houses of his native Cumberland. Painstaking analysis of the extant Tesco archive of this period has unearthed a blurry photograph of a male customer with strong resemblances to Mr McCulloch passing checkout number fourteen at six minutes past eleven on the 9 April 1962. Although the checkout receipt inscribed with the second fragment cannot be positively identified as being printed by the cash machine at checkout point number fourteen (the crucial upper part of the receipt which would have given this information having been torn away), the prima facie evidence points to Jock McCulloch as the author of the second fragment. He was after all in the vicinity and had the opportunity.
Resemblances, both stylistic and thematic to his elegiac “Fowerteen pints a weekend” reverberate through any reading of the second fragment.
Ida Idarsen, in her paper presented to the Stornoway Conference on Fragmentary Records (freely drawn upon here), brilliantly resolved a great many outstanding questions relating to the two fragments and in so doing created a firm foundation for future research. She deliberately left one major question unanswered however, and it remains unanswered as I write, “Fragments of what?”
