Songs about Engineering

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Norman –

Try this, which gives the rest of the err, song.

Billy Bean & His Funny Machine

According to Wikipedia the show, which apparently only ran for a year (1954), was based on an American children's TV show, to the extent that Billy was dressed as an American locomotive driver.

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There have been any number of folk-style songs written since the 1960s, romanticising various fields of work, sometimes inversely proportionately to the unpleasantness and dangers of the work portrayed – steel-making, deep-sea fishing, mining, etc. Although I like folk-music generally I've always thought these efforts rather pretentious and contrived,. and I cannot believe real steel-makers, fishermen and miners really sang about their work.

Somewhere I have a bootleg cassette, recorded by microphone in front of the wireless, of a 1970s BBC Radio Two Folkweave special devoted to a history of the Derbyshire lead-mining, which largely died out in the 19C. The narrative is fine provided you overlook that the compulsory " Somewhere Norf of Watford Gap Services " voice might not be Derbyshire at all. Oh Dear, though, the songs definitely owe more to the Ewan MacColl school of industrial-history than to any poetic inclinations among the men who climbed down the "dirty narrer shafts sometimes only two or three feet wide" to extract the ore, or who dug the impressively long (and still-active) Magpie Sough drainage adit that is described in the show.

[Why is that quote so memorable to me? I was especially interested in the programme thanks to my interests in industrial history and folk-music, but also as a caver who frankly finds a shaft as "narrer" as "only" two or three feet rather less intimidating to climb than one twenty or thirty feet across! I have also visited various old old metal mines and underground stone quarries, including one or two of the Peak District lead-ore workings.

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