Acker Bilk: not a stranger on Somerset’s shore!

The great jazz clarinettist, Acker Bilk, was born Bernard Stanley Bilk in Pensford on 28 January 1929. His nickname was West Country slang for ‘mate’ or ‘friend’. Educated at Pensford School, he learned his jazz during national service after the War. His wife, Jean Hawkins, whom he married in 1954, was also from Pensford.

For a time he worked in the Wills tobacco factory in Bristol, and opened a jazz club, the Paramount. With his Paramount Jazz Band, he became a leading light of the ‘trad jazz’ revival, but his greatest commercial success was the mega-hit, Stranger on the Shore in 1962, which topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

He recorded albums and performed on stage and on TV for many years, with his unique trademark appearance of goatee, striped waistcoat and bowler. Despite contracting throat cancer, he continued performing into the 2000s, and took up oil painting as a therapy, living in his birthplace of Pensford. He died on 2 November 2014, and is buried in All Saints Churchyard, Publow.

Throughout his life he cherished his Somerset roots. His title of his 1960 hit, Summer Set, was an obvious pun on the county. He was a great raconteur, and told many humorous stories about Somerset as part of his act, and, for example, in his various appearances on the late 1970s ITV chat show, Tell Me Another. When he received his MBE in 2001, he was quoted as declaring that he was “over the moon with the Honour…I’ll get a few of my friends in Somerset together, who I paint with, and we’ll crack open a bottle of something, maybe cider.” He related tales of his supposed songwriting friend, ‘Bert Ogg’, whose compositions included not only the musical, Ryvita, and the song I’ve got you under my sink, but also Trouble over Bridgwater. So Somerset!

Some of the very many local newspaper stories about Bilk over the decades were definitely not of the ‘stop the presses’ variety. In January 1964 some papers breathlessly recounted the tale of Bilk returning to London from a concert at Weston-super-Mare, and stopping off at a Glastonbury petrol station for fuel and cigarettes. The person on duty “chatted to Mr Bilk about the weather and state of the roads. ‘A very nice person’ was the verdict’”!

There was an unlikely connection between Bilk and the Tory MP for Taunton, Edward du Cann (who was profiled in the ‘Political Somerset’ article in Somerset Leveller #37, May 2018). During an April 1962 Commons debate on the Budget, du Cann mentioned that he was driving to Westminster one day and “I turned on the radio hoping to pick up Mr. Acker Bilk, who is a well-known son of Somerset” – a remark which received, according to Hansard, a “hear hear” from the Weston-super-Mare MP, David Webster. A year later, Bilk actually met du Cann, who was by then a Treasury Minister, when he was part of a delegation of musicians lobbying the Government just before that year’s budget, to have purchase tax removed from musical instruments. According to the Taunton Courier of 9 March 1963, Bilk told du Cann, “You’re with it, man” – not a phrase normally associated with the suave du Cann!

Not only did he perform regularly around the county during his long career, he was publicly active in its affairs. He became a member of Somerset County Cricket Club in 1962, during a club membership campaign at that time. In December 1971, he joined ‘Save our Somerset’, a group campaigning to prevent the breakup of the historic county – with some of it going into the new, and much unloved, County of Avon – during the highly controversial reforms of local government then going through Parliament. He offered to lead marches on Westminster, make a pro-Somerset record, and to “bend over backwards to help them.”

According to an editorial in the Somerset Standard of 20 August 1976, “time and again he has returned to help Pensford residents in fund-raising efforts .. We join with many others in saying ‘Welcome home, Acker’, for it says much for a man that he has not forgotten his early friends and supporters, and is still welcome among them.”

A fitting tribute to this north Somerset entertainer.