Obviously this isn't set in England, but spiritually this piece is within my English Football series. The first six episodes covered Nottingham Forest's 21st century woes, the dickpic that consigned Notts County to the non-league, a reignited rivalry between Derby County and Leeds United, Stoke City's legendary shithouse era, the English Golden Generation of the 00s descending into farce, and Wimbledon FC's controversial relocation to Milton Keynes
This spin-off piece follows on from the main question raised by the Wimbledon FC/MK Dons saga. When does a club stop being a club? Is it the legal entity or something rather more intangible? These were questions posed with regards to one of the titans of Scottish football earlier this decade.
Background - The Establishment Club
Rangers FC has long cultivated an image as Scotland's 'establishment club', it isn't just a sports team, but an institution that embodies a particular way of living and worldview. Alongside other institutions like the Church of Scotland, the club is perceived as embodying traditional and small-C conservative Scottish values. Alongside Celtic (more on them in a bit) Rangers have dominated Scottish football since the league started. No club other than the two Glaswegian sides has won the league since 1985. Rangers have 54 league titles, Celtic have 51. The joint 3rd best sides (Aberdeen and the Edinburgh pair Hearts and Hibernian) have just four a piece. And yet as a legal entity the club ceased to exist in 2012. What happened? Does Rangers FC still exist?
It would be impossible to tell this tale without telling the tale of the Old Firm and the profound political, cultural, and religious divides involved. Glasgow's two largest clubs have a rivalry that defies comparison to anything in the rest of Scotland or in England. Essentially Rangers FC and its supporters represent Protestantism and British Unionism, while Celtic FC are considered to be aligned with Catholicism and Irish Nationalism. When the two sides meet, the Scottish saltire is rarely flown by supporters. Rangers supporters prefer the Union Jack or Ulster Banner, Celtic fans are likely to fly Irish tricolours. It is as if somebody took the socio-cultural conflict of Northern Ireland and transplanted it into a football ground.
Which is sort of what happened. Ultimately a big factor was migration to Glasgow in the early 20th century - Irish Catholics in Glasgow set up Celtic FC as their club, while Protestants from Northern Ireland (who are historically of largely Scottish extraction) who worked in the shipyards of the Clyde came to adopt Rangers which was located near the shipbuilding areas. Local Scots, being generally Protestant, inclined to support Rangers and many would have shared the religious and political feelings of the newcomers from Northern Ireland. This has meant that at matches both clubs have sections of support who chant about the Northern Irish conflict - some Rangers fans have a 'songbook' including the Loyalist anthem The Sash (which commemorates King William III, the Dutchman invited to become King of England and Scotland who defeated a Catholic army at the Boyne in 1690), while Celtic fans might sing in support of the Irish Republican Army. This involves by no means the majority of supporters, but it is important in setting the atmosphere at games.
Rangers FC had until the late 1980s an alleged policy of not signing any player known to be a Catholic. This led legendary Celtic manager Jock Stein to joke that if offered a Catholic or a Protestant to sign for Celtic, he would sign the Protestant in the knowledge that Rangers would never sign the Catholic. I cannot find evidence of any player ever transferring directly between Celtic and Rangers in the postwar era, with the low number of players who have turned out for both having had a 3rd club in between. Another example of the intensity is the way in which the clubs traditionally share shirt sponsors. This sounds innocuous, but the only way to sponsor one of the clubs without triggering a mass boycott by the other supporters was to simply sponsor both.
No other football rivalry in Britain has a dynamic like this (Liverpool and Everton did to a far lesser extent before about the 1960s, but sectarianism largely died out there decades ago), even in the days when hooliganism was a serious blight on English football it never quite reached the sort of scenes on display at the 1980 Scottish Cup Final.
Which club is the 'biggest'? It is impossible to say. Rangers have had more League titles, but Celtic being the first British club to win a European Cup in 1967 is a fairly potent trump card. What is without a doubt is that they are the two best supported Scottish clubs and their rivalry is possibly like no other.
Chasing the Rainbow
Avid readers of this series will notice a theme. The 1990s were a boom time for football and everyone involved in the sport. TV revenue started to really take off, as did the prizes for winning European competitions. Many clubs sought to capitalise on the windfall and Rangers were no exception.
Their chairman, Sir David Murray, had become one of Scotland's weathiest businessmen by leveraging debts against future revenue. He spent big on Rangers in the hope that they would win a major European trophy and repay his investment. Top players like Paul Gascoigne came to Rangers where before it was fairly rare for big name players from other leagues to move to Scotland. Domestically his investments paid off, from 1989-97 Rangers won nine League titles in a row, equalling the record set by Jock Stein's great Celtic side between 1966-74.
Unfortunately this did not translate to the windfall a Champion's League win would have given. While Murray was bankrolling Rangers, other clubs around Europe were likewise chasing the new massive financial prizes. Rangers came close to getting past the group stage of the new Champion's League format in 1992-93, but no Scottish club would enter a Champion's League knockout round until Rangers do so in 2005-06.
The debts mounted and Murray sought ways to manage the debts and hedge them against future revenue anticipated from TV fees and European prize money. He allowed the Bank of Scotland to buy a stake in the club with a mortgage allowing them to recover their losses in the event of the club defaulting on its repayments. Nothing to worry about, surely? David Murray had become a wildly successful businessman by effectively managing credit lines and debt against future income to fund expansion.
But a far bigger problem was just three small letters.
EBT
Put simply, Employee Benefit Trusts are a way of not paying tax, it was legal in some cases at the time but is generally illegal now.
Murray sought, from 2000, to pay his players through EBTs. This meant that they would be able to offer high net wages to players while cutting tax costs. In Britain most employees have all their tax payments deducted by the employer, so schemes like this and ones where employees are paid in dividends are a way of essentially not paying tax.
By 2010 HMRC had begun to investigate the case, concluding that Rangers may have evaded £49m in taxes, a vast amount for a club already overleveraged in debt in a league not known for being particularly wealthy.
By about 2008 Murray had had enough of Rangers and was looking to sell up. He had gambled and lost huge amounts of money on the club, which was now saddled with huge amounts of debt. The prospect of paying £49m to HMRC if the courts ruled against Rangers deterred any serious buyer and it took some years for a buyer to emerge. Another serious issue was the sheer amount of debt Rangers had to Lloyds (who had taken over the Bank of Scotland), with fans in 2009 threatening a boycott of the banking chain if the bank called in its debts.
Would a buyer emerge and save Rangers from this predicament?
Well, a buyer would emerge in 2011. Not the other bit, sadly.
Enter Craig Whyte
Craig Whyte had once been Scotland's youngest millionaire as a venture capitalist. He bought the club for £1 from Murray but desperately needed to leverage some funds to settle the Lloyds debt, so he borrowed a cool £26.7m against future season ticket sales. This on the face of it should have set alarm bells, even the biggest clubs don't make huge amounts of money on matchday tickets in relation to their massive costs.
Whyte also indulged in a bit of tax fiddling. But rather than setting up an avoidance mechanism and letting the lawyers fight it out, he just stopped sending Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs the income tax payments for the club players and staff. Definitely not the sophistication of Murray.
Matters only got worse. In early 2012 BBC Scotland aired a BAFTA-winning documentary about Whyte and Rangers, which revealed that Whyte had been once banned from working as a company director for seven years. The Scottish Football Association agreed, Whyte was not a 'Fit and Proper' person to own a football club.
At about this time Rangers entered administration. When this happens in Britain, the company's creditors can agree to a 'Company Voluntary Arrangement' (CVA) which essentially means agreeing a plan for the company to continue operating while in administration so the creditors can recover their debts. HMRC, with the outstanding £49m tax case from Murray's era plus the money owed by Whyte's outright failure to pay tax, voted against allowing this to happen.
In the absence of a CVA and agreement with creditors, this meant that Rangers FC as a company ceased to exist in June 2012, with all assets transferred to 'Sevco Scotland Ltd'.
Could this have been avoided? In the end, the £49m owed to HMRC which proved such a millstone has been substantially reduced and the cases around it are still ongoing. But ultimately, Rangers had vast amounts of debt not just to HMRC.
For his part Whyte would be bankrupted by his loan to buy the club and would be faced with a far longer ban on acting as a company director.
Sevco FC?
Sevco inherited everything Rangers had. The players had an opportunity to transfer their employment to Sevco, which also gained Ibrox Stadium and Ranger's membership of the Scottish Premier League.
For the club owned by Sevco to be able to play in the SPL next season, 2/3rds of members had to vote in favour. Clubs such as Aberdeen, Dundee United, and Hearts bowed to fan feeling that Rangers could not continue where they left off. In the end, no club voted in favour of Rangers remaning in the SPL with only Kilmarnock abstaining. This event would generate a huge amount of bad feeling and bitterness from Rangers fans who felt that supporters of other clubs were content to throw them under a bus for reasons not of their making. There was definitely a sense of schadenfreude from supporters of other clubs, watching Scotland's 'Establishment Club' go to the wall.
Could Rangers join the Scottish First Division and gain promotion to the Premier League? First Division clubs didn't want to face the consequences of a Premier League problem, so they also rejected it.
In the end, the Scottish Football League allowed Rangers FC to rejoin the league in the Third Division, a largely semi-professional league three divisions below the Premier League. Their first competitive game was a Challenge Cup (competition for the two lower leagues in the Scottish Football League) tie against Brechin City, who represent a sleepy town of just 7,000.
Clawing their way back up
Most of Ranger's players had refused their statutory right to transfer employment to the new company. Nonetheless, the 2012-13 season started well with their first home league game setting a world record for the best attended fourth division match in history as over 49,000 attended Rangers vs East Stirlingshire. A strong league performance saw Rangers confirm promotion into the 3rd tier by the end of March.
2013-14 saw another promotion as Rangers had an unbeaten season in League One (the leagues were renamed at about this time) to secure promotion to the Championship, the first league which would be wholly filled with professional clubs after the mix of professional and semi-professional that plies their trade in Scotland's lower leagues.
Rangers didn't make it three back-to-back promotions as they lost a promotion play-off final 6-1 to Motherwell, one of Scotland's more successful non-Old Firm clubs who had suffered a stint in the 2nd tier.
During this season they met Celtic in the cup. Some Celtic fans placed an advert in a newspaper claiming that the 'Old Firm' was over and while they had enjoyed a rivalry with Rangers FC they did not recognise the new club as the same entity. This caused some controversy, not just with Rangers fans, but with Celtic fans who were indeed looking forward to the first Old Firm in some time. The accusation that Rangers were 'Zombies' or 'Sevco FC' would become a common one from Celtic supporters at games and remains as such.
Rangers won the 2016-15 Scottish Championship to secure promotion, while also beating Celtic in a Scottish Cup semi-final. But, the 'Gruesome Twosome' of Scottish football would once again grace the top flight together.
Same as before?
Celtic had done very well out of the previous few years. They had won a succession of League titles at a canter with the accompanying European qualification giving them financial muscle the other clubs couldn't compete with. Rangers finished a respectable 3rd, but Celtic once again dominated the league.
After an embarrassing elimination out of the Europa League at the hands of a semi-professional side from Luxembourg, Rangers didn't improve on their 3rd place and Celtic won again. It wasn't until 2018-19 that Rangers finished 2nd.
With Celtic winning again.
Could Celtic's domination be broken before they won 10 titles in a row and broke the record jointly held by 1960s-70s Celtic and 1990s Rangers? Perhaps not yet.
2019-20 started well, Rangers had a fantastic run in the Europa League under Steven Gerrard and beat Celtic at their ground for the first time since 2010. COVID put paid to an increasingly close title race with Celtic awarded the title based on Points Per Game with the season abandoned.
This season has very much been Ranger's season though. At the time of writing they seem, barring a miracle/disaster, overwhemingly likely to win the League this year and deny Celtic the coveted ten in a year.
Postscript
Is the Rangers FC of today the same club as that pre-2012? Displays from Celtic fans would say not, and as a legal entity it certainly isn't the same. But UEFA allows for 'sporting continuity' for a club in terms of identity and honours even if the holding company or corporate structure changes. This suggests something that many football supporters would agree with - a club is as much as community asset as it is a company or business and the stories we have looked at explore the issues when the business and the community collide.
Next time, we'll take a look at how Arsenal Fan TV revolutionised football social media while turning their club into a laughing stock

