This modern take on the Swing Riots of the 1830s raised eyebrows when Graham Moore performed it in Whitby Conservative Club, recalls Keith Laybourn.

Captain Swing
Graham Moore (Graham Moore, 1995)

In folk clubs circles, Graham Moore’s name is synonymous with songs of protest. Some may know him as a leading folk singer of fifty years standing, some as a co-founder of the Tolpuddle Martyrs annual festival, but most as the writer of classic songs on the oppression of the working class. Indeed, more than thirty years ago he wrote a musical called Tolpuddle Man. From it emerged some of the most memorable protest songs of folk music. I came across him twenty-five years ago as he performed his Tolpuddle set in the Conservative Club during the annual Whitby Folk Week. His first song, the hauntingly visceral The Wildwood, evoked no sense of alarm amongst our hosts. Tom Paine’s Bones elicited little concern – our hosts had clearly never heard of Tom Paine. Though they jibbed at the words ‘…King Georgy’s after me. He’ll have a rope around my neck and hand me on the liberty tree.’ Tolpuddle Man barely sounded the alarm bells for it was about the mass emigration of agricultural labourers in the nineteenth century. However, eyebrows were more than raised when Graham gave a rousing rendition of Captain Swing, about the Swing Riots, the hayrick burning by agricultural labourers in 1830 in their protest against the threshing machined that were likely to put them out of work. The song begins:

The sun’s gone down, the shutters drawn
The curfew bell has tolled
The fox is lurking round the farm
The barn owl’s wings unfurl
In the candle light tonight you might hear, to your alarm
The midnight band of Captain Swing as he rides from farm to farm
The ricks are burning, who’s the cause?
Captain Swing not I !

 (repetitive verse)

All over Dorset
The ricks are burning high, what’s the cause?
Captain Swing not I!

Graham continues to warble this song at Whitby Festival most years, as he did in August this year (2023), when he returned to the Conservative Club for one of his sets. Like the album it comes from, it represents the protest of the unheard and the oppressed though, by all accounts, gets less of a reaction than it did a quarter of a century before.

Keith Laybourn, University of Huddersfield and York St. John University