The song describes a situation common in the 19th century: naive men would be lured with the promise of sex, served with alcohol (possibly drugged), then be robbed of all their possessions and sometimes even their clothes.
Some versions of the song make it explicit that the victim is a sailor ("so take a tip young sailors/and watch your step on shore"). In this version, he has a "gold watch and a pocketbook" which seems a little unlikely for a poor sailor, but the fact that the song finishes up with him being sent "round Cape Horn" suggests that that is indeed what he is.
The place names in the song vary in different versions, but Chatham Street, where the sailor first meets the girl (clearly a prostitute), is in Lower Manhattan, near the docks where his ship was probably docked. It was close to Five Points, a disreputable and dangerous part of the city, and was lined with brothels and shops dealing in stolen goods. The girl takes him a little way uptown to Bleecker Street, which was also notorious for being home to a large number of brothels. The subtext is that the girl's "mother" and her "sister" are nothing of the kind: the "mother" is presumably the owner of the brothel, her "sister" another prostitute.
"Martin Churchill" was apparently a real figure, a 19th-century boarding house master who ran boarding houses that provided lodging to sailors. Like other owners of lodging houses that catered to sailors, he also acted as a recruiter, finding sailors to crew ships. He may also have been a 'crimp', a man whose recruiting methods involved drugging unsuspecting sailors or getting them drunk, and tricking or coercing them into signing a contract to join a particular ship while they were drunk or drugged.
The spoken parts of the Steeleye Span version ("play that modern banjo, Min") are in the voices of Minnie and Henry, two characters from the anarchic radio comedy series The Goon Show, popular in Britain in the 1950s.
The song describes a situation common in the 19th century: naive men would be lured with the promise of sex, served with alcohol (possibly drugged), then be robbed of all their possessions and sometimes even their clothes.
Some versions of the song make it explicit that the victim is a sailor ("so take a tip young sailors/and watch your step on shore"). In this version, he has a "gold watch and a pocketbook" which seems a little unlikely for a poor sailor, but the fact that the song finishes up with him being sent "round Cape Horn" suggests that that is indeed what he is.
The place names in the song vary in different versions, but Chatham Street, where the sailor first meets the girl (clearly a prostitute), is in Lower Manhattan, near the docks where his ship was probably docked. It was close to Five Points, a disreputable and dangerous part of the city, and was lined with brothels and shops dealing in stolen goods. The girl takes him a little way uptown to Bleecker Street, which was also notorious for being home to a large number of brothels. The subtext is that the girl's "mother" and her "sister" are nothing of the kind: the "mother" is presumably the owner of the brothel, her "sister" another prostitute.
"Martin Churchill" was apparently a real figure, a 19th-century boarding house master who ran boarding houses that provided lodging to sailors. Like other owners of lodging houses that catered to sailors, he also acted as a recruiter, finding sailors to crew ships. He may also have been a 'crimp', a man whose recruiting methods involved drugging unsuspecting sailors or getting them drunk, and tricking or coercing them into signing a contract to join a particular ship while they were drunk or drugged.
The spoken parts of the Steeleye Span version ("play that modern banjo, Min") are in the voices of Minnie and Henry, two characters from the anarchic radio comedy series The Goon Show, popular in Britain in the 1950s.