Pool, Albert

Singer

Collection date: Sept 1906

Area: Somerset - West

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Albert Pool of Exford: age 60? 2 songs on 6 Sept 1906: Albert offered two simple tunes, few words. According to Bob Patten's notes, Fred Milton reported (31/10/1986) that Albert Pool was born with a stump foot and was crippled. He supposedly worked as a mole catcher and once caught an albino mole, which he had stuffed. He lived with a friend in an old thatched cottage called ‘Newhouse’ in Exford. He never married.

It is unlike Sharp to get people’s ages wildly wrong. He wrote ’60’ for Albert in 1906 (i.e. born 1846) but there is nobody of the right age in any of the Exford censuses. There was, however, an Albert Poole, born in 1863, who was in Exford in 1891 census, aged 27 a general labourer, and again in 1911, unmarried labourer aged 47 (ref RG14/14161 schedule 41). The 1921 census lists an 'Albert Poole, age 58, single, a labourer, boarder at Tudball's Cottage, Exford'. This Albert Poole probably died June qr 1930 age 68 Dulverton 5c 311. Bob Patten suggests that Albert Pool was brother of Grace Coles.