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The Thirty-Foot Trailer

[Ewan MacColl]

This song from Ewan MacColl's radio ballad The Travelling People (1964) was sung by the Watersons (Lal, Mike and Norma Waterson and John Harrison) at their club Folk Union One in Hull. This recording by Bill Leader was published on their album The Watersons. Like all but one tracks from this LP, it was re-released in 1994 on the CD Early Days. It was also reissued in 1997 on the 3CD compilation New Electric Muse II and in 2004 on the Watersons' 4CD anthology Mighty River of Song.

The Watersons also sang The Thirty-Foot Trailer in 1965 on their BBC TV documentary video Travelling for a Living; this can be found on YouTube now:

A.L. Lloyd commented in the The Watersons sleeve notes:

A jaunty song written by Ewan MacColl for his radio ballad about gypsies and didikais, The Travelling People. The song is a lament, though not a heavy hearted one, for the old days and the picturesque old ways, the canting tongue, the horse-dealing, the clothes-peg whittling, the hawking of artificial flowers.

Inexorably the forces of economic and social change force the black-eyed, quick-fingered van-dwellers from the roads of Britain, once their birthright and heritage and it is only rarely, now, that one sees a battered waggon by the side of a busy road and a white horse nibbling the grass and leisurely swishing its tail as if it had all the time in the world. The Watersons swing out a tribute to their passing.

Isla St. Clair sang The Thirty-Foot Trailer in 1981 in the BBC television series The Song and the Story.

Lyrics

The Watersons sing The Thirty-Foot Trailer

The old ways are changing, you cannot deny,
The day of the traveller is over;
There's nowhere to go and there's nowhere to bide,
So farewell to the life of the rover.

Chorus (after each verse):

Farewell to the tent and the old caravan,
To the tinker, the Gypsy, the travelling man
And farewell to the thirty-foot trailer.

Farewell to the cant and the travelling tongue,
Farewell to the Romany talking,
The buying and selling, the old fortune telling,
The knock on the door and the hawking.

You've got to move fast to keep up with the times
For these days a man cannot dander;
It's a bylaw to say you must be on your way
And another to say you can't wander.

Farewell to the besoms of heather and broom,
Farewell to the creel and the basket,
For the folks of today they would far sooner pay
For a thing that's been made out of plastic.

Farewell to the pony, the cob, and the mare
Where the reins and the harness are idle;
You don't need a strap when you're breaking up scrap
So farewell to the bit and the bridle.

Farewell to the fields where we've sweated and toiled
At pulling and shoving and lifting,
They'll soon have machines and the travelling queens
And their menfolk had better be shifting.