Beach singers?

Let’s get this right.

“There is an old verb, to busk, meaning to improvise and it is from this word that busker is derived, to describe a street performer or beach singer or performer.” So says Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.  (What's a beach singer?)

 1931 New [sic] Gresham Dictionary offers: “busk to get one’s self ready, to prepare, equip, dress.” The busk was also a piece of flexible steel, whalebone or wood worn by women in the front of their stays.

Clearly just as this jongleur, braving the spring streets of Ludlow on Sunday and, forgive the expression, dropping his balls, needs more practise, so the term busking needs a little more research.

Warming the streets

Too cold, too cold. 
I try Ludlow for the first time this year, but my fingers freeze. I fail to raise the cost of parking the car. 
Never mind, as spring approaches there's more and more street musicians out and about, like these two guys (left) busking in Hereford the other day.

First World War busker

Munition girls: Their badges read: Speed up guns and ammunition

I’m researching Canary Girls, the story of the million or so sassy munition workers in Britain, Canada, Australia and India whose wartime contribution was never recognised.

One, Mabel Lethbridge, had her leg blown off by a faulty machine at an armaments factory in Hayes, Middlesex in 1917. “I saw my leg had gone . . . I wasn’t blind then,” she writes in Fortune Grass.

A year later “Peg-leg” Mabel is hiring a barrel organ from Pasquali’s, Clerkenwell, London (two bob a day) and busking for a living.

She busked around the city with this sign pinned to her jacket: “Lost a leg and sustained numerous other wounds in a munition explosion in 1917. You needed my help then! I need yours now!” Seems she did all right.