King's Lynn launch for book celebrating composer Ralph Vaughan Williams' works based on North End experiences

The story of the contribution made by the fishing communities of Lynn and West Norfolk to the works of great English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams has been told in a new book.

Penned by local historians Elizabeth James and Jill Bennett, 'A Norfolk Rhapsody: Ralph Vaughan Williams in King’s Lynn' was published this week, on the 150th anniversary of his birth.

It details the week he spent in West Norfolk in 1905 when he said he ‘reaped a rich harvest’ of songs and melodies.

It is the first to study in detail both the singers he met during that extraordinary week and the songs and tunes he collected, all researched and transcribed for the first time from his field notebook.

The book was launched at True's Yard fisherfolk museum because of the book's firmly established link with Lynn's North End.

Some 25 people attend the launch, including those who contributed their knowledge and research to the finished work, and others who were keen to read the work.

Joint-author Elizabeth James said: "We became aware many years ago, through performing some of the songs collected here in January 1905 by RVW, how few of them had ever been published.

"Our objective has been throughout to provide a publication which would include and explore them all and also reveal the lives – and lifestyle – of the individual singers he met who sang to him.

"To do that it was important to take the reader back in time and into the old North End itself, before it and its way of life vanished forever under 1960s redevelopment, and moreover to lay bare just what a special community was unappreciated and lost as a result: another good reason for holding our launch at True's Yard, which does such a sterling job in preserving its memory."

Other author, Jill Bennett, said: "So much of the North End has been swept away, but their stories and songs have not, thanks to Vaughan Williams."