Pretty little girl from nowhere, The

Lyrics from sheet music in Empire News & The Umpire March 1910

There's a dainty little girl, one of the prettiest,
And you'll meet her in a leafy country lane,
You ask her where she lives, her address she never gives,
She tries to tell the name of it, in vain,
It's just a cot, she'll answer, on the boundary,
Of a stately English mansion, fine and grand.
It stands here all alone and all around she's known,
As the little girl from No Man's Land.

She's the pretty little girl from nowhere,
Nowhere at all,
In a house very small,
That's ten miles from the railway station,
No name, no number, so lovers never call,
On the pretty little girl from nowhere,
Nowhere at all.

In her little old sun bonnet and her cotton dress,
She's as fine as any lass of high degree,
Lads from far and near come a-courting her, I fear
Her husband never one of them will be,
For a certain youthful lordling, who has lost his way,
Lost his heart to her, and soon I understand,
Titled single girls will mourn, that the season's catch has gone,
To the little girl from No Man's Land.

A Music Hall song most associated with the singing of both Florrie Forde and  Ella Retford. It appears to have been a “free song” – at this time some songwriters and publishers were starting to move away from selling the exclusive performance rights to individual artists. The song was sung in pantomimes up and down the UK in the 1909/10 season and it appears to have been very popular for a relatively short period. It seems to have been fondly remembered as it turns up in a number of memoirs and novels, including:

• The great push : an episode of the Great War; Patrick MacGill (1916), p61
• The dream of fair women; (Henry Williamson (1924) p363
• A Lincolnshire calendar; Maureen Sutton (1997) p16
• A ragged schooling : growing up in the classic slum; Robert Roberts p49

Significant fragments of this song turn up in The Fetterangus Rangers (RN 10548, RN30682) a song associated with Lucy Stewart of the important Scots traveller family, her version can be heard on the excellent Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches website. The New Victory Band recorded it on their CD One More Dance and Then…

Ella Retford sings its

Sources:

• Entries in the Roud Indexes at the Vaughn Williams Memorial Library: https://archives.vwml.org/search/all:single[folksong-broadside-books]/0_50/all/score_desc/extended-roudNo_tr%3A10548)
• Kilgarrif Sing Us
• Lyrics and Sheet Music: Empire News & The Umpire – Sunday 06 March 1910, British Newspaper Archive (requires account)
• Novels and memoirs on Archive.com
• Mudcat thread