I don't know about anyone else but I enjoy listening to a podcast or watching the youtube videos reacting to the episode but I've been so frustrated watching them and people just not getting the British references whatsoever. For me it is two-fold, Americans not getting the British references and English people not getting Scottish references so I figured I would do put all the references I caught in a post for the sake of these poor international viewers (who I don't blame for not knowing the references) and the Vivienne.
Of course I am not going to get everything so if I have missed anything/got anything wrong please message below.
Lawrence says his jokes come from ‘a penguin chocolate bar’. This is pretty self explanatory - these are chocolate biscuits with cheesy jokes (similar to those in Christmas crackers) on the wrapper. TIL these were actually first made in Glasgow and Australians maybe familiar with Tim Tams which are based on the Penguin - thanks wikipedia.
Rupaul says Britain loves a big poll. Presumably he is referencing the numerous elections and referendums preceding filming. Generally elections in the UK are every 4-5 years however for many complicated reasons we saw a general election in 2015, 2017, 2019 as well as a Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and the Brexit referendum in 2016. The British public are very fatigued with elections.
Secretary of shade, Trade minister, Leader of the house of lording it up, Baroness basic obviously all plays on political posts. The house of Lords is the 'upper chamber' of the UK parliament as is very controversial as members are unelected and many of the members are hereditary peers.
Ru refers to the West End when explaining the task. This refers to the West End of London where many of the cities theatres are concentrated and is pretty much the British equivalent of Broadway.
Rats the Rusical: clearly a reference to the musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber, one of the longest running musicals in both the west end and on broadway. If you are not familiar with Andrew Lloyd Webber please take some time to do so he is a very eccentric character. I would recommend his judging on BBC shows Over the Rainbow as well as the ones looking for Joseph (of the dreamcoat) and Nancy (from Oliver), I don't know if you can actually watch these anywhere but plenty of clips on youtube and Andrew Lloyd Webbers facial reactions are priceless.
Evita von Fleas (Veronica character) a portmanteau of Evita (another Lloyd Webber musical about the life of Eva Peron) and Dita Von Teese (the burlesque dancer).
Dame Dudy Stench (Ginny's character): A play on Dame Judi Dench, one of cast in the original production of Cats, and internationally known actress.
Not a reference (that I know of) but I enjoyed Tia calling Ellie diamond, Eleanor Elizabeth Rhinestone!
Sack of spuds: Spuds is a slang term for potatoes - either this or Tayce is referring to Baga Chipz mum.
Lawrence talks about people making fun of his accent but not making fun of Ellie's because they don't understand her. I thought I would give a local (Glasgow) perspective on this. Dundonian (native to Dundee) accents are notoriously difficult to understand but Ellie actually does not have a thick accent at all, presumably she is from a middle-class background as I don't think her accent reads particularly as Dundonian. Similarly Lawrence does not have a typical Glaswegian accent, in fact I was surprised to hear he was from Glasgow after hearing him speak, Lawrence certainly has a thicker accent (although it does feel a little put on) but it does not automatically read as Glaswegian. I did in fact discover Lawrence is originally from Helensburgh a relatively small town about 30 miles from Glasgow towards a much more remote area of Scotland (Argyll) which may explain the accent not being typically Glaswegian. I know you guys didn't ask for an essay on this but....
Both Lawrence and Sister Sister refer to 'bricking it'. I'm not sure if this is a British term but similar to 'Shitting a brick'. it means being terrified/extremely nervous.
Tayce is asked if she is more of an Elaine Paige or a Jane Mcdonald. Elaine Paige is a very well know musical theatre actress who also was in the original cast of Cats. Jane Mcdonald found her fame on a 90s documentary about a cruise ship on which she was an entertainesinger. Nowadays she presents on TV and releases corny albums of cover songs.
Cherry discusses with Sister Sister her traveller background. Travellers (also known as gypsies) are in fact not just one group of people, predominately in the UK they are Romani or Irish travellers, however I am also aware of Highland travellers and showpeople (who travel with their fairgrounds). These are all distinct groups of travellers and Cherry does not explain her background any further so we do not know which group she is from. Travellers often(but not alway) live in caravans and often (but not always) travel to find work. There are a lot of stereotypes and prejudices about gypsy travellers and to complicate matters some of these stereotypes can be quite real - there are numerous troublesome aspects of gypsy culture as demonstrated in Cherry talking about toxic masculinity in the community. I recommend the book Gypsy Boy by Mikey Walsh that talks about growing up gay in a traveller community. Sister asks if it is ok to say 'gypsy' as this can be considered to be a racial slur. Most peoples awareness of the traveller community in the UK will come from the TV show My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.
The guest Sheridan Smith is an actress who started her career in sitcoms and has since moved on to become a successful west end star in recent years. EDIT: Sheridan starred as Cilla Black (see below in a 2014 series about her life and this is likely the reason for the runway theme
Alan Carr mentions '5 guys named Moe' - I didn't get this but apparently it is a musical.
The runway name 'Surprise Surprise' was taken from a TV show presented by Cilla Black from 1984 to 2001 and would help people fulfil their wishes - surprise! Cilla was a singer in the 60's friendly with the Beatles (I think she worked in the cavern club) who had some success but was far more successful hosting both this show and Blind Date for many years. You may recognise the name from the Vivienne talking about possibly doing her for snatch game last series. She had a very distinct voice and was much loved, she would make a brilliant snatch game character. Here she is with a much younger Lorraine Kelly.
In the musical they make reference to the terrible Cats film - pretty self explanatory.
Depravity and Dysentry/Diptheria's section is clearly a reference to The Prodigy - Firestarter. I can remember this song coming out as a child and it being very controversial. I'm not sure if the prodigy were successful internationally but they certainly were here.
Runway references:
Awhora:
Freed the slaves - reference to Abraham Lincoln, I don't think this made sense on a UK show
Gentleman Jack of all trades - refers to a BBC drama Gentleman Jack about Anne Lister a 19th century landownediarist/lesbian from Halifax.
Robber bridegroom - apparently a fairytale, I didn't get this reference.
EDIT: Robber Bridegroom)
Lawrence:
Saltire - the Scottish flag (St. Andrews cross)
Bravetart - Referring to the historically inaccurate film Braveheart about the Scottish wars of independence
Och aye the noo-noo - Och aye the noo - a phrase never used by Scottish people but is used as a stereotype by people attempting a Scottish accent. It literally means 'Oh yes, just now'. Alan changes it to noo-noo to make it sound like a ladies private parts?
Bagpipes in the shagpipes - I don't know if shagpipe is an actual thing or whether its just a play on the traditional scottish instrument to make it sound like a penis (to shag is less offensive was of saying to fuck in UK)
License to Kilt - License to Kill, James Bond play on words with Kilt - traditional highland wear
Ginny:
Mrs. Overall - Please watch Acorn Antiques this is a character played by Julie Walters in a sketch show with Victoria Wood. Very funny.
Croc Destroyers - I'm sure you all know the Cock Destroyers by now
Darling bums of May - Darling Buds of May, a novel and 90s TV series that I don't know much about other than it having Catherine Zeta Jones in it.
Asttina:
Asttina's runway is a mortal kombat character - sorry but I don't know this reference either
EDIT: Mileena from Mortal Kombat.
Ninja with a minja - Minge is British slang for vagina
Tayce:
Mingeavitis - see above
Bimini:
Alexander Mcqueen
​
Michelle says Tia's costume looks like it comes from Angels - this seems to be a fancy dress (costume) shop in London - I'd be surprised if anyone outside of London knew the reference. I certainly had to look it up, it seems pretty obscure. EDIT: See comment below apparently they also produce costumes for theatre and film.
Sheridan says 'Maybe I am thick'. In this context thick means stupid, I'm not sure if this term is used elsewhere.
Wow that took me longer than expected and I ran out of steam a bit at the end there. If you think its useful I will do for episode 1 too, if not I won't because that took a long time! Haha. Let me know if I have missed anything and I can add it in!

Previous Results

1945 – Sir Archibald Sinclair (Liberal)
1950 – Clement Davies with 50% of the vote
1951 – Clement Davies with 58% of the vote
1955 – Sir Anthony Eden with 67% of the vote
1959 – Harold Macmillan with 75% of the vote
1964 – Jo Grimond with 73% of the vote
1966 – Jo Grimond with 70% of the vote
1970 - Jeremy Thorpe with 53% of the vote
1974 (Feb) - Jeremy Thorpe with 62% of the vote
1974 (Oct) - Jeremy Thorpe with 63% of the vote
Last week the results were: Jeremy Thorpe (Liberal) 63% Edward Heath (Conservative) 25% Harold WIlson (Labour) 12%
The Con vs Lab result was, Harold Wilson (Labour) 37% Edward Heath (Conservative) 63%
The Actual results from 1974 (Oct) were:
Labour: 319 seats, 39.2% of the vote
Conservative: 277 seats, 35.8% of the vote
Liberal: 13 seats, 18.3% of the vote
SNP: 11 seats, 2.9% of the vote
Plaid Cymru: 3 seats, 0.5% of the vote

Profiles

• James Callaghan is the 67 year old current Prime Minister, and Leader of the Labour Party, a post he has held since 5th April 1976
  
• Margaret Thatcher is the 53 year old Leader of the Conservative Party, a post she has held since 11th February 1975
  
• David Steel is the 41 year old current Leader of the Liberal Party, a post he has held since 7th July 1976
  

Background

• 1974 (Oct) – The second election of 1974 resulted in a slim Labour victory, with a majority of only 4 seats. This was a blow to Harold Wilson who had expected a much more comfortable margin, but with both parties exhausted and the country having little appetite for more elections Wilson accepted his victory. The Liberals who had hoped for “One More Heave” saw the loss of a seat, and Billy Wolf’s SNP saw a gain of 4, but he once again lost his own attempt to enter Parliament.
  
• The Iron Lady:
  
• Well it’s been a while since a leadership position last changed hands and here we have the first of three. Margaret Thatcher rose to prominence as Heath’s Education Minister, having been chosen as a hard-working and intelligent backbencher worked her way up as spokeswoman for various departments, she was then chosen by the US for its Foreign Leader Program - an exchange program which saw her tour the US and meet with various notables such as Nelson Rockafeller, and the IMF. Thatcher created a favourable impression on the Americans and gained a position on Heath’s Shadow Cabinet. As Education Secretary Thatcher was hard working and stuck to her remit, although she was perhaps best known for cancelling the programme of free school milk for children (she herself argued she was continuing a Labour policy as they’d cancelled the programme in secondary schools). After the Feb 1974 loss Thatcher was downgraded to Shadow Environment Secretary - perhaps a reflection of her and Heath’s frosty relationship. But what was meant to be a downgrade caused Thatcher’s star to rocket. Thatcher proposed a new policy of abolishing the rates system which was a property tax, and for it to be replaced by a new tax based on income (although the latter part was sometimes left out).
  
• Thatcher unveiled this policy during August when the rest of Parliament was on holiday and hoovered up the media’s attention with little else going on politically. As I discussed last week she also notably tore into Dennis Healey’s budget, which gained her great acclaim as Healey was seen as a formidable debater. Thatcher was aided by the fact that she never believed she'd be leader. The contest after Heath had already seemingly been set in stone: WIllie Whitelaw vs Keith Joseph. I’ve touched on Whitelaw previously but he was seen as a consensual centrist, whereas Joseph was the leader of the Conservatives’ right. However, after the October 1974 election, Joseph torpedoed his budding campaign in a series of controversial interviews, during one of which he argued poor people should stop having children because it diminished the British racial stock. The fact that Thatcher stood despite not being considered a forerunner for Leader meant that she avoided accusations of scheming or being power-hungry despite her political manoeuvring.
  
• Thatcher’s policy of scrapping taxes during a dismal campaign where 2 parties fought over who was the least unpopular brought her great acclaim and she was heavily featured in the Conservatives TV broadcasts (see my last post). This fame allowed her to take the unprecedented step of challenging Heath in 1975. Heath had assumed he’d stay on as leader, and most of his cabinet fell in line out of loyalty to him, but after losing 3 out of 4 elections most Conservative backbenchers were itching to get rid of Heath who as discussed previously could be unbearably haughty and arrogant. The contest with Thatcher brought out the worst of Heath as he failed to hide his disdain for the (as he saw it) annoying woman with right-wing views. Thatcher could sense the backbenchers had enough of Heath however and her image shown in TV broadcasts of the wife and mother cleaning up in the kitchen before whipping off the apron and dashing out for a business meeting struck a chord with many people along with her previous fame for scrapping taxes and coming across well in party broadcasts. Thatcher also managed to channel the anger of the right of the party who had stuck with Heath after he sacked Powell and then been disappointed by Heath’s u-turns while in power, and his shift to the left in the contests of 74. The heavyweights of the Conservative party dutifully fell in behind Heath and were stunned when he lost the first round of voting in a surprise upset. Heath withdrew and other candidates such as Whitelaw piled in but Thatcher had the momentum on her side, and for her courage in challenging Heath she won the second round and became Leader of the Conservative Party.
  
• But what does Thatcher believe, and how is she as a leader? Those within the Conservative party saw her as a figure of the right due to her monetarist policies and sympathies for Enoch Powell but the larger public had little idea of what she stood for. Thatcher embarked on a series of lengthy political interviews with journalists and commentators to advocate for her positions. Thatcher loved debating commentators so much she extensively appeared on the American show Firing Line, hosted by William F. Buckley. The show was only broadcast in the US so it had no political advantage for Thatcher but she enjoyed honing herself in TV debates. In this way Thatcher is totally different from Wilson, Heath, and Callaghan. Heath loathed TV appearances and could go a whole year as Prime Minister without ever giving an interview or putting himself on TV. Wilson disappeared after the 1970 election and tried to fade into the background of the referendum on the Common Market because he despised journalists and knew how much the public were sick of him. Callaghan did not avoid the press as much but was known to be a quiet figure who rarely made appearances. Thatcher’s outstanding quality during this period is her abilities as a political communicator and teacher, and her ability to frame issues. The policies she advocated for were radical, and are very different to the manifesto’s we’ve gone through before (briefly the “Post-war consensus” consists of a “Tripartite” agreement where managers represented by the CBI and trade unions are consulted before economic decisions are made, full employment is maintained through Keynesian economics trade unions are regularly consulted by the government on policies and are given widespread powers, and a strong welfare state is maintained through high taxes. Thatcher in effect opposes all of this), but Thatcher was able to frame her policies in a way which seemed completely normal, and appealing.
  
• Her economics were not just about numbers for example but freeing the people and giving them power. When asked if she was a pragmatist she replied ‘I’m a pragmatist in the true sense of the word… putting your principles into practice.’ When asked if she was right-wing she replied ‘Define what you mean by right-wing… you can’t look after hard-working people unless you create enough wealth to do so… My views don’t differ very much from Iain Macleod/ If you want lower taxes it’s called right-wing… If you support the police it’s called right-wing… If you want to sell council homes it’s called right-wing… If you want to uphold standards in education it’s called right-wing… If you call that right-wing, I’m right-wing.’. When discussing her housing policy she declared “property is freedom”, when discussing the economy she claimed Britain’s economy was struggling because something had “gone wrong spiritually and emotionally”. She declared she would not suffer disagreements from her cabinet. Heath and others scoffed at Thatcher for being overly simplistic and ignoring the realities of governing, but over the inertia of the political scene, Thatcher’s policies were seen by the public as bold and exciting. But Thatcher could only pursue these policies because at the time the British economy and political system were in total crisis and so a rethink made sense to voters. Elsewhere Thatcher was more careful, her cabinet, for example, contains more “wets” and “Heath-men” than natural allies. I should also note that by this point Margaret Thatcher is not seen as “The Iron Lady” or a particularly strong, or tough woman. At the announcement of her victory, she pulled out a feather duster and cleaned the stage to laughter, and when first called “The Iron Lady” she mocked the term and pointed out her done-up hair, her expensive dress, and her make-up. Thatcher’s image will change over the next few years. In summary, Thatcher is a bit of an unknown quantity but is seen as representing a clear break from Heath, and as someone with very clear principles, but also perhaps inexperienced.
  
• In or Out? - As promised after his victory Wilson eventually held a referendum on Britain staying or leaving the Common Market. This had been devised by Wilson to help keep the Labour party together which was split almost 50-50 on the issue. Both sides, however, saw a referendum as a way of solving the issue, and Wilson believed it’d let some of the tension out of his cabinet. Wilson largely took a backseat and let his cabinet members appear on TV to fight one another, intervening sparingly in favour of “Yes” (or remaining within the Common Market). Wilson had held off on a referendum until every available poll showed “yes” would win and in the 3rd election in 11 months the British public voted to stay within the Common Market
  
• Big Jim - Wilson then rather abruptly stood down as Labour leader. It’s still unclear why exactly Wilson stepped down. It may have been because his wife was ill, he developed colon cancer, or the realisation he was developing Alzheimers, and there are other reasons as well. As I’ve mentioned before Wilson’s cabinet was one of the most stacked in history and there were several candidates to succeed him the Labour party was split into 2 main ideological camps with the “soft right” being the largest. The left were split between Tony Benn and Michael Foot. Benn was a young charismatic maverick, and the darling of the hard left, whereas Foot was seen as a figure of the left who could still unite the party and therefore won the first ballot. On the right, there were 4 candidates although Anthony Crosland is pretty irrelevant. The main figures were the Chancellor Dennis Healey who was busy writing a budget and had just had a public spat with the left-wing magazine “Tribune” who were one of the main voices behind the “No” campaign which tarnished him. Roy Jenkins was one of the favourites to win, Wilson’s modernizing Home Secretary who legalised homosexuality a few posts ago. Jenkins had been the right’s standard-bearer but had voted against a Labour whip to vote yes to entering the Common Market when Heath was Prime Minister, and then resigned as Deputy Leader when Wilson committed Labour to re-negotiating Britain’s entry. Jenkins was therefore seen as disloyal and divisive among the party. Callaghan was a steady, safe pair of hands. A figure of the right but one who’d opposed British membership into the Common Market and led the trade unionist charge against “In Place of Strife” making him a figure the left could fall behind, and as the oldest candidate was seen as someone who’d maybe lead Labour into another election but would resign relatively soon, giving the other contenders another crack at leadership anyway. He had also been unofficially endorsed by Wilson, so when Jenkins withdrew after the first round of voting Callaghan hoovered up his support and went on to win.
  
• Thorpe to Steel - And finally we have the bizarre case of the Liberals change in leader. During the 60s Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe had a homosexual affair with a man called Norman Scott, then a criminal offence. MI5 tracked the two but took no action. When Thorpe became leader Scott resurfaced and tried selling his story but was turned down by newspapers due to the story being difficult to confirm and old news, but these rumours distressed Thorpe. Thorpe took money from a Bahaman millionaire to help cover his party’s election expenses and then gave the money to an airline pilot who promised to assassinate Scott. The pilot bungled the attempt however and ended up shooting Scott’s Great Dane. In court Scott testified that he believed the shooting had been motivated by his affair which made his relationship with Thorpe public knowledge. The pilot then sold his story the next year when he was released and the pressure made Thorpe step down as leader, although prominent Liberal figures defended him. The case eventually goes to court in 79 but the case is handled poorly, with Scott also bizarrely claiming that Thorpe infected him with the lifelong disease of homosexuality and should therefore pay for his care for the rest of his life. Thorpe is acquitted but is widely perceived as being guilty and the Liberal leadership goes to great lengths to distance themselves from him. The subsequent leadership election was won by David Steel who had been Thorpe’s chief whip and foreign affairs spokesman. Steel was a popular progressive figure, perhaps most notable for writing and proposing a bill which legalised abortion in 1966 but he’s not as charismatic as Thorpe, who after achieving the Liberals’ best modern result has badly tarnished its image.
  
• The Economy Stupid - The economic crisis we’ve discussed in the last few posts as a result of the oil crisis and stagflation continued into Wilson and Callaghan's government, but the resignation of Wilson made things worse as creditors lost confidence in Pound Sterling and it was temporarily pulled from being able to be converted into other currencies. In order to try and restore confidence, Callaghan instituted a program of austerity with widespread government cuts but the pressure continued and in 1976 the government was forced to ask the IMF for a hefty loan to keep going. The IMF agreed on the condition of more cuts which were implemented. Many in the Labour cabinet were opposed to both of these series of cuts and Callaghan employed the tactic of letting his opponents talk themselves into circles until eventually, it became clear that cuts were needed, however, this tactic resulted in extremely lengthy meetings where the cabinet seemed to endlessly debate amongst itself, leading to Thatcher’s aforementioned comments about not allowing much dissent within her cabinet. With the world economy improving, Labour’s cuts, the strengthening of the Pound, and a pay freeze (more on that Labour) inflation began climbing down from a peak of 26% in 75 to 7.8% in 78. Unemployment began falling and the economy as a whole began improving which led to an uptick in Labour’s polling, with polling in 78 showing Labour slightly ahead or a hung parliament likely. But by 1979 unemployment rose to 5.5% and inflation hit 13.39% and the economy began faltering again.
  
• The Lib-Lab pact - Although the Labour party had won a majority of 4 seats this was quickly whittled away due to by-election defeats, with the Labour Parliamentary Party elected in Oct 74 being notably older than usual. To combat this Callaghan negotiated with the SNP and Plaid Cymru, Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties, agreeing to referendums on Scottish and Welsh devolution and the prospect of creating a Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly in return for their backing on key votes. In 1977 an agreement was also made with the Liberal Party for the Liberals to back key votes such as the budget to keep Labour in power, an exchange for a joint Liberal-Labour committee which would examine government policies and legislation. It has been suggested that Steel as a new, young leader was naive to agree to this agreement as it didn’t give the Liberals much real power, but after the Thorpe affair, Steel believed close cooperation with the government would help the Liberal party rebuild its legitimacy. The pact, however, was unpopular with activists within both parties. The prospect of an election was growing more likely, and it was believed Callaghan no longer needed the Liberals. The Scottish and Welsh nationalists would wait until their referendums on devolution, and the upcoming boundary review was predicted to give Northern Ireland more seats so the Northern Irish parties would hold off, it’d also give Labour roughly 6-8 seats too so the Labour party wouldn’t try to bring him down beforehand, and MPs in both parties from marginal seats were nervous about an election. Just 15 months after it was agreed to the pact was terminated in August 1978.
  
• The Social Contract - In order to prevent the chaos of the Heath years Harold Wilson devised a “social contract” with the trade unions. The Industrial Relations Act was repealed and new protections were given to unions such as protections over picketing and “closed shop” practices where an employer agrees to only hires members of a specific union, and workers are forced into remaining members of that union otherwise they’ll be fired. Labour also agreed to pass legislation which favoured trade unions and carried out social policies which they agreed to, in return the unions would review pay every 12 months instead of just striking constantly. Miners were also given a further 35% pay increase to keep them happy. The unions agreed to this, and then to an “incomes policy” where the government and unions agreed to restrain themselves when it came to giving pay raises. This somewhat surprisingly worked and the trade unions kept to the agreement despite significant drops in real wages.
  
• The election that never was - by 1978 Callaghan had caught up to the Conservatives in opinion polls and as mentioned previously was slightly ahead or level with them. This is due to the low levels of striking and industrial actions, the improving economy, Callaghan himself whose calm and relaxed demeanour even during crisis reassured voters who felt as though they could trust him, and also Margaret Thatcher’s unpopularity with voters with her personal polling not being very impressive. By 1978 there was serious media speculation that Callaghan would call for an early election and Callaghan seriously considered one. He consulted widely but opinions were mixed. David Steel actually told him to go for an election, and most of his cabinet agreed, although the more prominent members didn’t want an election. As mentioned previously Callaghan’s position was seen as safe, and he personally didn’t believe the polls that suggested he would gain a majority. Callaghan believed there would probably be a hung Parliament again and that this would lead to more negotiations with other parties which he was exhausted at the prospect of after negotiating with the Nationalists and with the Liberals. Callaghan therefore decided to hold off until 1979 and let the economy improve some more. At the 1978 Trade Union Conference Callaghan was set to give a speech and it was expected he’d announce a general election, Callaghan instead made a joke, telling the conference that the commentators had set the date and the election but Marie Lloyd (a singer) had set the time and the event but that they all knew what happened, he went on to sing the song “Waiting at the Church” in a moment hailed as showing his domination of the political field.
  
• The Winter of Discontent - ...But that social contract did not last forever. In 1978 the agreement was due to be renegotiated and with the economy improving the unions believed it was time to loosen the belt. Callaghan without consulting anyone decided on a rather arbitrary limit of 5% pay rises at most for workers. Union leaders refused to accept this, knowing that it’d lead to their members turning on them and the head of the transport union asked who James Callaghan was to tell him he should refuse the pay increases he’d negotiated for his workers. The dam broke when Ford workers went on strike demanding a pay raise of 30% due to the companies growing profits and the fact that Ford’s chairman had just raised his pay by 80%. Ford offered the 5% the government had advised but the workers refused to accept it and eventually settled at 17%. The consequence for breaking government policy should have been sanctions for both the union and the company but when this was voted on in Parliament Labour’s left backed the unions and Callaghan was defeated. This meant that there was no pay restraint for the private sector but that public sector workers pay was still capped, which led to a strike at the BBC with workers threatening to go on strike over Christmas and not play the Sound of Music which BBC had just bought the rights to. A pay freeze only for public sector workers could not hold and limits were withdrawn. What followed were a massive wave of strikes with over 29 million days of work lost from January-February as different unions began striking to secure the pay rises that other unions had secured, culminating in a national “day of action” where 1.5m workers went on strike at the same time. At the same time, one of the coldest winters on record swept the country with temperatures hitting an average -14 degrees celsius or 57.2 Fahrenheit. The UK was buffeted with storms and heavy snows just as the strikes began. Lorry drivers went on strike and demanded a raise of 40% which caused petrol stations to shut down due to distribution issues, and food stores to be stripped empty as people began panic buying. Cities were blockaded stopping all movement in or out and the strike also meant cancer patients could no longer receive chemotherapy. Gravediggers went on strike which saw bodies being dumped out in the open and discussions were held on how they could bury people at sea instead, binmen went on strike so garbage was simply dumped in the streets, hot water supplies were disrupted so people had to boil water instead, nurses went on strike and blockaded hospitals, then ambulance drivers went on strike. Workers walked out en-masse in St. Ormond’s Street Hospital, leaving the sick and dying children to lay inside alone. After this formerly left-wing Labour MPs even began to give speeches in the House saying the unions were going too far.
  
