After years of tormenting self-doubt and false starts, the Warlock ingenium emerged spontaneously, uncontrollably in 10 songs composed within a two week period in August 1918—including such classics as The Bayley Berith the Bell Away, My Gostly Fader, and Whenas the Rye—heralding spates of ineffable lyric charm through the remaining dozen years of his brief career. Given the central place that beer and drunkenness played in his life, it is curious that the first of the drinking songs, Captain Stratton's Fancy, did not appear until 1920, to be paired with Mr. Belloc's Fancy, composed in 1921, both published by Augener in 1922. The former, subtitled "RUM," is complemented by the latter, subtitled "BEER," composed at Cefn Bryntalch, the family estate in Wales whither Warlock repaired after his puzzling flight from the editorship of the radical, often hilarious journal of the arts, The Sackbut, a flight that took him from London to Marseilles and, via the Sahara desert, to Budapest, to end face down and drunk in a Paris gutter. The doggerel to which it is set, by John Collings Squire (not to become Sir until 1933, three years after Warlock's death), are a good-natured guying of his fellow historian, poet, and journalist, Hilaire Belloc—"At Martinmas when I was born, Hey diddle, Ho Diddle, Do. There came a cow with a crumpled horn... She stood agape and said, 'My dear, You're a very fine child for this time of year, And I think you'll have a taste in beer. Hey diddle." Belloc may well have had a taste in beer but seems to have cultivated oinology instead, as evidenced by his rich and moving "Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine." Though not published as such, Warlock regarded Captain Stratton's Fancy and Mr. Belloc's Fancy under the rubric of Two True Toper's Tunes to Troll with Trulls and Trollops in a Tavern. As an ardent hockey fan, Squire was responsible for commissioning Warlock's Cricketers of Hambledon in 1928. Copley noted, "In its original form, and in common with the accompaniments of several other of Warlock's early songs, the accompaniment of Mr. Belloc's Fancy is extraordinarily difficult to bring off at the indicated tempo (Very brisk, half-note = 92) simply because of the plenitude of very widely spread chords. Warlock evidently realized this, for in 1930 he completely rewrote the accompaniment in a form which, while losing nothing of the effectiveness of the original, is decidedly more manageable...."

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi