Rab Channing: Life and Legends

Abstract

WE first met the Rab Channing stories in 1981 in our last recording session with the late Harry Adams of Isle Abbotts, near Taunton in Somerset, and at that time Harry expressed surprise that the stories were new to us. It was immediately clear that the stories fell into that intriguing area where oral history and folklore merge, and we decided to pursue them further. Our first step was to see if Rab Channing was an identifiable, historical person. Harry had placed him as an innkeeper in nineteenth century West Hatch, a village four miles south-east of Taunton, so we went to the 1851 Census Return, which gave us a Robert Channing, Beer House Keeper at West Hatch. The next step was to try and collect some more stories. Excluding general enquiries in the search for potential informants, we approached eleven people with the specific intention of asking for Rab Channing stories. All eleven people were over retirement age and all had long connections with West Hatch or the neighbouring villages. Of the eleven, one was medically unable to answer questions, three more could not recall hearing the name, a further three could recall the name but nothing more, and the remaining four could add to the collection of material. In each case the initial approach was made without the tape recorder, but if a pocket notebook and a pencil proved inadequate then it was brought from the car. The tape recorder was only brought out once; so it is true to say that Harry Adams was our main informant and for several stories he was the sole source. In addition to the collected material, a number of published references were found. One was in a nineteenth-century book by a near contemporary of Rab Channing, and this has been treated as an accurate historical record; all the other material has been published in the second half of the twentieth century, and this has all been included with our collected material. As the nineteenth century progressed, so generally the quality and quantity of the documents improve, and as many of Rab Channing's best remembered exploits probably occurred when he was physically in his prime, say 1820-40, the contemporary record is less than complete. It is also worth bearing in mind that in dealing with rogues folklore tends to remember their 'successes,' while gaol records, for example, catalogue the 'failures.' In this paper we will attempt to compare the stories that have come down to us with the contemporary records; to this end we have identified the sources of the stories (both oral and printed) by initials, e.g. Harry Adams becomes HA; these sources are listed at the end of the article, and are followed by notes giving all other references. Even the most basic information has been altered over the years; the hero's name occurs in one source as Rab Jennings (PO), in another as Rab Channings (RW), but