{"id":887,"date":"2017-01-08T15:56:33","date_gmt":"2017-01-08T15:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/trailerstar.co.uk\/songwriter\/?p=887"},"modified":"2017-01-08T18:39:42","modified_gmt":"2017-01-08T18:39:42","slug":"the-ballad-of-the-orange-tree-the-story-behind-the-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trailerstar.co.uk\/songwriter\/2017\/01\/08\/the-ballad-of-the-orange-tree-the-story-behind-the-song\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ballad of The Orange Tree – The story behind the song"},"content":{"rendered":"

This entire series of songs are the most personal and autobiographical I have ever written.<\/p>\n

I have never delved so deeply into folk and personal stories as here a sign of the influence of attending a great Scottish Cultural Studies course at Nottingham University.<\/p>\n

In this case the family story (now more detailed thanks to other family members input) revolves around my great-great grandmother and her ‘flight’ as it turns out now from southern Ireland not Ulster as I presumed in 1995. The story is simple she was catholic from a small village..Borrisleigh in Tipperary. It looks like her marriage to a serving British Army man Private Charles Mead\u00a0precipitated the flight from Ireland (allegedly at dead of night in a fishing boat) to escape persecution by\u00a0Irish Independents\u00a0long before the Anglo-Irish War. He too was a catholic I now believe not a protestant but accepting the ‘black and tan’ was treated as even worse than the old ‘enemy’.<\/p>\n

They were then sent to Ranikhet in the Himalayas which modeled on an English village in 1880s where my great-grandmother Mary was born\u00a0on the 15th December 1888. Below her birth certificate.<\/p>\n

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Here the ‘English Church at Rani Khet’ from a postcard.<\/p>\n

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and the officer’s mess<\/p>\n

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This location and photos have only been uncovered recently.<\/p>\n

I have amended the song lyrics from what sung on tape from Bombay..to Ranikhet and my Great Nan’s son Jack Everitt was wounded not dead at Arnhem but that whole other story.. and song one day…<\/p>\n

The Ballad of Ranger Best referred to in the original recording is a poem by James Simmons which refers to the murder in 1972 of a 19 year old Irish member of the British Army (The Irish Rangers) who abducted from home when on leave from Germany and executed by the OIRA.<\/p>\n

For now here the song and lyrics<\/p>\n

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