MAYNARD George ‘Pop’
George ‘Pop’ Maynard – and Leigh: England’s Best Known Traditional Folk Singer
George ‘Pop’ Maynard was a folk-singing legend and he spent every summer for around eighty years at Moorden Farm. Pop was born in 1872 “on Old Christmas Day” – 6th January – in Surrey and he lived most of his 90 years in a rural cottage near Copthorne. His father was a seasonal agricultural worker and George followed the various trades. When asked what jobs he used to do, George said “Why woodcutting in the wintertime” – presumably this was mainly coppicing and George later mentioned the specialist skill of making hoops which held barrels together. “Then when spring of the year came around, we used to have a gang of flawers”. (These were farm workers who did any/all jobs). “Then after that I used to do barkatching”. (This involved stripping bark and cutting it into two/three inch long pieces, which were used for curing leather). “In summer, I’d do the harvesting and the hop-picking and pulling the poles . . .” He added that the other hoppers were a mixed lot – Londoners, gypsies, Irish labourers as well as locals. In the evenings and on Sundays, George tells of the drinking and the singing.
Pop had no ambition to be wealthy – yet he excelled at everything he undertook, both work and play. He was a famous shove-halfpenny player locally and in 1948 at the Tinsley Green world marbles championship which has been played there for hundreds of years on Good Friday, he won the first of many titles. Yet it was as a singer of English traditional songs he became best known. His repertoire was huge – initially learnt form his father but, as he had a fine ear and an outstanding memory, he picked up the tunes and words when he heard them sung by others – from other farm workers, from children, from ‘ballad sheets’ which were pedalled around the villages and, later, even music hall songs from the radio.
He said that his life-long connection with Leigh started when he was four – so around 1876. The whole family came over to Mr John Day’s Moorden Farm for the hop-picking. There are still two rows of old hop-pickers huts at the farm. The huts were certainly not luxurious but clearly the family loved the month each year they spent there – “a holiday with pay” there, as George said. When George’s wife was dying, George said perhaps they should not go to Leigh that year. However, his wife insisted. They went. She died shortly after they returned home, probably only in her forties. But Pop was still visiting Moorden until a few years before his death in 1962.
Luckily for us today, his songs survive – well over a hundred of them – both on record and in written form. The Historical Society will do what it can to bring them all alive again.
Chris Rowley (Parish Magazine article April 2021)