Four Pence a Day
I got this song from out of a book I bought in the early 1960’s titled
'The Shuttle and the Cage', edited by Ewan McColl and published by
the Workers Music Association in 1954.
Ewan McColl and his wife then Joan Greenwood had collected the song in 1948 from John Gowland, a retired lead miner from the North Pennines town of Middleton-in-Teesdale in County Durham. The song is thought to have been written by the Teesdale lead miner and poet Thomas Raine.
In 1961 Stan Kelly and Eric Winter wrote a parody of the song lampooning the state of the building industry, titled ‘Four Pounds A Day’, which at the time was the amount paid to the workers on building sites when they were ‘rained off. The chorus of the parody went:
Four pounds a day, me lads and nothing much to do
No trouble from the foreman, he’s in the union, too
Some want the rain to go to Spain, we want the rain to stay
We’re rained on and contented on four pounds a day .
