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A life on the ocean wave! A home on the rolling deep!
Where the scattered waters rave, and the winds their revels keep!

Composer and musician, Henry Russell was born in Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey on 24 December 1812, the son of Jewish parents Moses and Sarah (nee Levin). According to Lamb, his father was a government officer,¹ who is known to have changed his surname from Levy.² His great uncle on his mother’s side was Solomon Hirschell (1762-1842), the Chief Rabbi who was an Ashkenazi Orthodox Jew remembered for his opposition to Reform Judaism.³

An Ashkenazi Orthodox Jewish community had settled in Sheerness from at least the late eighteenth century establishing a synagogue in the town. With the rise of the port during the Napoleonic era, the Jewish community grew up around the dockyards and garrison, with several members licensed as navy agents. This led to antisemitic feeling among some of the townsfolk and in 1810 a wild cat was thrown through the synagogue window during a service.⁴ The temptations of the port are evident and records of the London Beth-Din reveal that in 1812 members of the Sheerness community, whilst collecting debts from the seamen broke the laws of the Sabbath by selling merchandise on board a man-of-war.⁵

In 1811, the year before Russell was born, a new synagogue was built in the Blue Town area, between Sheppey Street and King Street, to accommodate the growing community.⁶ It was only a wooden structure, but members of the Westminster Congregation were invited to its opening and a band played music which ‘was perhaps as grand as has been witnessed’⁷. The early nineteenth century was a period of increasing interest in Jewish music. Lord Byron wrote 30 Hebrew Melodies to accompany the Canterbury-born composer Isaac Nathan’s music in 1815. Although Nathan’s melodies were inspired by European folk tradition and not strictly traditional Jewish music, Byron’s collaboration with Nathan reveals a genuine sympathy and interest in Jewish culture at this period. Russell’s family were at the heart of the Sheerness Jewish community and these early memories of the bustling port, “on the brink of the salt sea itself”⁸ and overlooking the expanse of ocean coupled with the synagogue music may have influenced the young Henry.

After the Napoleonic Wars, the Jewish community in Sheerness began to dwindle, and the community sought opportunities in other seafaring towns such as Glasgow.⁹ By 1847 there were only 13 Jewish people in Sheerness, with larger communities in Ramsgate and Canterbury.¹⁰ In October 1816, the petition of Moses Russell, shopseller, fruiterer and general dealer late of Sheerness, a prisoner for debt in the King’s bench Prison was heard at the Guildhall in the City of Westminster.¹¹ It is possible that this is Russell’s father.

The Russell family moved to London, where Henry studied music in Seven dials for six pence a lesson, before joining a Children’s Opera and performing in front of George IV at Brighton ‘who was so delighted that he took him on his knee and kissed his cheek’.¹² The King’s brothers, the Dukes of Cumberland, Sussex and Cambridge, had visited the Great Synagogue in 1809 where Henry’s great uncle had led the service and were sympathetic to the Jewish people, so it’s possible that George IV was aware of Henry’s lineage.¹³ At the age of ten Henry began working at a chemist’s shop. He did not have any aptitude for the business and recalls giving a customer who ‘asked for Epsom salts enough poison to kill fifty persons’.¹⁴

At the age of twelve, Russell travelled to Italy to study at the Bologna Conservatory where he met Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini. He then went to Paris and at the age of 20 sought his fortune in Toronto but struggled to find work. Moving on to New York, he debuted at Mitchell’s Olympic theatre. He describes this time as one of “jealousy and opposition” and he decided to abandon this work to concentrate on composing ballads.¹⁵

On returning to London, he took up a post as chorus master at the King’s Theatre¹⁶, where productions of Rossini’s ‘Trancredi’, ‘L’assedio di Corinto’, Otello and Donizetti’s ‘Marino Faliero’ were performed. It was at this time that he married a Quaker, Isabella Lloyd, from the Lloyd banking family, with whom he had at least six children, including the novelist William Clark Russell (1844–1911), who later lived in Ramsgate and Deal.¹⁷

Russell composed between 600-800 songs, many tackling social injustice including slavery. His song “The Fine Old English Gentleman” which was published in 1835 and later parodied by Charles Dickens in a political attack on the Conservative Party, was an ironic description of “the poor old English gentleman” who “kept a brave old mansion / At a bountiful old rate”.¹⁸ This was far from his own background and the two men, whose fathers had both worked in the dockland communities of Kent (Dicken’s father John had worked at Chatham Dockyard), struck up a working relationship. In 1838 ‘I Care Not For Spring on His Fickle Wing’ -from the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club and the Christmas melody ‘The Ivy Green’ both written by Dickens were set to music by Russell. According to Russell, Dickens was also fulsome in his praise for another of his songs ‘The Maniac’ (1840) which ‘… had done as much in exposing the great social evil as any of his writing’.¹⁹ In 1850, he collaborated with Dr Charles Mackay on The Far West, or, The Emigrant’s Progress from the Old World to the New, which included songs accompanied by commentary extolling the emigration movement. Would-be emigrants were cheered on with rousing words such as: ‘Cheer, boys, cheer, No more of idle sorrow, Courage, true hearts, shall bear us on our way’.²⁰

Russell moved with his family to Boulogne in 1857 where he acted as a moneylender and bill broker.²¹ On the death of his wife in 1887, Russell aged 75, married his mistress, Hannah de Lara, with whom he already had two teenage sons. He died in 1900 at his home in Maida Vale and is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. His gravestone is shaped like an arm chair in tribute to one of his songs. His obituary states that ‘Henry Russell was fortunate in having for his collaborators such writers as Eliza Cook, Charles Dickens, Thackeray, Longfellow, Tennyson, Dr Mackay and others, whose compositions went far towards helping him to achieve his reputation as a story-teller in song.’²²

Russell is rememberd today as the man who wrote the music for Epes Sargent’s poem ‘A life on the Ocean Wave’, and as a result is considered an important figure in American popular song tradition. The song was adopted as the regimental march of the British Royal Marines in 1889, whose school of music was based at Deal until 1996.

This article was published: 26 June 2022.

Bibliography

Roth, C. The Rise of Provincial Jewry. The early history of the Jewish communities in the English countryside, 1740-1840. Reprinted from “The Jewish Monthly.” With plates.

References