Henry's Songbook

I went out to get some water
Get some water for my tea
I caught my foot and down I stumbled
A collier lad's come kissing me

My mother says I mustn't have a collier
It would surely break her heart
I don't care what my mother tells me
I'll have a collier for my sweetheart

If you leave your collier sweetheart
I'll buy you a guinea gold ring
You shall have a silver cradle
For to rock your baby in

I don't want your silks and satins
I don't want your guinea gold ring
I don't want your silver cradle
For to rock my baby in

Collier lads get gold and silver
Ferranti's lads get nowt but brass
And who'd be married to a lad from Ferranti's
When there are plenty of collier lads

My mother said I could be a lady
If from my collier lad I'd part
I'd sooner walk on the bottom of the ocean
Than I'd give up my collier sweetheart

Repeat 1

(as sung by Harry Boardman)

[1975:] This love song from Lancashire has some interest for the historian. In his book 'The Making of the English Working Class' Mr Edward Thompson quotes

"Collier lads get gowd and silver
Factory lads get nowt but brass."

.... as evidence that miners were frequently better paid than other workers. Yet at the same time, they were not held in high esteem by society. As the song shows a mother does not want her daughter to marry one - always a touchstone of a group's respectability. The miner was regarded as a rough, tough, hard-drinking individual who would more than likely meet a violent end. It is interesting to note that Harry Boardman, who has this song from his mother sings

"Collier lads get gowd and silver
Ferranti's lads get nowt but brass."

Harry is from Failsworth in North East Manchester and his father worked at Ferranti's electronic factory there - these women have wicked tongues. (Notes 'The Bonnie Pit Laddie')

[1978:] Text from William Oliver, of Widnes. Another, more fragmentary version was communicated by an ex-miner of Cwmynyscoy, Pontypool, formerly of Platt Bridge, near Wigan, who says the song was 'popular some fifty years ago among the collier boys and the girls who worked on the screens, and why the bit came in about the factory lads was because there were plenty of cotton mills around there at the time'. The song has some relation to the well-known Johnny Todd through common possession of the ring and cradle verses. (Lloyd, Miners 346)