Thomas John Dibdin

GEDCOM Note

The Dibdins

The anniversary of the death of THOMAS DIBDIN, which was recorded in yesterday's extract from the The Times of 1841, gives a welcome excuse for remembering a very talented and attractive family. The DIBDINS could not compare, perhaps with the LINLEYS or the KEMBLES for beauty or for genius; but THOMAS JOHN, whose anniversary occurs about this time, was not the most eminent or the most amusing of a remarkable lot. At the age of four, as The Times recalled, he appeared at Drury Lane as Cupid to the Venus of twenty-year old SARAH SIDDONS; and on the whole he may be held to have lived up to so dazzling a start. Born, as the phrase goes, on the stage, he was doomed to the theatre; and having been a choir boy at St. Paul's Cathedral, a schoolboy, and an apprentice, he duly ran away and became first a provincial and then a London actor, on and off a scene-painter, and always a dramatic writer "of a fatal facility". Of his two thousand ditties, the best remembered is "The Snug Little Island" - Daddy Neptune's remarks to Freedom about the "right little, tight little island," of which the credit is still too often given to the writers father. Of TOM'S innumerable dramatic works one remains famous - the pantomime of Mother Goose, first seen at Covent Garden in 1806-7, with GRIMALDI brought in to achieve and contribute triumph. TOM DIBDIN was a hard-working and respectable man, affable and popular; and his Mouth of the Nile and other theatrical tributes to the British Navy in the Napoleonic Wars won him favour of his SOVEREIGN as well as of the public. TOM DIBDIN had an elder brother, CHARLES ISAAC MUNGO DIBDIN, who wrote plays and pantomimes and a history of the London Theatres. This CHARLES DIBDIN had a son, HENRY EDWARD DIBDIN, a harpist, organist, composer, mainly of sacred music, and remembered today in choirs and places where they sing for his collections of Psalm tunes. His first and best teacher was his sister, MARY ANNE, who married a MR. TONNA, whence came the second name of the late SIR LEWIS TONNA DIBDIN, Dean of the Arches. We are coasting the ecclesiastical; and we land there with the eminent clerical member of this variously gifted family, THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN, bibliographer, part founder of the Roxburghe Club, traveller and prolific author, sacred and profane. His father, a naval captain, was, in a sense, the original Tom Bowling. If the comparison be not irreverent, he was to that song as CAPTAIN JOHN WORDSWORTH was to his brother WILLIAM'S "Happy Warrior." For CAPTAIN THOMAS DIBDIN was in the mind of his devoted brother CHARLES while he wrote in or about 1788, the words and music of that much loved song. This elder CHARLES DIBDIN, the father of THOMAS JOHN, was the most original and the most effectual of them all. "The Professional Life of Mr. Dibdin" is the title he gave to his Memoirs; and that was just as well, for his private life was not for all eyes or ears. A choirboy in Winchester Cathedral and a popular boy singer, he became an occasional organist in London; he often played the congregation out of the church at St. Bride's, Fleet Street, before he was sixteen; and (the young monkey!) soon learned to "handle Moll Peatley, Bobbin Joan and Lilballero in a voluntary." His quarrels with GARRICK and others, his ups and downs, his labours and adventures, his myriad compositions and performances make a thrilling tale. Some of his operatic music lives yet.

But best of all were his songs. He wrote "The Jolly Young Waterman," and "Farewell, my trim built wherry," and "The Lass the loves a Sailor"; and he wrote those songs about Tom and Ben and Bob, and their kind but virtuous Polls and Sues, which gave the British Tars a good conceit of themselves and their country a good conceit of them. CHARLES DIBDIN, it was said, brought more men into the NAVY in war then all the press gangs could; and CHARLES NAPIER ROBINSON, the historian of the British Tar, has recorded how the Navy itself has borne witness to the improvement as well as pleasure that it has owed to CHARLES DIBDIN and his songs of the sea.

The Times Saturday September 20 1941