• Crisis? What Crisis? - What was Callaghan doing during all of this? Well, he was at an economic conference in the Caribbean where the press took photos of him gleefully sunning his toes and posing with beach babes. Callaghan had no idea of what was happening in the country and when he returned he decided to give a press conference straight after getting off his plane. During the conference Callaghan scoffed at journalists for asking if he should have come home, claiming they were jealous, brushed off a question about mounting chaos and then laughed about it, asking if he’d be able to find a cup of coffee with all the chaos the journalists were braying about. Callaghan’s cool and calm nature had won the public over during previous crises but this press conference seemed beyond the pale for voters who’d had images of blizzards, empty shelves, and cities being left to starve seared into their minds. When Callaghan soaked in the scale of what had happened he told his press secretary he’d let the country down. When told if Labour kept their heads and fixed things they’d still be able to win the next election Callaghan murmured “I’m afraid we might”, and he refused to give a televised statement on the chaos, asking how he’d give an address admitting his policy had collapsed. During the crises, Thatcher appeared on television to put forward a programme of restricting union powers. By the election, 82% of the public believed the unions were too powerful and Labour were 20 points behind the Conservatives. The day after Callaghan’s conference The Sun ran the headline “Crisis? What Crisis?” Callaghan never said the words during the conference although The Sun claimed he’d said them to a journalist afterwards in private. But the headline summed up what many thought of Callaghan’s response and it formed the basis of one of the Conservative’s most iconic political broadcasts which I’d highly recommend watching to understand the narratives at play during this election, and so you can see the images of the Winter of Discontent
  
• No Confidence - As the strikes petered out referendums were held in Scotland and Wales on devolution. The Welsh referendum was voted against outright whereas the vote in Scotland passed but did not meet the required threshold to implement a Scottish Parliament so Labour blocked it. This led to the SNP calling for a motion of no confidence in Big Jim, who claimed that they were turkeys voting for Christmas. The motion was a tense affair and there are many stories about how one or two decisions could have changed history but in the end, the motion passed by 311 votes to 310, and a general election was called. With the Conservatives jeering the young Labour MP Neil Kinnock leads his party in singing The Red Flag. Harold Wilson is asked for his thoughts and he murmurs that he thinks his wife will vote Conservative because they’re led by a woman. The Labour party is not particularly happy with his contribution
  
• The Campaign - The Campaign itself is relatively uneventful. The Conservative Party employs the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi who come up with the poster “Labour isn’t working which becomes iconic and is reused in later elections. Thatcher is also trained in lowering her voice to make it sound more commanding, but Thatcher isn’t quite the Iron Lady yet and isn’t a natural at campaigning. Callaghan comes off as by far the most experienced and like Wilson in 74 tries to focus on prices rather than larger ideological debates. One of his advisors told Callaghan he thought they could win it due to Callaghan’s campaigning but Callaghan replied that once every generation there was a sea-change in politics when what people wanted completely shifted and that they were experiencing that now. Before the election Thatcher gave a speech claiming that there was a worldwide revolt against big government and bureaucracy and that now they were witnessing the end of an era, and throughout the campaign the Conservative party focused on promising a radical break from the past whereas Labour promised continuity, flipping the party’s traditional roles.
  

Issues

Labour:

• Strengthen price controls, radically reform the European common agricultural policy and work with the trade unions to hit a target of 5% inflation to get prices under control.
• Setup regional development agencies and plans with companies to increase employment, “work for an international agreement under which all countries are helped and encouraged to expand their economies to the limit of their productive capacity and so stimulate world trade”, continue with job creation schemes, move towards a 35 hour work week, expand the national bank “Girobank” to compete with private banks, protect employees from unemployment due to their companies modernising, reserve the right to nationalise companies who take government aid
• Increase the nationalisation of the North Sea oil reserves, continue to support coal mining, encourage energy saving schemes,
• Nationalise road haulage industry, electronics, pharmaceuticals, health equipment and building materials
• introduce an annual wealth tax on the small minority of rich people whose total net personal wealth exceeds £150,000, reduce the burden of income tax, and raise the tax threshold below which people pay no income tax, increase benefits and pensions
• End as soon as possible private schools, abolish prescription fees in NHS, phase out private beds
• Provide a universal scheme of education and training for all aged 16-19, remove barriers preventing poorer students from attending higher education
• Increase rights of tenants, relax planning laws, help first time buyers with mortgages, increase job security in construction, Encourage the development of building workers' cooperatives, tackle land speculation through land nationalisation.
• Develop policies for resource conservation, encourage recycling and cleaning campaigns, reduce pollution and lead contents of petrol
• “encourage recognized trade unions to establish joint representation committees in all companies employing more than 500 people, and place a legal obligation on employers to discuss company plans with these committees. We will establish an industrial democracy commission to stimulate and monitor schemes of industrial democracy in the private sector and nationalised industries.”
• Introduce a Freedom of Information Bill to provide a system of open government,
• Continue direct rule and army presence in Northern Ireland but expand the role of the police
• oppose any move towards turning the European Community into a federation, reform the Community’s agriculture, energy, finance, trade, and industry policies, legislate that British parliament is able to repeal and amend European laws
• Cut the defence budget
• Push for peace in the Middle East and Cyprus, detente with the East, opposition to colonialism and racial injustice, force South American dictatorships to repay debts, restore human and trade union rights

Conservative:

• Monetary discipline with targets for the growth of monetary supply, a reduction in government borrowing, an end to price controls, and the size of government to be reduced in order to control inflation
  
• Scrap government programs and further nationalisation to save £1.65bn
  
• Picketers to be confined to only picketing their place of work, a review of the immunity of strikers, those who continue going to work during strikes to be free of intimidation or violence, violence and obstruction to no longer be tolerated, an end to “closed shop” practices where workers have to remain members of a specific union or be fired, secret and postal ballots to be used by unions, pay bargaining to be conducted only between employer and employee, pay rises in the public sector to be dependent on what the taxpayer can afford
  
• Cut income tax at all levels, raise tax threshold of what people can make before paying taxes, reduce highest band tax rates to European average, sickness benefits to be included in annual income, reduction to investment income taxes, simplification of VAT and reduction of tax bureaucracy, no wealth tax, capital transfer tax and capital gains tax to be merged into a simpler, reduced tax. Amend regulations around small business to be simpler and more favourable.
  
• sell back to private ownership the recently nationalised aerospace and shipbuilding, sell government shares in the National Freight Corporation, relax the Traffic Commissioner licensing regulations to enable new bus and other services to develop, encourage new private operators, amend the 1975 Industry Act and restrict the powers of the National Enterprise Board solely to the administration of the Government's temporary shareholdings, to be sold off as circumstances permit.
  
• Scrap all import controls but maintain regulations against foreign “dumping” of products
  
• Encourage energy saving scheme, make sure tax and licensing policies encourage larger oil production, support for coal and nuclear power
  
• Radical change to the Common Agricultural Policy, opposition to discriminatory proposals, implement a freeze on CAP price increases for goods which are in surplus, negotiate agreement with Common Market to protect British fishing
  
• Improve pay and conditions for police, reduce procedures which take up police time such as traffic supervision duties, introduce tough compulsory attendance centres for young offenders, free vote in Parliament on if capital punishment for murderers should be legal
  
• introduce a new British Nationality Act to define entitlement to British citizenship and to the right of abode in this country, tougher immigration controls, quotas for non-EEC immigrants
  
• Implement an elected regional council for Northern Ireland, no amnesty for terrorists,
  
• Introduce policies to support first-time buyers, sell nationalised housing with discounts for long-time renters
  
• Continue to protect the environment and reduce pollution. Particular attention to improvement and restoration of derelict land, the disposal and recycling of wastes, and reducing pollution of rivers and canals subject to availability of resources. Improve housing insulation to reduce fuel consumption
  
• “Repeal those sections of the 1976 Education Act which compel local authorities to reorganise along comprehensive lines and restrict their freedom to take up places at independent schools.”, introduce national standards for education, restore direct grant schools, introduce a parents charter which gives parents right to choice of schools
  
• Simplify and decentralise the NHS and cut back bureaucracy. Reintroduce paid beds and end “vendetta against the private health sector”, reintroduce tax aid for health insurance.
  
• Simplify social security, reimplement tax credit schemes, exempt war widows' pensions from tax, introduce cash benefits for disabled, allow pensioners to still work if they want to
  
• Significantly increase defence spending, increase the pay of servicemen, buy new equipment.
  
• Reaffirm Britain’s commitment to the Common Market, integrate each country’s foreign policies more closely, but some reforms to CAP and fishing, national payments into the Common Market budget should be more closely related to each countries ability to pay Support peace in Middle East and Rhodesia, strengthen aid to Commonwealth
  

Liberal:

• Because this post is running really long the Liberal Manifesto will be down in the comments:

Read the full manifestos here:

Labour
Conservatives
Liberal
1979 Election coverage (featuring the debut of “Arthur” and one of the greatest openings ever): https://youtu.be/9USm6g5eYgI?t=14
Conservative political broadcast: Crisis? What Crisis? - https://youtu.be/V0TYvzAHzwo?t=28
Thatcher election broadcast - https://youtu.be/vcrO8SWZJFc?t=23
Thatcher Winter of Discontent broadcast - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP_iDw5JHtM
James Callaghan interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePk1Gs8ZLTs

Vote here (All Parties): https://rankit.vote/vote/CfExfseypiCCM5hOU7q6

Vote here (Labour vs Conservative): https://rankit.vote/vote/vJmEsc8PwCQlQMdKiV1h

Please try to vote as if you are a British citizen in 1979 without knowledge of what will happen after the election.

