Hylda Sims
Folk singer, teacher and novelist who was at the forefront of the skiffle craze with the City Ramblers
HYLDA SIMS, who has died aged 87, was a folk singer, guitarist, writer, poet and teacher who first came to fame during the skiffle boom, which inspired British teenagers to grab primitive instruments and form groups in the 1950s. Imitating improvised blues, jazz and jug bands who turned household items into instruments to play house parties in the American South in the 1920s, Lonnie Donegan, Chas Mcdevitt, and the Vipers had most of the hits. But as a founder of one of the earliest and most enduring of these groups – the City Ramblers – Hylda Sims played a key role.
The coffee bars of Soho were at the heart of the scene and it was Hylda Sims who set up and ran the most popular venue, the Skiffle Cellar in Greek Street. At one point it was open seven nights a week, and all the leading lights – along with visiting Americans like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Sonny Terry and Brownie Mcghee – performed there.
The skiffle boom soon faded, but its legacy was a network of young musicians who were inspired by the folk, blues and country material at its heart to adapt it into the emergent folk club scene. Hylda Sims was one: a lifelong advocate of Left-wing values and progressive thinking, she was still performing topical songs in a City Ramblers Revival band with Simon Prager and Doc Stenson weeks before her death.
She was born on April 3 1932 and liked to describe herself as “the love child of itinerant communist market traders”. Her father, an atheist from the Midlands, was a member of the Marxist-sympathising Plebs League and a founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain who earned his living travelling around the country in a wooden caravan selling home-made herbal remedies. After settling in Norwich, her mother ran a fish and chip shop and Hylda attended a state school, which she hated.
However, aged seven she was installed at Summerhill, the free, progressive residential school founded by AS Neill at Leiston, Suffolk, where lessons were voluntary. She relished the freedom and developed an interest in Marxism; her 2000 novel, Inspecting The Island, was based on her experiences at Summerhill. One of her tutors there was the Scottish poet and humorist Ivor Cutler, who was reputed to have wanted to marry her; he became a good friend and presented her with her first guitar.
Leaving at 15, Hylda lived on her own in a flat in Swiss Cottage while attending ballet school. She joined the Young Communist League and sang in Eastern Europe with the London Youth Choir. To help pay the rent she would dress as an English minstrel wench singing Greensleeves for tourists at the Elizabethan Rooms in Kensington, and worked at Collets, the Left-wing bookshop.
She began singing in coffee bars, playing Woody Guthrie and Burl Ives songs; with her bohemian lifestyle, striking looks, her straight jet-black hair and her long green cigarette-holder, she exuded an alluring sense of mystery.
She was playing a gig at the Heritage Society in Oxford when she met Russell Quaye, a tall, red-bearded commercial artist, busker, anti-fascist activist and former rear-gunner. He was 12 years older, but they fell in love and established the City Ramblers, initially with John Pilgrim and John Lapthorne. They opened their first club in a South Kensington studio flat, moving to a pub after complaints from neighbours about the noise.
Adding the words “Skiffle Group” to chime with the times, they appeared on television on 6.5 Special, released a 78rpm single, Round and Round the Picket Line, and played in Moscow at the 1957 International Youth Festival.
Hylda and Quaye married in 1957, although the relationship did not last. As a soloist, she performed on the nascent folk club scene, playing both traditional and modern material. In the 1960s she gained a BA and MSC in Russian Studies at Hull University and went on to teach English as a foreign language in London and Spain; she also taught table tennis to young Londoners.
In the South Yorkshire moors she helped to set up the Lifespan community with one of her Summerhill friends, Freer Spreckley, buying and renovating a row of 19 empty cottages as a commune for families seeking an alternative lifestyle. The initiative still exists as a housing co-operative.
Hylda Sims was a freethinker who believed that society could be changed by art; her London home was open house, providing bed, board, encouragement and inspiration for musicians, poets, artists and philosophers. She published her first full poetry collection, Sayling the Babel, in 2006, followed by Reaching Peckham (2009). She contributed to Poetry News and supported poetry events.
From 2005 she hosted, read her work and sang at the monthly Fourth Friday events at the Poetry Café in London. As well as Inspecting the Island, she wrote two other novels, Waterloo Roses and Peckham in Person, gritty narratives set in 1990s London.
Hylda Sims is survived by two daughters.