Broadside Ballad Sheet: Ashantee War; Mother's Far Away. c1873

[SUCH, Henry, printer.] Ashantee War; or, A Soldier’s Farewell. [With:] Mother’s Far Away.
London: H. Such, Machine Printer & Publisher, 177 Union Street, Borough, S.E., [c.1873].
 
Broadside ballad sheet (240 × 190 mm), printed in two columns with decorative border and two woodcut vignettes (soldier and sweetheart; deathbed scene); verso blank. Old folds, small edge wear and minor losses to the extremities, tear to right-hand corner, faint creasing and occasional paper flaws, but fairly well preserved overall; good.
 
A double song sheet issued by Henry Such, one of the principal late-Victorian ballad printers. The first ballad, Ashantee War; or, A Soldier’s Farewell, refers to the Third Anglo-Ashanti War (1873–74), fought on the Gold Coast of West Africa, and is written in the voice of a departing British soldier responding to the perceived insult to the British flag. The companion song, Mother’s Far Away, is a sentimental lament on maternal death, home, and moral guidance, a staple theme of the penny ballad tradition.
 
Such’s Union Street press was among the most prolific of the late nineteenth-century “penny printers,” continuing the Seven Dials broadside tradition into the age of cheap mechanised printing. Ephemeral survival rates are low, and examples outside institutional collections are uncommon.