What with the current fascination with sea shanties and sea songs, I figured that some folks might be interested in trying out the musical instruments of Western sailors of the 1800s and early 1900s. While a classic shanty tended to be sung just with vocals, sailors played a variety of musical instruments popular in their eras, and in the Folk Revivals of the mid 1900s, lots of musicians did fine work adding instrumentation to the old tunes.
Maybe you’re an experienced musician looking to try a new sound after discovering sea songs, or maybe you’ve never played a note and hearing these great old tunes has inspired you to learn. In whatever case, in this little write-up I’m going to lay out some of the traditional instruments of the era which were favored by sailors, and explain for each how affordable and easy to learn they can be, and link you in some examples to listen to and places to learn more about each instrument.
I’m not a PhD musicologist, but I do have a lot of research background, been playing traditional music for over 30 years, and have a general handle on the scene and the era. And I have for over a decade done little projects online to encourage people to push their boundaries and break away from the mainstream by trying musical instruments beyond the most common ones. Being entranced by a new genre of music is a fine time to further expand your horizons by taking up an instrument and making music yourself.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WINDS * Tinwhistle * Flute (and piccolo and fife) * Trumpet
STRINGS * Guitar * Banjo (and banjo ukulele) * Fiddle * Mandolin * Ukulele
FREE REEDS * Harmonica * Concertina * Melodeon/Button Accordion * (Toy Accordion/Melodeon)
PERCUSSION * Drums * (Bodhrán)
NOT TRADITIONAL SAILOR INSTRUMENTS, BUT WOULD SOUND AWESOME WITH SHANTIES * Appalachian/Mountain dulcimer * Udu or Ibo drum * Bagpipe * Electronic Instruments
I will note before we begin, especially in the budget category, there are some real bargains but plenty of junk, so please use this article as a starting point, but read up a little on best buys. Don’t just say “oh, I dig Irish flute, and I see a new one on eBay for $50, sounds like a bargain!” and buy it without doing a little research, or you’ll get stuck wasting time and money on unplayable junk. All the more so for used instruments, which can offer great savings, but you really want to buy from a reputable dealer or a musician, or have an ironclad strategy for DIY repair, lest you get something too out of whack to learn on and too pricey to repair. Plenty of bargains, just don’t get impulsive, do just a little research before each purchase and you’ll be glad you did. There are online communities full of geeks like me for each of these instruments, who'd be happy to chat with you about choosing a good one for your money, and how you can best learn to play.
We’re looking largely at the instruments of seafaring European (and diaspora) folk of the 1800s and early 1900s, which you can note largely resembled the instruments of the working class on land, farmers and city laborers, just with an eye towards durability and portability at sea. Fortunately, many of these instruments are relatively affordable, intuitive to learn (they had to be, to catch on with a largely illiterate population that just wanted to get to playing music without fuss), and often rugged and compact for travel. I realized after I finished this article that all these instruments can be learned by ear and video without formal written study, and (with the exception of fiddle) beginner tutorials for them are written in “tablature” (numbers that say where your fingers go) rather than sheet music, making them even easier to learn for total novices.
WINDS
Wind instruments had the huge advantage of being relatively compact, simple, and affordable, and some of them had a dual purpose for signaling or for military music, or just being heard above the noise of work and waves to keep a rhythm for work or dancing.
Tinwhistle
A tinwhistle is a small metal pipe with six finger-holes, and a whistle-like mouthpiece that directs the breath onto a sharp edge that produces the note. Like a referee’s whistle but with control of the notes.
The great thing about tinwhistle is you can get a totally serviceable instrument for literally $9 or so; they’re just that cheap to make. There are professional Irish musicians who spend decades playing $9 whistles (often doing a little fine-tuning on their own to smooth them out), so they’re by no means just toys. Even if you aren’t in a hurry to learn, honestly at that price you might as well pick one up next time you’re shopping online, and give it a whirl. An instrument you could own for life for the price of a decent 6-pack. The subreddit tinwhistle can provide advice and resources, and off-Reddit there’s the specialized Chiff and Fipple Forum.
If you buy a tinwhistle as a beginner, absolutely get one in the Key of D (the most common key), because 99% of teaching materials are for D, the common key for Irish music. (You'll notice an Irish crossover trend in much of this advice). There are some tutorials for shanties online, but honestly best bet would be to use some of the tutorials for Irish tunes just to learn the basics, and then you’ll swiftly be able to transition to learning other genres by ear.
"Drunken Sailor" tinwhistle duet with concertina
Flute (including piccolo and fife)
The flute is of course a tube where you blow across a hole to make a note. Most of us have seen the classical flute in videos, silver with all those fancy mechanical keys, but the flutes of the 1800s were largely wooden and had few or no keys, just open finger-holes like the tinwhistle. In the modern day, such “simple flutes” are largely associated with folk music, especially Irish, so there are plenty on the market, including affordable ones made of synthetic materials or metals. Just don't be seduced by import "rosewood" cheapies, they're junk, one made of PVC pipe by an actual musician would be a better buy than those wall-hangers.
I made a post on Chiff and Fipple asking about affordable flutes and fifes, and got some good options under $50 for some really simple plastic tube instruments of decent make, and some finer Irish flutes turned from synthetics around $250. Flutes come in a variety of sizes, but like tinwhistles the easiest way to learn is using Irish music tutorials and then adding nautical repertoire once you have the basics down, so again probably get Key of D.
You can get a Low D flute about 2 feet long, or a High D flute (known as a fife or piccolo, or band flute) an octave above, the same rough size and pitch as a tinwhistle, just different method of blowing. The Low D instruments are pretty similar to each other, but for High D ("fife/piccolo/band flute") note some are "true fifes" made to play best at very high pitches for fife and drum music, others are meant to play smoothly at their lowest register, identical in range to a tinwhistle. So mind that distinction and ask the experts if you aren't sure which model suits your vision.
Dixon Irish flute duet with cittern (large mandolin cousin)
Modern high-quality Irish keyless piccolo
Trumpet
In my poring over old engravings and photographs, I was struck by how many showed sailors playing various trumpet-type instruments in the late 1800s, which kind of makes sense given the cultural crossover with military Naval traditions, and the volume of a trumpet which helps cut through wind and noise for signaling or dance music. I’m sure there are a zillion good write-ups on buying a basic trumpet (from $100-300), so I’ll leave you go google those or visit Trumpet.
But personally reading up for this article got even me thinking about trying my hand at a little brass. I'm honestly torn between getting one of the novel plastic "brass" instruments made for learners like pTrumpet or jHorn (around $100) because I like innovative design, or carefully buying an okay-quality used brass instrument (after consulting experts) for similar price. But I bet a whaler would've loved a plastic one if they'd been available in 1863.
"Wellerman" on trumpet
STRINGS
Guitar
In my survey of period imagery, I did indeed find some images of men at sea playing guitar, but do bear in mind that guitar in the 1800s and early 1900s was nowhere near as omnipresent as it is today, and in different forms. Plenty of other instruments were far more popular, up until the mid-1900s where guitar really became a go-to choice in the West. Note too that steel strings on guitars, as well as larger body sizes, didn’t show up much until the early 1900s, so for much of this period those who played guitar played smaller body instruments, with gut strings (nowadays nylon strings sound almost like gut but are massively more durable and affordable).
That said, tons of musicians in the Folk Revivals of the 1900s played a modern large guitar with steel strings and sounded great, so it really depends what tradition and sound you want to imitate. Again there are thousands of write-ups on taking up guitar, and plethora of new and used models, steel strings or nylon, all sizes, so I’ll leave that to you to Google or hit up LearnGuitar.
But I would encourage you to keep an open mind to guitar types to get a little more unusual flair in your musical stylings, break away from the crowd a bit. If you’re an experienced strings player, if you want to get that droning and modal sound you hear in shanties, try tuning your current guitar to the Drop D or DADGAD tunings (see DADGAD), also popular in Irish music, and I think you’ll like your results.
And if you’re a novice considering starting on guitar, I’m one of those people who believes that 2 months on a $50 ukulele and then four months on a guitar gets you further ahead than 6 months on a guitar alone, because uke is just so much more accessible for the total beginner. (Plus you’ll end up having a spare uke to carry where your guitar is inconvenient and left at home.) So if you’re considering guitar, check ukulele and ponder whether a uke of some sort could be an affordable and easy initial stage to launch your studies.
Irish jig on guitar in DADGAD tuning
"Drunken Sailor" on nylon-strung guitar
Banjo
The banjo is an instrument developed by American enslaved people, inspired by related instruments they’d known in Africa. By the mid 1800s, the banjo had crossed demographic lines and become hugely popular with European-Americans and spread to other countries, far more popular than the guitar was at the time. It was the go-to plucked string instrument for much of the 1800s.
If you’re looking to take up banjo, know that the banjos of this period had a different sound and playing style than the modern bluegrass instrument, so set aside your stereotypes and listen to some recordings of “Old Time” banjo rather than the bluegrass and country licks you’re used to hearing in soundtracks. These banjos were less piercing, mellower, and a more languid style. And much like on guitars, steel strings were less common, gut being typical and having a much softer sound (today we have nylon options). So when you go reading up “how to choose a banjo” articles or visiting Banjo (or BanjoHangout.com), look for an “open back” banjo rather than one with the heavy metal ring around the head (“resonator”) which makes it louder and sharper for bluegrass.
If you want to get really traditional, and sound softer and be easier on your fingers, spend $9 to get nylon (imitating gut) strings for a much less cliché and smoother sound. (Just note nylon strings stretch like crazy for a few days until they break in and stabilize, be patient.) Speaking of sound, absolutely don’t fall into trying to learn the modern “three-finger” or “Scruggs” style of play, which is a post-WWII styling, but read up on the old “clawhammer” or “frailing” style of play, which sounds entirely different and may pleasantly surprise you if you thought you don’t like banjo.
"Wellerman" on 5-string banjo, played clawhammer style
Nylon strings on a fretless banjo, just to show a very different sound
I will briefly mention some banjo variants other than the 5-string type we’re mostly familiar with. There is also the “tenor banjo” which has four strings, lacking that shortened fifth string off to the side on the currently popular banjos. A tenor banjo is tuned differently: depending on what strings you’re using (and you can swap the strings out for about $10) it’s tuned either like a violin/mandolin, or like a guitaukulele, so those skills cross over well, and is slightly shorter than the common 5-string.
Three Irish reels on a tenor banjo
And if you want a banjo that to one degree isn’t as historically associated with sailors, but to the other is actually surprisingly similar to the smaller and mellower banjos of the early 1800s, there’s the “banjo ukulele” hybrid which is quite affordable and easy to learn.
Frankly, if this is your first instrument and you want banjo, I’d get a banjo ukulele first rather than a 5-string, because they’re just so affordable (decent ones start around $100 new) and handy and easy to learn, and very mellow, not like the cliché sound you’d expect. And though they lack the fifth string, in the last decade or so a ton of YouTube uke experts have been developing the “clawhammer ukulele” style of play. It works impressively well on ukulele or banjo ukulele (which are played the exact same way, same online tutorials apply, they just have a different body and thus sound).
"Leave Her Johnny, Leave Her" on banjo ukulele, clawhammer style
Fiddle
The “fiddle” is physically basically the same as a violin, just played in a folk rather than classical style. There are probably millions of violins bouncing around the world, including plenty of used deals, but you really want to read up on how to find a good deal on a new or used one, because violins are a little finicky. I would also say that unless you’re extremely motivated or getting a Zoom teacher, I wouldn’t advise fiddle as your very first instrument. Because they lack frets and learning to use a bow is its own distinct skill, they have a bit of a steep initial learning curve. So you maybe want to learn a little ukulele or mandolin (which has the same fingering as fiddle) before jumping in. But that said, if you just love fiddle and are ambitious, or already have a little strings background, by all means dive on in. Learn it in standard tuning, but once you get the basics down, try "open tunings" for shanties and the like. Hit up Fiddle for advice.
The fiddle was a hugely popular instrument from the 1700s up to the mid-1900s before falling off sharply heading into the rock ‘n’ roll era. With fiddle you can cover a huge variety of historical musical traditions.
"Blow Boys Blow" on fiddle, while singing (something you don’t see classical violinists do)
Mandolin
This originally Italian instrument took on a wider popularity in the Western world around the late 1800s and early 1900s, again being more popular than guitar in many areas during that period. A mandolin has the chording ability of the guitar but the melodic dexterity of a fiddle, is nice and compact especially compared to a large modern guitar, and can be bought in a passable starter model as low as ~$99. Though if you can stretch to a budget of more like $300, you’ll really appreciate the improvement.
Plenty of used ones floating around, though buy those from a musician or reputable dealer, not from randos on eBay with something they pulled out of a closet from ages ago. Mandolins are under very high tension, and older ones that are low quality or mistreated can be warped or cracked in ways a novice can’t easily notice, but that make them unsuitable to be played. Don't jump on the first "bargain" you see, mando is common enough that you'll see bargains every other day, don't get impulsive, get advice from mandolin players online.
I will note that although mandolin had a narrower time and place of popularity than banjo or especially fiddle, it closely resembles even earlier instruments like the “English guitar”, “cittern” and “Portuguese guitar” that were more widespread, so can serve as a partial stand-in for a number of centuries and locales. Plenty of good information at mandolin awaits you if you want to take up mando.
Beginner mandolins are pretty affordable, and it's not too hard to learn, but it will take time for your hands to adjust and toughen up your finger pads. If you want to try mandolin tuning on an even more affordable instrument and with less string tension, you can get a basic starter ukulele and get Aquila's "Fifths" strings for ukulele (make sure to get the size that corresponds to the size of your uke) for $5-10 and string it in GDAE or CGDA, and then the fingerings would cross directly over to mandolin or mandola.
"Salt Water Shanty" tune on the mandolin
An example of the related "Portuguese guitar", shared between England and Portugal by the sea trade, played on the docks of Lisbon for "fado" music
"Bach 1st Cello Suite" on a ukulele re-strung to CGDA
Ukulele
