On Board the Kangaroo

I've found some surprising things on the bookshelves in the free stuff shed at our local dump, but The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin has to be one of the most unlikely. Published in Ireland in 2021 by Four Courts Press, it presents the repertoire of a renowned Irish singer and song collector who died in 1956, leaving behind an archive of recorded and written material encompassing some 200 songs, many of them in her native Irish. The book, compiled by her grandson Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, was issued along with two CDS, which, unfortunately, my copy lacks.

Cronin sang or collected versions of familiar English-language songs like "High Germany," "The Derby Ram," and "Green Grow the Rushes O," as well as pieces that are otherwise unknown; in some cases her song-lists preserve a title only. The song that leapt out for me was one she called "On Board the Kangaroo." When I saw this I recognized it and remembered that I had heard her name before, because when Christy Moore recorded the song with Planxty, under the title "The Good Ship Kangaroo," he mentioned that he had learned it "from the singing of the late Mrs. Elizabeth Cronin of Macroom, Co. Cork." He elaborates in his own song collection, One Voice:

Somewhere along the line I came to possess a recording of Mrs Cronin's beautiful singing. She had a unique sound, a beautiful voice combined with perfect diction and her singing in English was wonderfully coloured by the inflections of her native tongue. I simply love the way this woman sings.

The song in question is narrated by a man who signs up for a tour as cook and steward on the Kangaroo, and finds, when he returns months later, that his true love has run off with another man. The lyrics are quite colorful and funny:

Our ship it was homeward bound from many's the foreign shore
Many's the foreign present unto my love I bore
I brought tortoises from Tenerife and ties [sic] from Timbuktu
A China rat, a Bengal cat and a Bombay cockatoo

Paid off I sought her dwelling on a street above the town
Where an ancient dame upon the line was hanging out her gown
Where is my love she's vanished sir about six months ago
With a smart young man who drives the van for Chaplin Son & Co

Refrain:

I never thought she would prove false or either prove untrue
As we sailed away from Milford Bay on board the Kangaroo

The version of the lyrics above is from One Voice; I suspect that "ties" is a mistranscription of "toys." Below are recordings of the song by Planxty, from After the Break, and by Elizabeth Cronin:

There's no indication that Cronin ever claimed to have composed the song, although for years I assumed it was hers. Clearly it's too clever and polished to be a textbook example of collective invention and transmission; someone had to have written the song. But who? The extensive notes in The Songs of Elizabeth Cronin don't attempt to identify the original source.

As it turns out, for once we have a fairly definite answer. It was composed by an English music hall performer named Harry Clifton, and published as sheet music in 1865. The National Library of Australia has a copy, and portions of the lyrics are right there on the cover:

How Cronin learned the song may never be known, nor is it clear why Clifton's authorship of it was forgotten for so long, but no doubt the composer would have been tickled to learn that it is still being sung 150 years later.