Shep Woolley biography: from the Royal Navy to the folk clubs

Shep Woolley biography: a Working Men's Club childhood

The Shep Woolley biography starts a long way from the sea, in the Midlands mining country around Tamworth. His father, Charlie, was a coal miner, and the family's entertainment came from the local Working Men's Club, where an uncle, Fred, was the steward. On free-and-easy nights anyone could get up and sing, and young John Woolley was usually first in the queue. His party piece was "If You Ever Go Across the Sea to Ireland", a song that, he wrote on his own website, could still bring him to tears decades later.

The colliery outings are part of the same story. On the coach home from a seaside day trip somebody had to keep the passengers going, and the boy who would become Shep was the one singing the ballads of the day, from Johnnie Ray's "The Little White Cloud That Cried" to "If Your Sweetheart Sends a Letter of Goodbye". Then the newspapers began advertising guitars that promised you could play in a day and become the hit of every party. He talked his parents into buying one: three feet of strung plywood with a red satin cord to hang it round his neck. The bedroom mirror became his first audience, and skiffle and rock'n'roll did the rest.

Fifteen, and the Royal Navy

He joined the Royal Navy at fifteen. The Navy of that era took boys at that age and trained them at establishments such as HMS Ganges at Shotley in Suffolk, the place he later sang about in "Up and Down Laundry Hill". The music went with him. He played in ship's concerts, on the ship's radio and in a series of groups, and the repertoire was rock'n'roll rather than folk. In Singapore in 1965 his band was Downbeats Ltd, and it was there that he met Jenny, who would become his wife in 1967. With a family to think about he decided to put the band business aside and concentrate on being a sailor.

Married quarters at Paulsgrove brought him to Portsmouth, and one evening somebody took the couple to the folk club at the Star in Lake Road. His verdict at the time was that everybody there was slightly mad. It took a ship to change his mind.

HMS Mohawk and the road to the folk clubs

In 1968 he was serving aboard the frigate HMS Mohawk, where a couple of shipmates played Irish and Scottish folk music. He joined in, enjoyed it in a big way, and came home from that deployment a convert. Back in Portsmouth he went to the Sunshine Folk Club in Farlington. In his own telling, the regulars were still slightly mad, but this time he knew some of the words. They asked him to stay on as a resident singer, and Jenny took a job behind the bar.

The Farlington years shaped everything that followed. A folk club resident has to hold a room every week with whatever he has: a song, a monologue, a story that grows more absurd with every telling. Shep's mix of naval songs, comic routines and the occasional angry ballad about pit closures or politics was formed there, in front of the same faces, long before it reached theatres.

Professional from December 1975

He turned professional in December 1975 and, by the account on his own website (last updated in 2019), worked as an entertainer for the next four decades, which makes the second half of any Shep Woolley biography a list of stages. The range of work in those decades is wider than the "shanty singer" label suggests. He presented and produced programmes on Radio Victory, Portsmouth's commercial station, for around ten years. He promoted concerts in the city, organised folk clubs and shows on the pier, ran a honky-tonk bar night on Thursdays in the late 1970s and finished joint first on the television talent show New Faces. Further afield he worked festivals, theatres, cruise ships and after-dinner engagements, and toured as far as New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong.

A page from his diary for the spring of 2007 gives a feel for the circuit: folk clubs in Chesham, Llantrisant and Belper; Royal Naval Association branches in Uxbridge, Swindon and Waterlooville; private evenings aboard HMS Warrior; a village-hall tour in Gloucestershire; and a monthly "Shep Woolley & Friends" night at Thorngate Halls in Gosport. In April that year he also sang at Cecil Sharp House in London at a celebration of Cyril Tawney, the Gosport-born naval folk singer.

What reviewers heard

The reviews he collected over the years return to the same puzzle: what exactly is he? One writer who saw him on North West Leicestershire District Council's touring scheme admitted to going in "stone colder than Steve Austin" and coming out convinced, describing a set that opened with a cheeky Tom Paxton pastiche and moved through Bob Dylan singing George Formby's "When I'm Cleaning Windows", an ode to the Queen Mother set to "Ol' Man River", and the ballad of an obsessive gardener called Greenhouse Graham.

Shep's humour can often hide the fact that he is a passionate man, especially where he sees injustice or misuse of power.The Real Music Club, Staffordshire

That passion shows in the serious songs: "Dirty Black Coal", a warning to keep sons out of the pits, and "Cornish Lads", about fishing and tin-mining communities left with little but the holiday trade. Rural touring organisers in Gloucestershire noted his fourth visit to their scheme as another success, praising good timekeeping, a first-class PA and a show for adults with no bad language.

Underneath the jokes, the Shep Woolley biography is consistent: a miner's son who went to sea at fifteen, found folk music on a frigate, and spent the next half-century turning naval life into songs that people who were never in the Navy still sing along to.