The ukulele is based on traditional Portuguese small guitar-like instruments, and was introduced to the Hawaiian Islands in 1879 when the SS Ravenscrag brought over Portuguese immigrants in 1879. The instrument caught the imaginations of the local Hawaiians, and some Portuguse woodworkers who'd just arrived capitalized on that trend and began producing a local version. So certainly sailors coming and going from Hawaiian ports had a chance to become familiar with the instrument.
The ukulele is one of the easiest string instruments to play, and the skills cross directly over to guitar and other instruments. If you're new to strings I would highly suggest getting a $50-99 ukulele first to get used to strings, and then decide your best move. As noted above, a uke can be an excellent stand-in for guitar, banjo, or mandolin (especially if restrung in fifths).
"Wellerman" on a regular $40 ukulele, conventional strumming and sounding awesome
"5 Sea Shanties on Ukulele", a really great and crystal-clear tutorial for noobs by Destiny Guerra
Ukulele has a shanty contest recently, might want to check out the submissions by other Redditors of shanties on ukulele
FREE REEDS
The name “free reeds” might sound confusing, but it basically just means things like the accordion and harmonica (which despite looking so different, are close cousins). On common reed instruments like saxophone or oboe, the air tube has one reed (a flexible tongue that produces a note as it vibrates when air flows over it) that makes the core pitch, and by opening holes to change the functional length of the tube you change the note. In contrast, with free reeds, you have an array of individual reeds that always make the same note, and you choose which note(s) to play by directing air over them with a button (accordion) or by moving it against your mouth (harmonica)
Harmonica
I think most folks are familiar with the basic concept of a harmonica, so I’ll just note there are a harmonicas at every price range, all kinds of keys (and ones in minor scales and such), and a lot of harmonica players own a whole stack of them to have a variety. While there are playable ones for like $10, aim for about $25-35 or more for your first one, if able, rather than going totally cheap, just so you aren’t held back as you’re trying to learn. There are a ton of free harmonica tutorials online, and books you can buy, and harmonica to advise, so you can’t go too wrong.
The modern harmonica was invented in the 1800s (based in concept on centuries-old instruments of Southeast Asia encountered by travelers). Hohner started mass-producing barge-fulls of them in Germany shortly after the American Civil War, and exporting them to the US. While maybe we don’t think of harmonicas as a sailor thing, they were an omnipresent affordable and pocket-sized instruments, surely familiar to sailors of the period.
"Drunken Sailor" on a less-common minor-key harmonica
"Wellerman" tutorial on standard harmonica
Concertina
The association between sailors and concertina is so strong as to be almost cliché, due in large part to Hollywood portrayal, like sea shanty concertinist Alf Edwards cameoing in 1965’s “Moby Dick". The concertina is basically like a small hexagonal accordion, but a simpler and less raucous sound due to (usually) only one reed per note, and every button is an individual note rather than some buttons being chords.
Concertina is pretty intuitive to play, and there are some good free tutorials online. For a novice interested in sea shanties you probably want the “Anglo” style (different notes on push and pull, like a harmonica or melodeon). Commonly people buy the 30-button Anglo, because most concertina buyers play Irish music and you want 30 for that. But for shanties and other simple folk, you can do well with a 20-button (which can also play most Irish), which tend to be a little cheaper. I would really give a pass to the $150-200 China-made ones on Amazon and eBay, and go for at least $299 or so for a new 20b or used 30b. (Or hit up Cnet's sales subforum to ask if anyone has a bargain 20b for a noob).
While Anglo is hands-down the traditional choice of sailors, in the Folk Revivals, for whatever reason (lots of them cheap in pawnshops?) a lot of folk musicians took up the English-system concertina. The English externally looks similar but has the same note on push and pull of the bellows, so totally different playing style. Some of the most famous shanty players of the 1960s-1970s (like the fantastic Alf Edwards mentioned above) played English, which in the actual sailing days was the instrument of the wealthy, not laborers.
But y’all are in luck, because I’m a mod at Concertina and have written a pretty comprehensive Concertina FAQ and Buying Guide for novices, the sub itself can help advise with any questions, and for serious experts or to shop an active buy/sell forum for bargains, visit Concertina.net Forums.
Note for both concertina and melodeon (button accordion), “Appcordions” produces free or cheap apps for your phone or tablet which emulate concertina (Anglo, English, or Duet fingering systems) or button accordion. The apps take a little getting used to, but are fun to try out the concept before committing. Read the instructions or watch a tutorial for each to understand how to emulate bellows direction changes on an app, and they're better on tablet than phone, but passable on phone.
Modern shanty "Grogg Mayles" played on Anglo concertina (note the constant back-forth to change notes)
A. L. Lloyd singing “Off to Sea Once More” backed up by Alf Edwards on English concertina (Lloyd is my favorite shantyman of all time, and Edwards so gorgeous on English that I forgive him the heresy of passing up Anglo)
Melodeon (Button Accordion)
When modern people think “accordion” they tend to think the huge ones with a piano keyboard, such as played by Weird Al. But for much of the 1800s and early 1900s, the dominant accordion was the “melodeon” (Americans tend to call them a “button accordion”) which is generally smaller, and has one, two, or three rows of buttons instead of a piano keyboard. Like the Anglo concertina or the harmonica, a given melodeon button produces a different note when you change air direction, which means that notes that make a chord line up together, making it very intuitive to play.
There are hordes of melodeons on the used market, but ones hauled out of a closet after 40 years of no play can need hundreds of dollars of refurbishment by a skilled technician. So again don’t go buying from randos on eBay, but buy from an actual player, or reputable dealer (many of whom buy the tore-up rando ones cheap on eBay, fix them up and flip them at reasonable prices). Figuring out the good deals can be daunting to a novice, so I went to Melodeon.net and got a detailed discussion going resulting in somewhat of a novice buyer’s guide for sea shanties that you might find easier to digest.
With some hunting around the various reputable dealers, and Melodeon.net’s sales section, you can find a decent melodeon as low as $250-350 (easier still in the UK or EU where melodeon is more common). Also check out the small sub Melodeon (we may add a sticky or wicki to link dealers of affordable refurbished button accordions). Fortunately shanty players are less picky about specific keys and models, so can get some good deals on less-fashionable variants other musicians are slow to buy.
High Barbary on 2.5-row melodeon, voice and fiddle
"Bully in the Alley" tutorial on 2-row D/G melodeon
Addendum: “Toy” Accordions (Melodeons)
I will address one kind of intriguing and highly affordable option for learning the basics on melodeon. There’s a little 7-button job called a “toy accordion” made in China (the button kind, not piano kind), sold on all the major online retailers. It isn’t so much really a "toy" as it is a small functional instrument but of kinda middling materials and iffy quality control, but it is a genuine musical instrument. Funnily enough, a small and shoddy mass-produced melodeon was exactly what laborers and sailors of the mid to late 1800s played, churned out of factories in Germany at prices so low they were practically disposable. Ironically the “toy” is arguably the historically authentic option, in spirit.
I don’t want to sound like I’m shilling for Amazon, I don’t even have affiliate links to them on my YouTube channel (maybe someday), but I’m telling you now that Amazon or equivalent is a good place to get a toy accordion. That way you can buy a model and from a seller with the best reviews, and (this is vital) one with “free returns”. The QC on these is iffy, so if you get a lemon it’s great to be able to put it right back in the box, click “return” on the app, and it gets picked up off your porch or you drop it off at a local business that processes Amazon returns. And if you like you can even just re-order it with your refund until they get it right.
These “toys” run about $20-40 (I just bought an EastaMugig, and it seems pretty decent and ready to tweak), so just pick one with good reviews, ensure it has free returns, and give it a whirl. Or if you really want to cut to the chase, there are accordion “fettlers” (repairers) who will just gut a toy for you and put quality reeds in it. Currently Smythe’s Accordions is the main shop I know of doing this in the US, and will put in quality reeds in the key of your choice, into a Russian toy accordion (better quality), if you want to spend $200.
Now, if you get one into your paws that plays okay and you want to keep it, I suggest immediately opening it up and making some minor tweaks. This is one of those things all the melodeon folks casually mention and afaik nobody has bothered to make a proper tutorial on (I hope to shortly for my YouTube channel), but you can make these substantially better with very little skill. Basically put, you got seven buttons, with two notes per button, and two reeds per note to give it a tremolo/echo effect. The issue is those doubled reeds use up a lot of air, and your bellows are small, and one reed will always be more in-tune than the other. So you get some really basic tools and masking tape, pour a beer or soda, carefully open it (they’re pretty sturdy if you get a good one) and identify the two reeds for each note, lay down masking tape along one to silence it. While you’re in there, if you can identify any reeds that aren’t sounding properly, they’re probably clogged with dust, and you can google up how to carefully slide something thin like a dollar bill under the tongue to knock the dust loose and allow it to sound. Tape off one of each pair, assemble it and try it, and if a given note (now one reed per note) sounds off, make a note of which, disassemble and switch the tape from the other reed and see if the other one sounds better.
It’ll take some futzing, but no major skill and no permanent changes (do it carefully so you can still return it if it just won’t shape up). If you get it right, now it’ll be using half as much air so way easier to play, and if you like there are many other little tweaks to adjust button play, fix bellows leaks, and all that, all pretty low-skill. But fundamentally for $20-40 you can have a kinda shoddy yet effective little melodeon, much like the sailors of old, on which you can accompany sea songs.
Drunken Sailor on a decent yet stock toy accordion
Irish polkas on a toy accordion that’s been fitted with quality reeds
PERCUSSION
Looking at old sailor imagery, you generally see small snare drums and bass drums, and there seems to be a large crossover between those on civilian ships and similar ones played in the British and American navies of the era. If you’re a real stickler you can get “rope-tuned” old-school wooden snare and small bass drums (sold for fife and drum reenactors), or make do with modern used marching-band instruments.
I do want to note there is one kind of drum that’s relatively recent in tradition and wouldn’t really have been played by shanty-era sailors, but sounds absolutely amazing with shanties if you aren’t a stickler: the Irish bodhrán. It’s a relatively shallow circular shell with one drum head, held in one hand and the other hands holds a double-headed stick (like a little kayak paddle) and virtuosically skips it off the drum head in rhythmic patterns. It's pretty cool, but if you get one, learn it proper because eager noobs not bothering to learn skill and just whacking on it are a cliche in the Irish trad scene. Bodhran is tiny but has some good links, and you can always ask and see who answers.
Daniel Payne of Newfoundland sings “Wind Through the Window” while backing himself on bodhrán
NOT TRADITIONAL SAILOR INSTRUMENTS, BUT WOULD SOUND AWESOME WITH SHANTIES
I want to briefly discuss one instrument from each category that aren’t strictly historical to seafarers, but really fit in with the spirit of shanties. These would be great retcons, and one very modern wildcard at the end.
Appalachian/Mountain dulcimer
The dulcimer was likely a French or German instrument acquired by the rural folks in the Appalachian mountains of the US, and worked into the local tradition due to its simplicity. It’s a long wooden box played in the lap, tuned to open tunings, with only partial fretting, which makes it ridiculously easy to learn and accompany yourself on. I like to joke that it's the "Celtic sitar."
I taught quite a few workshops on the dulcimer for groups, and it’s about one of the easiest fretted string instruments to learn. They’re pretty affordable (you can get cardboard-bodied [seriously, they work] ones around $50, basic wooden ones around $100, ask around at dulcimer) and they have that droning and dark sound that would go great with shanties.
"Skye Boat Song" on dulcimer
Udu or Ibo drum
This percussion instrument, originating in West Africa, is a clay pot (some modern makers use synthetics) that is drummed upon, and capable of some really cool percussive sounds. Can produce a surprising number of tonal effects, I think of it as the "African tabla." Runs about $100+ for the basic synthetic models by Meinl, which are lighter and more durable than ceramic. LP makes durable ceramic ones from about $75. See the very tiny sub Udu for more info, or ask the larger community at drums.
Udu/Ibo drum solo
Bagpipe
Check your stereotypes, the Great Highland bagpipe associated with marching around in kilts (which is awesome in its own way) is only one of about 100 kinds of bagpipes, from Ireland to India and Sweden down to Libya. The Highland Pipe is loud and piercing, so not really great vocal accompaniment, but among the many other pipes are several which play at an indoor volume and lower pitch.
Among the ones I’d most recommend to someone starting pipes, in terms of affordability (roughly around $400-$500 for basic ones of these three, some bargains come in lower), availability, volume, compactness, versatility, etc. would be the Scottish Smallpipes (quieter and a full octave deeper in pitch than Highland), the Swedish bagpipes, and the German hümmelchen.
More than any other instrument on this list, for bagpipes I urge you to beware "too good to be true" deals. The reason is there is one specific outfit in Pakistan that has been turning out virtually unplayable bagpipes for export for decades, and they're all over Amazon and eBay for $100-200. They are not "well, I'll try a cheapie first and see if I want to get a nice one", they are total garbage, and the company is run by jerks because they could make a serviceable pipe in Pakistan by paying their workers 10% more and instead opt to turn hopeful noobies off piping forever with a "maybe it's a good starter" that's just trash. There are definitely good deals in piping (mainly some innovators working in synthetics, and some craftsmen in Eastern Europe with low costs of living), but the specific Pakistan pipes exported by a certain cynical company are omnipresent and a total waste. But the good news is with the slightest research you can avoid them and get some good starter pipes at reasonable price.
Give those three types of bagpipes (or others too) a listen, see what jumps out at you, drop by Bagpipes to discuss.
"Mingulay Boat Song" on Scottish smallpipes (bellows blown so the piper has breath to sing)
"Polska efter Nedergårds Lars" on Swedish bagpipes
"A Cascarexa" (Galician waltz) on hümmelchen
Electronic Instruments (maybe on your tablet or even phone to be cheap)
I’m sure many of you have seen techno remixes of "Wellerman" and whatnot, so though clearly in history those far post-date the shanty era, they do sound awfully cool (in some cases). So don’t be too shy to lay down some drum and bass lines and sing over them. There are various electronic boxes and knobs you can buy to do so, but these days a lot of what used to be $500 of fancy electronics are now emulated on your phone or tablet. Go mess with the free music apps, or read reviews and pay $10 for a good one, and get some beats going.
If you want to try out a free iOS app that's pretty intuitive for making beats, as a total novice in electronic music I've enjoyed the free phone app Figure.
Korg iKaossilator laying down drum and bass lines

