Rooting through the Bins - and Scratching Forty-Year-Old Itches

[steepholm]

When I was at primary school, I suppose in about 1970, we used to sing a song about school dinners. It went like this:

Say what you will,
School dinners make you ill,
And Davy Crockett died of shepherd's pie.
Our school din-dins come from pig bins
Out of town.

I used to walk home for dinner in those days (this was long before I became gentrified and started calling it lunch), so my interest in the subject was merely theoretical, but I sang along with the rest in a spirit of camaraderie.

It's interesting, if only to me, to piece together the various bits of this song. Its tune was the opening theme from the TV show Out of Town, presented by Jack Hargreaves. The theme's lyrics were:

Say what you will,
The countryside is still
The only place where I could settle down
Troubles there are so much rarer
Out of town.

Clearly the school rhyme is a parody of this, so we might expect that the school dinner song postdates 1963, when Out of Town was first broadcast. But there are features that irksomely suggest an earlier date. Davy Crockett is a quintessentially mid-'50s icon, is he not - thanks to the US film and TV series? In 1970 I had a vague idea who he was, but he was by no means a name to conjure with in my childhood. I knew the phrase "king of the wild frontier", for example, but had no notion what it referred to. (In fact I still don't. Is it the western frontier, or the frontier with Mexico?)

Pig bins were more mysterious still. They were obviously meant to be unpleasant, but what were they? This bothered me vaguely even in 1970, I now recall, but it took me more than forty years to find out. In fact, this post was prompted by my accidentally learning about pig bins just the other day, from a TV programme on the history of waste management. According to the programme, pig bins were a wartime feature - metal bins put on the street for the collection of scraps to be fed to pigs, in a thrifty effort at recycling. You can see a picture here.

At this point the song looks like a chimera. It references WWII pig bins, but also a 1960s TV programme, along with a figure whose cultural zenith was about 1955. What generation of children could possibly have invented it? Did it evolve over time in some way? Having read the Opies, one might find that plausible.

But the mystery dilutes when you learn that the Out of Town theme was actually written for the film Charley Moon (1956), where it was sung by Max Bygraves. So the parody may be earlier. Not only that, but if you look at the first comment on the article about pig bins linked above, you will read that they survived the war and lasted into the 1960s (though not in my town, obviously). Given all that, my best guess is that the song I sang was probably composed circa 1956, riding the wave of Crockett enthusiasm and taking advantage of Max Bygrave's song in Charley Moon, while alluding to the noisome pig bins still dotting the streets of Albion.

I wish now that I could go back to my 1970 self and share the news.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

In American historical parlance, "frontier" always means the western frontier - movable according to what year or era is being discussed - but post 1820 or so in practical terms, part of that frontier is with Mexico, so that is an element, as it is an element (but only one element) in Crockett's biography. The frontier is officially considered to have closed in 1890, when historians noted that the census of that year was the first time that a line of the edge of settlement could no longer be drawn. Consideration of the Mexican borderlands area as an region of special interest in and of itself considerably postdates that, and is mostly driven by xenophobia over the Brown Peril and responses to that, so that's a phenomenon of, hmm, the last 40 years or so.

[gillo]

I'm pretty sure we referred to the food waste bins in the school kitchens as "pig bins" at the various schools I attended in Staffordshire between 1960 and 1973. It was generally believed that all uneaten food went to feed pigs. Probably it didn't, but school legends last a long time.

Kids' TV had a lot of repeats - not just The Singing Ringing Tree, which never seemed to be off-air, so it's possible Crockett lasted longer than you think. I can remember him, and I'm not that much older than you.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Davy Crockett was very much a hero of my childhood (I was born in 1951)- not so much for the TV show (I don't remember ever watching it) but because he was all over the culture (I possessed a Davy Crockett colouring-in book) and especially because of John Wayne's movie The Alamo (which I adored.) The Alamo came out in 1960.

I also remember the Max Bygraves song. It had a long shelf life- and got regular plays on radio shows like Children's Favourites.

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

Iona and Peter Opie published it in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959). They recorded it in Alton, Great Bookham, and Tooting. They note: 'Became current October 1956. Sung to 'Out of Town' (p. 182). Congratulations on your research: you were spot on.

I read the Opies' book as a teenager in the mid-sixties. Many of the rhymes they record were ones I'd learned from other primary school children in the second half of the fifties-early sixties. I don't remember that one, though.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that our school in the 1970s had a pig bin for waste school dinners. Whether the contents went to a farm for real pigs to eat, I couldn't say.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Here's a school dinner poem from about 1973:

These are the graves of three poor sinners
who died from eating our school dinners.
Our school dinners laid them aside
many have eaten them - many have died.
Look at the gravy, slimy and still,
if that doesn't get you, the custard will!

[joyeuce]

We still called the bin into which waste food was scraped a "pig bin" at my prep school in the early 1980s. South Yorkshire, and a reasonable amount of the material the Opies found was at least semi-familiar when I read the book. Our truce term was "kings", accompanied by crossed fingers.

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

My (slightly younger) brother and I were familiar enough with Davy Crockett to play games that involved being him...I remember no details but I'm sure that happened. Also, I remember no other details (except maybe the hat), but I can sing that song about him being king of the wild frontier.