The Vassal Singers in Nunthorpe before the First World War

This was written many years ago by Kay Hill (1905-2005).  I think it must have appeared in some publication but I don't know which.  She was born Katharine Isobel Ellis Stubbs and she lived with her parents and two elder brothers at Red Croft (now 113 Guisborough Road) in the little hamlet called Nunthorpe Station.

Katharine Stubbs c1914

The Vassal Singers

They were known throughout the North Riding as the Vassal Singers, although they chanted rather than sang, and learned writers spelled the word "wassail".

They came every November, a group of boys and girls, aged between five and fifteen years old, carrying a deep, oblong, cardboard box containing a doll tucked up in bed.

I saw them first when I was six years old and never forgot the doll.  She had a china face and blue staring eyes that never closed.  Her head was on a pillow and her body covered with a counterpane of white cotton sprinkled with faded flowers, probably a scrap of material from a well-washed summer frock.

They chanted, rather than sang, on one note in our broad, delightful North Riding dialect that so clearly reflects a Scandinavian origin.  The verse, as my mother taught it to me afterwards, went, as I remember, something like this:

God bless the Maister of this hoose

And the Mistress alsaw.

And all the pretty childer

As round your table gaw.

And all your kith and kindred

As dwells both far and near.

We wish you a Merry Kissimuss

And a Happy New Year.

We gave them pennies and biscuits, cakes and apples.  My mother told me I must always keep up the custom, as she had heard that townspeople coming into the village were turning them away unkindly, believing them to be carol singers arriving far too early, just a nuisance.

They never came again after the First World War and I am told that the name of the leader, a shy, gangling boy, is alongside that of my brother on the village War Memorial.

I was enchanted by the word "Kissimuss" and taught it to my brothers when they came home from school for Christmas, until it became a family word that I am quite capable of using to this day.

I wish you a Merry Kissimuss and a Happy New Year.

.............

Kay Hill lived to be 100 years old.  More of her recollections of life before the First World War can be found at Days of plenty in Redcar: a middle class household before the First World War

More of her writing can be found here 

The Poltergeist at Moor Farm, North Yorkshire: 1940 to 1950