Anne Bonny was a female pirate from the Golden Age of Piracy. She is a name you will almost always find in just about any book on the subject, academic or otherwise. A lot has been said and a lot has been written about her. There are minor questions, such as when she was born or why she became a pirate. But the most famous question, is what happened to her? She vanished after a trial on November 28th, 1720, 300 years ago as of today. Well since May I have been searching for an answer and I might have actually figured it out. This story was published in the South Carolina Post and Courier today, and mostly draws from a 71 minute video I wrote for my YouTube channel. The video and article are here but I have written a broad summary of the video if you would like to read it. Sources are all listed at the end.
Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOiUgXyk0Fs)
Article (https://www.postandcourier.com/news/a-22-year-old-youtuber-may-have-solved-anne-bonny-pirate-mystery-300-years-aftearticle_78fc0a2e-2914-11eb-a5f5-03b65f4d281a.html)
​
Anne Bonny was a violent lesbian sailor. Anne Bonny was a serial killer. Anne Bonny was a feminist hero. Anne Bonny was an inspirational LGBTQ icon. Anne Bonny was a mere child who didn't think her life through. Anne Bonny was a heroine of the people. All of these phrases have been said by someone. Historians, journalists, bloggers, all of these people saying something like this. None of this is true. She might be a famous icon of the Golden Age of Piracy, depicted in Black Flag, Black Sails, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride and so on, but she isn't a well understood figure of history. She was treated as more an oddity by contemporary writers, in the vain of a carnival barker saying come see the freaks. She is a prism to the past, a cipher. Everyone sees something in her that reflects what they believe. So what is the truth? Who was she and what happened to her?
Its a difficult question to answer. Documents are hard to find, mostly kept in libraries across the Americas and the West Indies. Most come in the form of newspapers and short articles, a proclamation from a governor here and there, and court transcripts. Anything written years later is already unreliable, and details that come from the 20th century onward is almost always nonsense.
The Golden Age of Piracy is difficult to define, everyone has a different opinion on when it began and ended. I picked the longest timeframe, 1650 to 1730. An era defined by Henry Morgan, Henry Every, William Kidd, Edward Thatch, and Bartholomew Roberts. In this time period of legendary criminals came a woman named Anne Bonny. Said to be from Ireland, bastard daughter of an attorney and a maid. She moved to the Carolinas, lived a life that included stabbing a maid and almost killing a rapist, before running away with a sailor to Nassau, the Pirate Republic. She falls in love with Jack Rackham, quartermaster for Charles Vane. Rackham seizes power, Anne runs away from her husband and they plunder ship after ship. Eventually Anne falls for a sailor who is really Mary Read, becoming close friends. The British navy eventually captures them, Rackham is hanged but the two women avoid the noose by way of pregnancy. Mary dies in prison but Anne is never seen again.
This is the story as told in Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates. Who was Captain Charles Johnson? It was an alias, not his real name. Almost certainly taken from the playwright Charles Johnson, who wrote a play about pirate Henry Every. In the 1930s historians mostly agreed Johnson was Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe. In the 1980s the general opinion changed to Nathaniel Mist, Defoes publisher. The popular suspect remains Mist, an opinion I agree with while fully admitting it could have been another writer under Mist. The mystery of who Captain Charles Johnson is cannot be solved beyond reasonable doubt, and its not the only problem with the book. Its full of claims without sources and when a source can be used to factcheck it, the facts don't add up. The book takes a true story and almost always twists it for more dramatic events or details almost certainly made up. Anne Bonny's story is the worst example, her chapter is mostly about her father's misunderstandings about silver spoons. It has quotes that were never said at her trial. It contradicts witness statements at the trial. In a book full of lies, Anne Bonny's chapter is perhaps the worst of the bunch.
So what is the truth? Well, Governor Woodes Rogers of the Bahamas first mentioned Anne in a proclamation recorded in the Boston Gazette. He said the pirate John Rackam, notice the spelling difference, stole a sloop called the William from the harbor. He did it with 14 people, 12 men and two women. He lists them as Ann Fulford, alias Bonny, and Mary Read. A key detail of Johnsons account is Mary dressing up as a man and not being discovered to be a woman until the trial. This makes it all very unlikely. There are some scattered papers of two female pirates on a sloop attacking fishing boats reported through September and October, no names are mentioned but we know who this is. The big document is the Tryials of John Rackam and other Pyrates. A pamphlet printed in Jamaica that functions like a transcript, its quite rare and very key to the story. The pamphlet mentions that they robbed several fishing boats, sloops and schooners until October 22 1720. On that day, Rackam was caught by the privateer Jonathan Barnet, who ironically had served as a pirate alongside Henry Jennings in 1715. He caught the pirate after a pathetically short battle and brought them to Jamaica. Rackam was hanged on the 18th. Anne and Mary faced the court and governor of Jamaica, Sir Nicholas Lawes, on November 28th in the court house of Spanish Town. Anne Bonny was called Ann Bonny, alias Bonn. There several witnesses were brought forward, captains of vessels they stole, and witnesses to there crimes. They described them as constantly swearing, giving powder to cannons, and boarding vessels with cutlass and pistols drawn. They even tried to kill a female witness at one point. They wore sailors regalia while plundering but dressed in womens clothing when off duty. They were called spinsters of New Providence, and they never said a word to save themselves at trial.
At the end they were condemned to death not far from Henry Morgan's favorite town, Port Royal. But before sentencing was done they claimed quick with child. Following a newspaper in 1721 that referenced the trial and some other scattered reports, they were never heard from again.
So who was Anne Bonny? Well I don't think she was Irish. The name Anne is an English surname, it was popular due to Queen Anne of Great Britains reign but also well known due to Anne Boleyn. The spelling of Anne or Ann also usually denoted social rank at the time. Bonny is a French English name, it comes from the word bon, meaning good. It was mostly associated with Lancashire County but popular in all of England. Those other names, Fulford and Bonn, were also found in England and not Ireland. Fulford was a popular surname in Staffordshire and Bonn is just a fancier spelling of the French word. Nobody at her trial made mention of an accent or red hair, hell she probably had brown hair if she was from England.
She is perhaps the same Ann Bonny who was baptized in St. Giles In the Fields Church in St Giles London in 1690. This Ann Bonny had several siblings and likely lived in St Giles, which was infamously a terrible place of poverty. St Giles was also close to the Tyburn Tree and Execution Dock, so its possibly if this is Anne Bonny, she might have witnessed William Kidds death in 1701.
Its possible if this is the same woman, that she moved to Nassau around 1716. 1716 saw a rise in prostitution in Nassau and if Anne was an adult woman without a husband on that island, odds are likely she was a sex worker. Mary Read was also likely a working girl. In 1720 Governor Rogers started trying to stamp out prostitution because of his stern religious beliefs. Around the same time he was doing this, was when Anne and Mary fled on the William. Perhaps this was the cause of her short piracy career.
Now as to what happened to Anne, well there are many theories. Perhaps she was executed after all, would contradict all the documents mentioning executions, so I doubt it. I doubt she escaped that would have been quite a public sensation. Many believe she escaped after her father paid for her release. This is false, the name often used for her father is William Cormac. This comes from the 1964 romance novel Mistress of the Seas by John Carlova. He made up almost everything, even stealing details from the movie Anne of the Indies, but somehow historians ended up quoting this. David Cordingly quoted it. Colin Woodard quoted it. Kate Williams quoted it. It might be what shows up on Anne's wikipedia page but its not true. We don't truly know who her parents were, I suspect they were probably just poor folk in England, nobody rich or powerful.
This begs the question, where did she go? Anne Bonny's fate is mysterious, Mary Read's isn't. Everyone agrees she died in 1721, but no document is ever shown. Sure some historians say there was a document, coming from a 1989 Clinton V Black book, but I couldn't find it on the internet. The library of Jamaica flat out sent me listings for a childrens book but not a document. I nearly gave up until I found a parish registry on a genealogy website. Mary Read died in April of 1721, the document mentions a Mary Read Pirate buried April 28th. It left me at a crossroads because I felt if there was no document for Mary, then maybe Anne died and nobody reported it. As a joke I typed in Anne's name to the genealogy site. By sheer luck I found a document listed as Ann Bonny, buried December 29th 1733, St Catherines Jamaica. Its the right area, St Catherines is where Spanish Town is. Its only 13 years after the trial, no family is listed and the spelling is without the phantom E Captain Charles Johnson added. There are other Ann Bonny's buried in Jamaica but all are from either 1710 or a far off date like 1790.
If this is her, then what likely happened is, the Governor took pity on her and let her go. There is a precedent, Mary Critchett, the only other female pirate convicted in the Golden Age, was never hanged and probably let go due to her gender. If let go, Anne probably went back to prostitution, no paper trail or taxes or owning a house. The child she had probably died or was taken, Jamaica was a rough place to live. Its what probably killed her, disease like yellow fever or tuberculosis. But she managed to outlive Governor Rogers, who died in 1732, and basically every notable pirate of the era. If she could read, maybe she even read her own legend be born with General History. Regardless, she is indeed a pirate legend, still going strong 300 years later and dare I say probably will remain popular in 300 more years.
She might be a legend now, but she was real once upon a time. She perhaps lived an unremarkable life after a remarkable two month time period. But its not what has been recorded, and it never will be. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend, so says a John Ford classic. Aye, a legend it may be and always be, but the truth can be learned if one looks hard enough. Buried treasure may not be real, but finding the real story behind a nearly mythical woman is nearly as sweet.
Special Thanks to
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Script editor, Alexandros Chousakos aka Alexandros The Greek
Script co-editor Jacob Krehbiel
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Alexander Rodriguez
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Andrew Rakich aka Atun-Shei Films
Ann Marie Lazarus
Ann Riley
Bear Derby
Brian Dunning
Cathedral of St. Jago De La Vega
Chris "Vertigo" Skoufis
Colin Woodard
Cynical History Forum
David Cordingly
David Fictum
Jack Rackam (Internet Personality)
Jean McCalmont
Jif
Joan Hartmann
Joseph Paul Hall-Patton aka The Cynical Historian
Marcia Jones
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Neil Rennie
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OOTWDF Forum
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Professor Christianna Hurford
Rachel Arpin
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Renegade Pop Culture
Sasuri
Sep
Subme1212
Talkernate History
Thomas Rodriguez
Tony Bartleme
Trent Coe
Veritas_Certum
YukikoKoiSan
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Primary Sources
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Ancestry.com. London, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. George Bonny document
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Lancashire Online Parish Clerk Project. https://www.lan-opc.org.uk/
The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and other Pirates, 1721 https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/postandcourier.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/6/89/68970990-ded9-11e8-be44-1b1f2868c03d/5bdcac97a7f1f.pdf.pdf
Ward, Ned. A Trip to Jamaica. 1698. https://grubstreetproject.net/works/R905?func=intro&display=text
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Not really about Kitboga. The author talks to Jim Browning. Very interesting. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/magazine/scam-call-centers.html
[Edit: adding the text of the article which was sent to me by a friend from a call center]
Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?
One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.
He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.
After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.
Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.
After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.
A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.
Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.
“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.
Minutes later, her phone rang again. This caller introduced himself as Jim Browning. “The guy who is trying to convince you to sign into your online banking is after one thing alone, and that is he wants to steal your money,” he said.
Langer was mystified that this new caller, who had what seemed to be a strong Irish accent, knew about the conversations she had just had. “Are you sure you are not with this group?” she asked.
He replied that the same scammers had targeted him, too. But when they were trying to connect remotely to his computer, as they had done with hers, he had managed to secure access to theirs. For weeks, that remote connection had allowed him to eavesdrop on and record calls like those with Langer, in addition to capturing a visual record of the activity on a scammer’s computer screen.
“I’m going to give you the password to unlock your PC because they use the same password every time,” he said. “If you type 4-5-2-1, you’ll unlock it.”
Langer keyed in the digits.
“OK! It came back on!” she said, relieved.
For most people, calls like the one Langer received are a source of annoyance or anxiety. According to the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the total losses reported to it by scam victims increased to $3.5 billion in 2019 from $1.4 billion in 2017. Last year, the app Truecaller commissioned the Harris Poll to survey roughly 2,000 American adults and found that 22 percent of the respondents said they had lost money to a phone scam in the past 12 months; Truecaller projects that as many as 56 million Americans may have been victimized this way, losing nearly $20 billion.
The person who rescued Langer that afternoon delights in getting these calls, however. “I’m fascinated by scams,” he told me. “I like to know how they work.” A software engineer based in the United Kingdom, he runs a YouTube channel under the pseudonym Jim Browning, where he regularly posts videos about his fraud-fighting efforts, identifying call centers and those involved in the crimes. He began talking to me over Skype in the fall of 2019 — and then sharing recordings like the episode with Langer — on the condition that I not reveal his identity, which he said was necessary to protect himself against the ire of the bad guys and to continue what he characterizes as his activism. Maintaining anonymity, it turns out, is key to scam-busting and scamming alike. I’ll refer to him by his middle initial, L.
The goal of L.’s efforts and those of others like him is to raise the costs and risks for perpetrators, who hide behind the veil of anonymity afforded by the internet and typically do not face punishment. The work is a hobby for L. — he has a job at an I.T. company — although it seems more like an obsession. Tracking scammers has consumed much of L.’s free time in the evenings over the past few years, he says, except for several weeks in March and April last year, when the start of the coronavirus pandemic forced strict lockdowns in many parts of the world, causing call centers from which much of this activity emanates to temporarily suspend operations. Ten months later, scamming has “gone right back to the way it was before the pandemic,” L. told me earlier this month.
Like L., I was curious to learn more about phone scammers, having received dozens of their calls over the years. They have offered me low interest rates on my credit-card balances, promised to write off my federal student loans and congratulated me on having just won a big lottery. I’ve answered fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service who threaten to send the police to my doorstep unless I agree to pay back taxes that I didn’t know I owed — preferably in the form of iTunes gift cards or by way of a Western Union money transfer. Barring a few exceptions, the individuals calling me have had South Asian accents, leading me to suspect that they are calling from India. On several occasions, I’ve tested this theory by letting the voice on the other end go on for a few minutes before I suddenly interrupt with a torrent of Hindi curses that I retain full mastery of even after living in the United States for the past two decades. I haven’t yet failed to elicit a retaliatory offensive in Hindi. Confirming that these scammers are operating from India hasn’t given me any joy. Instead, as an Indian expatriate living in the United States, I’ve felt a certain shame.
L. started going after scammers when a relative of his lost money to a tech-support swindle, a common scheme with many variants. Often, it starts when the mark gets a call from someone offering unsolicited help in ridding a computer’s hard drive of malware or the like. Other times, computer users looking for help stumble upon a website masquerading as Microsoft or Dell or some other computer maker and end up dialing a listed number that connects them to a fraudulent call center. In other instances, victims are tricked by a pop-up warning that their computer is at risk and that they need to call the number flashing on the screen. Once someone is on the phone, the scammers talk the caller into opening up TeamViewer or another remote-access application on his or her computer, after which they get the victim to read back unique identifying information that allows them to establish control over the computer.
L. flips the script. He starts by playing an unsuspecting target. Speaking in a polite and even tone, with a cadence that conveys naïveté, he follows instructions and allows the scammer to connect to his device. This doesn’t have any of his actual data, however. It is a “virtual machine,” or a program that simulates a functioning desktop on his computer, including false files, like documents with a fake home address. It looks like a real computer that belongs to someone. “I’ve got a whole lot of identities set up,” L. told me. He uses dummy credit-card numbers that can pass a cursory validation check.
