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“Men must work…”

Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)

Clergyman, poet, and author Charles Kingsley grew up as a clergyman’s son. In his youth, he often witnessed scenes of fishermen lost at sea like that narrated in the song.  Later, he became a founder of the Christian Socialist movement in England. The January 24, 1904 edition of The New York Times contains a short article on the origins of “Three Fishers,” by then a popular parlor song of the Victorian era only recently concluded. The Times article merely represents the story as given earlier by London’s St. James’s Gazette, including a vivid depiction of fishermen trying and failing to race a fatal storm to shore. (That this article emerged half a century from the song’s beginnings testifies to the popularity of the song in the Victorian era, and to the fact that our kind of music writing is not without precedent.)

As to the genesis of the song itself, the article explains:

“In 1851 [Charles Kingsley] preached a sermon in a London church on ‘The Message of the Church to the Laboring man.’ At its close the Vicar arose and denounced him. Bishop Blomfield forbade Kingsley to preach again in his diocese until, having read the sermon and seen its author, he withdrew the edict of excommunication. The same night upon which he delivered the discourse Kingsley went to his home, weary. There had nearly been a riot in the church. Sick at heart, he retired to his study. When he reappeared he handed to his family his immortal song, ‘as though it was the outcome of it all,’ as his wife said.”

From this account, it appears that the poem emerged not only from Kingsley’s religious and political effort to dramatize the hard lives and perils of working people, but from a moment of professional insecurity on his own part. I don’t mean to suggest a false equivalence between his peril and that of his subjects in mentioning this, but it provides one plausible reading of why Kingsley opted to contrast men who work and women who weep in the concluding lines of each stanza. In this day, the song can sounds anachronistically gendered. The core sentiment overcomes that factor in most performances, though, alluding to the love of family that both calls us to stay close to them and calls us away to provide for them.

Three fishers went sailing out into the West,
Out into the West as the sun went down;
Each thought on the woman who lov’d him the best;
And the children stood watching them out of the town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And there’s little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbour bar be moaning.

Three wives sat up in the light-house tower,
And they trimm’d the lamps as the sun went down;
They look’d at the squall, and they look’d at the shower,
And the night rack came rolling up ragged and brown!
But men must work, and women must weep,
Though storms be sudden, and waters deep,
And the harbour bar be moaning.

Three corpses lay out on the shining sands
In the morning gleam as the tide went down,
And the women are weeping and wringing their hands
For those who will never come back to the town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And the sooner it ’s over, the sooner to sleep—
And good-by to the bar and its moaning.

The poem was soon set to music by John Pyke Hullah. Hullah’s arrangement appears in this performance by musicologist Derek B. Scott. Scott describes the song as a “Victorian parlor song,” which certainly fits its sound to modern ears. The “Three Fishers” of this era, and some of its earlier “folk” recordings very much create a feeling, at least today, of a song more about working people than of working people. It urges us to sympathy and pity more than solidarity and action.

Richard Dyer-Bennett‘s recording of the song reprises this rather proper cast, extracting a keen musical sentimentality from the lines.

Artists from the late 19th/early 20th century English recitalist Clara Butt (Spotify, YouTube) to American folk living legend Joan Baez (Spotify, YouTube) reprised the Hullah arrangement of the song, which remained quite popular through the Victorian era and after. As Scott states, the phrase “men must work and women must weep” became a widespread catchphrase. I can well imagine it as an aphorism of stiff upper lip humor offered as a household’s breadwinner departed for work each day.The song’s refrains and themes spread to other art forms, including the 1883 painting by Walter Langley at the start of this post. Langley was based in West Cornwall, and his visual interpretation of the “Three Fishers” scene is one of many paintings he created dramatizing the life of fishing villages. As the artistic summary provided by the Penlee House Museum says, he “excelled at watercolour, producing narrative works imbued with almost overwhelming pathos.”

D.W. Griffith adapted the song’s themes to a short, silent film, The Unchanging Sea (1910), starring Mary Pickford, which includes subtitles with lyrics from the song.

Griffith reworks the story to a much happier, if rather neurologically miraculous, ending. If a large swath of the audience knew of the song, the change to the happier ending is an interesting modification to the story–perhaps more in line for the expectations of motion pictures in their early days. Unlike with Langley, the audience in this case was not to be left with the pathos.

Garnet Rogers (Photo Credit: Bruce Dienes)

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