Alfred Williams
Alfred Williams
(1877-1930)
Alfred Williams was born into hardship at South Marston, Wiltshire. Alfred was barely five years old when his father left his mother, and his half-a-dozen siblings. Rudimentary schooling increasingly gave way to the needs of his ailing family. He moved to Swindon to the better paid but soul-destroying industry of the Great Western Railway's giant works. Such hardships could not hold Alfred back; working in his spare time he learned the classics, read Shakespeare, experimented with painting, taught himself and in 1909 his first book was published - Songs in Wiltshire. It was well received but could not provide him with the income to allow him to leave factory employment.
It was the support of his friends and benefactors that made it possible for him to continue to publish, and through friends' efforts three different prime ministers heard of his plight, but were unable to authorise the permanent civil pension that would have made all the difference.
In 1914, dogged by ill health, Alfred was forced to leave the railway works and try to make ends meet through market gardening. This move freed Alfred to publish Life in a Railway Factory. His book gives us a window into what life was like for industrial workers on the eve of the First World War.
His poor health prevented him from initially enlisting, and so he wrote a series of war poems for the local press that were eventually published in book form as War Songs and Sonnets in 1916. He was sent to India after the Somme, where attitudes had changed, and here he was inspired to learn Sanskrit and wrote two books, neither of which found publication.
Importantly, he published two books Round About the Upper Thames (1922), and Folk Songs of the Upper Thames (1923), which featured the best of a vast collection of hundreds of folk song lyrics he had assembled prior to the war. His mission to help preserve the dying tradition of folksong was achieved by cycling around the area, mostly during the winter - a labour of love that now earns him celebrity status among folk song enthusiasts across Britain. He died after visiting his wife and childhood sweetheart in hospital where she was terminally ill. He was 53.
The Alfred Williams folk song notebooks are currently housed at the Swindon and Wiltshire History Centre. They cover the Thames Valley, Wiltshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire.
Browse Alfred Williams' collection in The Full English digital archive.