The scammer’s connection to L.’s virtual machine is effectively a two-way street that allows L. to connect to the scammer’s computer and infect it with his own software. Once he has done this, he can monitor the scammer’s activities long after the call has ended; sometimes for months, or as long as the software goes undetected. Thus, sitting in his home office, L. is able to listen in on calls between scammer and targets — because these calls are made over the internet, from the scammer’s computer — and watch as the scammer takes control of a victim’s computer. L. acknowledged to me that his access to the scammer’s computer puts him at legal risk; without the scammer’s permission, establishing that access is unlawful. But that doesn’t worry him. “If it came down to someone wanting to prosecute me for accessing a scammer’s computer illegally, I can demonstrate in every single case that the only reason I gained access is because the scammer was trying to steal money from me,” he says.
On occasion, L. succeeds in turning on the scammer’s webcam and is able to record video of the scammer and others at the call center, who can usually be heard on phones in the background. From the I.P. address of the scammer’s computer and other clues, L. frequently manages to identify the neighborhood — and, in some cases, the actual building — where the call center is.
When he encounters a scam in progress while monitoring a scammer’s computer, L. tries to both document and disrupt it, at times using his real-time access to undo the scammer’s manipulations of the victim’s computer. He tries to contact victims to warn them before they lose any money — as he did in the case of Kathleen Langer.
L.’s videos of such episodes have garnered millions of views, making him a faceless YouTube star. He says he hopes his exploits will educate the public and deter scammers. He claims he has emailed the law-enforcement authorities in India offering to share the evidence he has collected against specific call centers. Except for one instance, his inquiries have elicited only form responses, although last year, the police raided a call center that L. had identified in Gurugram, outside Delhi, after it was featured in an investigation aired by the BBC.
Now and then during our Skype conversations, L. would begin monitoring a call between a scammer and a mark and let me listen in. In some instances, I would also hear other call-center employees in the background — some of them making similar calls, others talking among themselves. The chatter evoked a busy workplace, reminding me of my late nights in a Kolkata newsroom, where I began my journalism career 25 years ago, except that these were young men and women working through the night to con people many time zones away. When scammers called me in the past, I tried cajoling them into telling me about their enterprise but never succeeded. Now, with L.’s help, I thought, I might have better luck.
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India.
I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Image Murlidhar Sharma, a senior police official, whose team raided two call centers in Kolkata in October 2019 based on a complaint from Microsoft. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
Although individuals like this particular scammer are the ones responsible for manipulating victims on the phone, they represent only the outward face of a multibillion-dollar criminal industry. “Call centers that run scams employ all sorts of subcontractors,” Puneet Singh, an F.B.I. agent who serves as the bureau’s legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, told me. These include sellers of phone numbers; programmers who develop malware and pop-ups; and money mules. From the constantly evolving nature of scams — lately I’ve been receiving calls from the “law-enforcement department of the Federal Reserve System” about an outstanding arrest warrant instead of the fake Social Security Administration calls I was getting a year ago — it’s evident that the industry has its share of innovators.
The reasons this activity seems to have flourished in India are much the same as those behind the growth of the country’s legitimate information-technology-services industry after the early 2000s, when many American companies like Microsoft and Dell began outsourcing customer support to workers in India. The industry expanded rapidly as more companies in developed countries saw the same economic advantage in relocating various services there that could be performed remotely — from airline ticketing to banking. India’s large population of English speakers kept labor costs down.
Because the overwhelming majority of call centers in the country are engaged in legitimate business, the ones that aren’t can hide in plain sight. Amid the mazes of gleaming steel-and-glass high-rises in a place like Cyber City, near Delhi, or Sector V in Salt Lake, near Kolkata — two of the numerous commercial districts that have sprung up across the country to nurture I.T. businesses — it’s impossible to distinguish a call center that handles inquiries from air travelers in the United States from one that targets hundreds of Americans every day with fraudulent offers to lower their credit-card interest rates.
The police do periodically crack down on operations that appear to be illegitimate. Shortly after I got to Kolkata, the police raided five call centers in Salt Lake that officials said had been running a tech-support scam. The employees of the call centers were accused of impersonating Microsoft representatives. The police raid followed a complaint by the tech company, which in recent years has increasingly pressed Indian law enforcement to act against scammers abusing the company’s name. I learned from Murlidhar Sharma, a senior official in the city police, that his team had raided two other call centers in Kolkata a couple of months earlier in response to a similar complaint.
“Microsoft had done extensive work before coming to us,” Sharma, who is in his 40s and speaks with quiet authority, told me. The company lent its help to the police in connection with the raids, which Sharma seemed particularly grateful for. Often the police lack the resources to pursue these sorts of cases. “These people are very smart, and they know how to hide data,” Sharma said, referring to the scammers. It was in large part because of Microsoft’s help, he said, that investigators had been able to file charges in court within a month after the raid. A trial has begun but could drag on for years. The call centers have been shut down, at least for now.
Sharma pointed out that pre-emptive raids do not yield the desired results. “Our problem,” he said, “is that we can act only when there’s a complaint of cheating.” In 2017, he and his colleagues raided a call center on their own initiative, without a complaint, and arrested several people. “But then the court was like, ‘Why did the police raid these places?’” Sharma said. The judge wanted statements from victims, which the police were unable to get, despite contacting authorities in the U.S. and U.K. The case fell apart.
The slim chances of detection, and the even slimmer chances of facing prosecution, have seemed to make scamming a career option, especially among those who lack the qualifications to find legitimate employment in India’s slowing economy. Indian educational institutions churn out more than 1.5 million engineers every year, but according to one survey fewer than 20 percent are equipped to land positions related to their training, leaving a vast pool of college graduates — not to mention an even larger population of less-educated young men and women — struggling to earn a living. That would partly explain why call centers run by small groups are popping up in residential neighborhoods. “The worst thing about this crime is that it’s becoming trendy,” Aparajita Rai, a deputy commissioner in the Kolkata Police, told me. “More and more youngsters are investing the crucial years of their adolescence into this. Everybody wants fast money.”
In Kolkata, I met Aniruddha Nath, then 23, who said he spent a week working at a call center that he quickly realized was engaged in fraud. Nath has a pensive air and a shy smile that intermittently cut through his solemnness as he spoke. While finishing his undergraduate degree in engineering from a local college — he took a loan to study there — Nath got a job offer after a campus interview. The company insisted he join immediately, for a monthly salary of about $200. Nath asked me not to name the company out of fear that he would be exposing himself legally.
His jubilation turned into skepticism on his very first day, when he and other fresh recruits were told to simply memorize the contents of the company’s website, which claimed his employer was based in Australia. On a whim, he Googled the address of the Australian office listed on the site and discovered that only a parking garage was located there. He said he learned a couple of days later what he was to do: Call Indian students in Australia whose visas were about to expire and offer to place them in a job in Australia if they paid $800 to take a training course.
Image The Garden Reach area in Kolkata. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
On his seventh day at work, Nath said, he received evidence from a student in Australia that the company’s promise to help with job placements was simply a ruse to steal $800; the training the company offered was apparently little more than a farce. “She sent me screenshots of complaints from individuals who had been defrauded,” Nath said. He stopped going in to work the next day. His parents were unhappy, and, he said, told him: “What does it matter to you what the company is doing? You’ll be getting your salary.” Nath answered, “If there’s a raid there, I’ll be charged with fraud.”
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
Parking my car in the vicinity of the address L. had given me, I walked through a narrow lane where children were playing cricket, past a pharmacy and a tiny store selling cookies and snacks. The apartment I sought was on the second floor of a building at the end of an alley, a few hundred yards from a mosque. It was locked, but a woman next door said that the building belonged to Shahbaz’s extended family and that he lived in one of the apartments with his parents.
Then I saw an elderly couple seated on the steps in the front — his parents, it turned out. The father summoned Shahbaz’s brother, a lanky, longhaired man who appeared to be in his 20s. He said Shahbaz had woken up a short while earlier and gone out on his motorbike. “I don’t know when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up,” his father said, with what sounded like exasperation.
They gave me Shahbaz’s mobile number, but when I called, I got no answer. It was getting awkward for me to wait around indefinitely without disclosing why I was there, so eventually I pulled the brother aside to talk in private. We sat down on a bench at a roadside tea stall, a quarter mile from the mosque. Between sips of tea, I told him that I was a journalist in the United States and wanted to meet his brother because I had learned he was a scammer. I hoped he would pass on my message.
I got a call from Shahbaz a few hours later. He denied that he’d ever worked at a call center. “There are a lot of young guys who are involved in the scamming business, but I’m not one of them,” he said. I persisted, but he kept brushing me off until I asked him to confirm that his birthday was a few days later in December. “Look, you are telling me my exact birth date — that makes me nervous,” he said. He wanted to know what I knew about him and how I knew it. I said I would tell him if he met with me. I volunteered to protect his identity if he answered my questions truthfully.
Two days later, we met for lunch at the Taj Bengal, one of Kolkata’s five-star hotels. I’d chosen that as the venue out of concern for my safety. When he showed up in the hotel lobby, however, I felt a little silly. Physically, Shahbaz is hardly intimidating. He is short and skinny, with a face that would seem babyish but for his thin mustache and beard, which are still a work in progress. He was in his late 20s but had brought along an older cousin for his own safety.
We found a secluded table in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and sat down. I took out my phone and played a video that L. had posted on YouTube. (Only those that L. shared the link with knew of its existence.) The video was a recording of the call from November 2019 in which Shahbaz was trying to defraud the woman in Ottawa with a trick that scammers often use to arm-twist their victims: editing the HTML coding of the victim’s bank-account webpage to alter the balances. Because the woman was pushing back, Shahbaz zeroed out her balance to make it look as if he had the ability to drain her account. On the call, he can be heard threatening her: “You don’t want to lose all your money, right?”
I watched him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “Whose voice is that?” I asked. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
Image Aniruddha Nath spent a week on the job at a call center when he realized that it was engaged in fraud. A lack of other opportunities can make such call centers an appealing enterprise. Credit...Prarthna Singh for The New York Times
He nodded in shocked silence. I took my phone back and suggested he drink some water. He took a few sips, gathering himself before I began questioning him. When he mumbled in response to my first couple of questions, I jokingly asked him to summon the bold, confident voice we’d just heard in the recording of his call. He gave me a wan smile.
Pointing to my voice recorder on the table, he asked, meekly, “Is this necessary?”
When his scam calls were already on YouTube, I countered, how did it matter that I was recording our conversation?
“It just makes me nervous,” he said.
Shahbaz told me his parents sent him to one of the city’s better schools but that he flunked out in eighth grade and had to move to a neighborhood school. When his father lost his job, Shahbaz found work riding around town on his bicycle to deliver medicines and other pharmaceutical supplies from a wholesaler to retail pharmacies; he earned $25 a month. Sometime around 2011 or 2012, he told me, a friend took him to a call center in Salt Lake, where he got his first job in scamming, though he didn’t realize right away that that was what he was doing. At first, he said, the job seemed like legitimate telemarketing for tech-support services. By 2015, working in his third job, at a call center in the heart of Kolkata, Shahbaz had learned how to coax victims into filling out a Western Union transfer in order to process a refund for terminated tech-support services. “They would expect a refund but instead get charged,” he told me.
Shahbaz earned a modest salary in these first few jobs — he told me that that first call center, in Salt Lake, paid him less than $100 a month. His lengthy commute every night was exhausting. In 2016 or 2017, he began working with a group of scammers in Garden Reach, earning a share of the profits. There were at least five others who worked with him, he said. All of them were local residents, some more experienced than others. One associate at the call center was his wife’s brother.
He was cagey about naming the others or describing the organization’s structure, but it was evident that he wasn’t in charge. He told me that a supervisor had taught him how to intimidate victims by editing their bank balances. “We started doing that about a year ago,” he said, adding that their group was somewhat behind the curve when it came to adopting the latest tricks of the trade. When those on the cutting edge of the business develop something new, he said, the idea gradually spreads to other scammers.
It was hard to ascertain how much this group was stealing from victims every day, but Shahbaz confessed that he was able to defraud one or two people every night, extracting anywhere from $200 to $300 per victim. He was paid about a quarter of the stolen amount. He told me that he and his associates would ask victims to drive to a store and buy gift cards, while staying on the phone for the entire duration. Sometimes, he said, all that effort was ruined if suspicious store clerks declined to sell gift cards to the victim. “It’s becoming tough these days, because customers aren’t as gullible as they used to be,” he told me. I could see from his point of view why scammers, like practitioners in any field, felt pressure to come up with new methods and scams in response to increasing public awareness of their schemes.
The more we spoke, the more I recognized that Shahbaz was a small figure in this gigantic criminal ecosystem that constitutes the phone-scam industry, the equivalent of a pickpocket on a Kolkata bus who is unlucky enough to get caught in the act. He had never thought of running his own call center, he told me, because that required knowing people who could provide leads — names and numbers of targets to call — as well as others who could help move stolen money through illicit channels. “I don’t have such contacts,” he said. There were many in Kolkata, according to Shahbaz, who ran operations significantly bigger than the one he was a part of. “I know of people who had nothing earlier but are now very rich,” he said. Shahbaz implied that his own ill-gotten earnings were paltry in comparison. He hadn’t bought a car or a house, but he admitted that he had been able to afford to go on overseas vacations with friends. On Facebook, I saw a photo of him posing in front of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and other pictures from a visit to Thailand.
I asked if he ever felt guilty. He didn’t answer directly but said there had been times when he had let victims go after learning that they were struggling to pay bills or needed the money for medical expenses. But for most victims, his rationale seemed to be that they could afford to part with the few hundred dollars he was stealing.
Shahbaz was a reluctant interviewee, giving me brief, guarded answers that were less than candid or directly contradicted evidence that L. had collected. He was vague about the highest amount he’d ever stolen from a victim, at one point saying $800, then later admitting to $1,500. I found it hard to trust either figure, because on one of his November calls I heard him bullying someone to pay him $5,000. He told me that my visit to his house had left him shaken, causing him to realize how wrong he was to be defrauding people. His parents and his wife were worried about him. And so, he had quit scamming, he told me.
“What did you do last night?” I asked him.
“I went to sleep,” he said.
I knew he was not telling the truth about his claim to have stopped scamming, however. Two days earlier, hours after our phone conversation following my visit to Garden Reach, Shahbaz had been at it again. It was on that night, in fact, that he tried to swindle Kathleen Langer in Crossville, Tenn. Before I came to see him for lunch, I had already heard a recording of that call, which L. shared with me.
When I mentioned that to him, he looked at me pleadingly, in visible agony, as if I’d poked at a wound. It was clear to me that he was only going to admit to wrongdoing that I already had evidence of.
L. told me that the remote access he had to Shahbaz’s computer went cold after I met with him on Dec. 14, 2019. But it buzzed back to life about 10 weeks later. The I.P. address was the same as before, which suggested that it was operating in the same location I visited. L. set up a livestream on YouTube so I could see what L. was observing. The microphone was on, and L. and I could clearly hear people making scam calls in the background. The computer itself didn’t seem to be engaged in anything nefarious while we were eavesdropping on it, but L. could see that Shahbaz’s phone was connected to it. It appeared that Shahbaz had turned the computer on to download music. I couldn’t say for certain, but it seemed that he was taking a moment to chill in the middle of another long night at work.