It’s late afternoon in Falmouth and out on the bay, the masts of sailing ships echo in the still, dark blue night. But things are a little livelier inside the Pennycomequick pub, an 18th-century public house and one of the town’s oldest drinking spots. The Barrel Seagals, an all-female group of seafaring shanties, sing to a hushed crowd the story of the Bencoolen, a merchant ship that sank off the coast of Bude in 1862. The ship is still written large in local folklore – the barrel, which was hoisted onto the ship’s mast, can still be seen from the beach. The music then gives way to dancing that appeals to all generations and continues well into the night.
The evening is part of the Falmouth Sea Shank Festivala weekend-long celebration of British maritime culture that was founded over 20 years ago. Fuelled by the TikTok craze for sea songs, the festival now sees the city’s pubs and outdoor stages packed with people hoping to witness the strangeness and cultural solidarity woven through sea songs.
The festival is part of a wider cultural renaissance that has taken place in Falmouth in recent years, as new restaurants and drinking places have opened. And so, having spent the school holidays on the south coast of Cornwall, battling rain, rock pools, freezing beaches and beer-laced commercialism, I am curious to see whether Falmouth can bring a real sense of folk heritage to British seaside holidays.
At first, the town’s main street, with its colourful bunting fluttering in the wind, seems peaceful. We pass old antique shops and wooden masts in the harbour, all dominated by Dunstanville Terrace, where imposing Cornish villas once housed officers of the British Empire’s postal service. Soon we hear the first funereal tones of the shanties floating through the air. They make the town seem otherworldly, like walking through a ship in a bottle. Moving between the pubs and open-air stages, which quickly fill up, we hear enthusiastic, well-harmonised renditions of the canonical shanties “South Australia” (thought to date from the 19th-century Australian gold rush) and “Leave Her Johnny”, a song that sounds like it’s about a woman but is actually about a ship (“Oh, times are bad and wages are low/Leave her, Johnny, leave her!”).
The next morning I sit down with Alan Ramsden, one of the original organizers of the Shanty Festival and singer of the The inhabitants of the Rum and Shrub favelasto watch the parade of sea songs down the main street. Dozens of singers float around carrying banners and instruments, singing rich harmonies. “I was always awakened every morning by the trampling of [the] “The boots of the boys who worked on the docks,” he says of his childhood on the street. Since then, the port has deindustrialised, Falmouth University has expanded and many of the old pubs along the main street have closed.
The songs are often as much about the loss of maritime industries as they are about celebrating them, Ramsden explains. Strictly speaking, sailors’ songs are not just nautical-themed songs, but have a specific call-and-response format used for the drudgery of work on a ship. A sailors’ song, from the French “chanter” (to sing), was originally a work song meant to bring some entertainment to boring work. Over time they would become valuable to foremen who wanted to speed up work on board, says Marek Korczynski, a professor of sociology at the University of Nottingham and author of a book on British work songs.
Cecil Sharp, the great English folklorist, helped popularise the songs and expurgate them, that is, clean them up for the Edwardian middle class, Korczynski says. The tradition was revived for a new generation in the 1950s and 1960s by performers such as Pete Seeger and Stan Rogers. Although the songs were often from Britain or Ireland, they were also distinctly international, with influences from black sailors and dockworkers from both the Caribbean and the American South.
These songs weren’t routinely sung on land, let alone on a stage sponsored by a local brewery. As Korczynski notes, they were often used as a way for sailors to express dissent, whether over rations, a cruel foreman, or pay. The shanties sung in Falmouth are tinged with a kind of melancholy for a shared culture that has long since disappeared. So what is driving the revival now? Korczynski says, “It’s the camaraderie of shared physical labor, for as manufacturing jobs are outsourced elsewhere, all we have left are these songs.”
