Arnott’s songs were to be sung to traditional tunes. Two of them, ‘The Day of St George Every Briton inspire’, for the court held on St. George’s day, and ‘This Autumn our Country with Plenty is Blest’, for the feast day of St Edward the Confessor on 13 October, to the tune of ‘The Cobbler’; that for the feast day of St Mary Magdalene on 23 July, ‘Once more with great pleasure each brother we meet’, to the tune of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’; and the final one, for the Conversion of St Paul on 25 January, ‘With Joy we Hail this Happy Day’, to Thomas Arne’s ‘Rule Britannia’. Almost three years later, in December 1820, Arnott produced a revised version of ‘Once more with great pleasure each brother we meet’, for the first time also including a verse dedicated to the Fletchers’ ladies. This was glued into to the book of songs presented in 1818.
The volume is to be found within the archives of the Worshipful Company of Fletchers in the Guildhall Library (Reference: CLC/L/FF/F/002/MS21126).
At the time Arnott presented his songs in 1818 he was not far short of his 80th birthday. He had been admitted to the freedom and livery of the Fletchers in July 1784, and by 1793 had become a member of the company’s Court. At the time, he was trading as a silk mercer in Birchin Lane, not far from the George and Vulture, where the Fletchers routinely met. In 1794, however, disaster struck and Arnott was declared bankrupt. It is not clear that he ever recovered from this blow, for he was eventually appointed Keeper of the Monument, a post that the corporation could grant to an elderly citizen who had fallen on hard times. While the post itself carried a stipend of only £20 per annum, the keeper could increase this tenfold by admission charges, and the sale of descriptive pamphlets.
In his own pamphlet, Arnott expressed his gratitude to the Mayor, Aldermen and Common Council in the same rhyming couplets that would later stand him in good stead when composing his songs for the Fletchers’ dinners.
“Full threescore years life's various scenes I've past,
And Providence has fix’d me here at last
Within those ancient walls to find repose,
From all the sorrow that Misfortune knows:
With thankfulness to pass my latest hour,
With gratitude proclaim kind Friendship’s power;
Whilst life remains God's mercy to record,
And pray my friends may gain a blest reward.”
Even in the early 19th century the annual visitors to the Monument numbered in their thousands, and it seems that Arnott was certainly not left destitute. Indeed, in the autumn of 1802 he was elected Renter Warden of the Fletchers, and after serving the two-year term usual at that date, he duly advanced to become Upper Warden.
By the end of his life his fortunes had thus recovered sufficiently to be able to have his song texts printed and bound for presentation to the Company (although whether he called in a favour – he used the same printers who provided him with copies of the guidebook to the Monument, John Bryan & Son of Whalebone Court, Lothbury – we do not know). Arnott seems to have died not long after presenting his final song to the Fletchers in December 1820.
Arnott was no composer, so – and in the interest of easy use at Company dinners – he tailored his lyrics to popular tunes with which his fellow Fletchers were familiar.
Today, the best known of these is ‘Rule Britannia’, the rousing chorus from Thomas Arne’s masque Alfred, first performed in 1740, but seen on the London stage only five years later, when it achieved the instant popularity which it retains to the present day.
Less well known today, but highly popular in its own day, was ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’, which had its origins in Henry Fielding’s play The Grub Street Opera, first performed in 1731. The tune that popularised it was penned somewhat later by the composer Richard Leveridge (1670-1758), and, particularly in a setting for fife and drum, is still widely used at military functions.
Curiously, and perhaps in a reflection of his own character, Arnott chose for two of his original four songs a today unfamiliar and rather more melancholy tune, ‘A Cobbler there was’. Another of Richard Leveridge’s compositions, dating from the late 17th century, the tune had by the 1730s achieved enough popularity to be used by John Gay in his Beggar’s Opera, and this public recognition evidently endured in Arnott’s day.
Hannes Kleineke