Brighton Camp

Recorded by The Country Dance Band Leader: Nan Fleming-Williams under the auspices of the EFDSS

Duration: 2 min. 34.27 sec.

His Master’s Voice Folk Dance Series: “English Folk Dances for Young People” E.M.I. 7EG 8533 Side 1, Track 2.  [TEA1064: side 1; TEA1065: side 2] (n.d. 1959?)

Brighton Camp is familiar to a great many people as one or another popular song, both in the British Isles and North America but particularly as the military song The Girl I Left Behind Me. The title of the tune Brighton Camp (and no doubt the tune itself) seems to date quite specifically from 1758—to the dismay of Fuld, if he were still alive—and refers to one of nine short-lived military defence camps set up along England’s south coast during the Seven Years War of 1756-1763 (see: Winstock 1970, p. 67-68). In Morris Dancing Brighton Camp is usually a handkerchief dance.

As The Girl I Left Behind Me in O’Neill Waifs & Strays (1922), 36 (no. 52). G, 2/4. Anglo-Irish title, The Spalpeen Fanach. O’Neill’s set is elaborate, with variations by Jeremiah Breen, a famous blind fiddler of North Kerry.

In spite of that 1758 date and Wm. Chappell’s comments in Popular Music of the Olden Time (708 ff.), no 18th-century copy of text or tune has yet been located. A song “The girls we love so dearly”, p. 69 of The New Whim of the Night, 1799, calls for the tune, and I have not found the title earlier. There is a text of about 1805 among the 100 issues of the Charms of Melody, Dublin, c. 1795 -1811, but there is no Brighton Camp in this.

  The translation of the Irish Spaílpín Fánac is “The Rambling Labourer”, under which title it is in O’Neill Music of Ireland (1903), 52 (# 299), giving alternate titles The Girl (etc.), I Love my Love in the Morning, As Slow our Ship (from Thomas Moore’s song). Other words: “The Wicklow Rangers”.

The song “The Girl I left behind me” (begins “I’m lonesome since I cross’d the hills”) is in Chappell and other places. Another set (begins “The route has come, we march away”), by A. P. Graves, in his Irish Song Book (1895), 68. 3×8 lines.