But new energy is being injected into the songbook. Claire Ingleheart began writing new songs inspired by famous Cornish women after visiting the festival 10 years ago. She went on to found Women of the seaan all-female choral group. The younger generation of shanty singers “don’t want to sing just about whaling and prostitution,” she says. Ingleheart’s compositions pay homage to figures such as Ann Glanville, a 19th-century rowing champion, and Jenny Mopus, a Truro river boatwoman. Performances by Femmes de la Mer have become some of the most eagerly awaited of the festival.
Artist and curator Rhys MorganThe founder of the LGBTQIA+ sea shanty choir Seaweed in the Fruit Locker, he draws inspiration from queer stories. “There’s nothing queerer than a bunch of men singing a bunch of songs about a bunch of men who are alone at sea,” he says. There are plenty of sources to draw on: Herman Melville’s short story about the English sailor Billy Budd, with its undercurrent of homoeroticism; the legendary romance between two pirates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny, and the arrangement known as “matelotage,” a quasi-marriage between two male sailors used to protect one’s loot.
Some of the songs performed by Seaweed on the Fruit Locker also feature lyrics in Polari, a secret slang used by itinerant sailors, voyagers, and gay pleasure cruisers—“butch” and “naff” are believed to be Polari terms. “Seaweed” refers to a single gay sailor, and “fruit locker” to a cabin for gay sailors. The reception to this new tradition, Morgan says, has been overwhelmingly positive. “People seem to really like the subversion of it,” he tells me with a laugh.
We stopped singing traditional songs and retired to Hello!a seafood restaurant that chef and Falmouth local Finn Johnson recently opened on High Street. Named after a traditional Cornish fishing call that was used to alert sailors to a school of fish, the restaurant has antique wooden floors, candle-lit tables and a short seafood menu on the blackboard. Johnson says local tastes have been changing as a new generation of chefs and restaurateurs have begun to experiment with what it means to cook Cornish food, “in a neighbourhood style.” People are increasingly excited about the possibilities of Cornish produce and suppliers. In Johnson’s view, there has been a move away from large hotel restaurants that sell themselves on “location and tend to be overpriced and high volume, low quality.”
At Hevva!, we enjoyed a raucous dinner of salty dark crabmeat fritters, bright green asparagus with choron sauce, and red mullet with salsa verde, followed by a restaurant-closing DJ set by the chef himself. It is, in its own way, a rejection of the vacation-home economy.
At Johnson’s urging, we take another excursion the following evening, leaving the main street and heading up the lush residential streets of Falmouth to SupplierOpened nearly twenty years ago, its first incarnation was as an Italian delicatessen. Today, it is known for its cicchetti, or small Venetian plates, served after work on a sunny patio. Negronis and a vermouth menu accompany starters of rich anchovy fillets on toasted bread slices with red onion and crisp cherry tomatoes and a spiral sausage appetizer with a fennel flavor.
We ended up at the Old Brewery Yard, tucked away at the narrow end of the main street, which is home to Chintzthe city’s eccentric cocktail bar and restaurant. MineWe sit happily eating Cornish beef carpaccio and garlic-cream glazed lamb shoulder as a group of shanty-goers take to the stage in the red-lit courtyard. Dessert is an elderflower honey cake and we enjoy a plate of Cornish cheese as we watch the group mournfully sing “Barrett’s Privateers” to a cheering crowd.
On the last day of the festival, as the sun begins to set over Falmouth, we head to The Cornish Banka respected folk music venue. In the back garden, we see Simon the Shanty Harpist under a marquee. He turns out to be one of the weekend’s best. Freewheeling, raw and wry, he plays chilling covers of traditional songs (including a worn-out arrangement of “Hal-An-Tow”) and his own sharp, tragicomic compositions. “They’ve just sold the last of the fishermen’s cottages / You’ll never guess how much,” he sings.
Falmouth’s nascent food scene and lively culture offer a glimpse of a more experimental and urgent attempt to connect with the region’s rich maritime heritage. British seaside holidays can be daunting, but there is still something to be salvaged here.
Joshua Gabert-Doyon is an audio producer for FT podcasts