About This Web Site

Some years ago when the Internet was young and we had just gone online, we received an email... quite an event in those days. The content was remarkable. A man called Garry Gillard offered to build a website dedicated to the Copper Family. He said that he already knew quite a bit about us and that we could have what input we liked but that he would put up some ideas. He seemed like a nice man and his was an extraordinary offer so we took him up on it. What's more, he offered to do it for love. Now, offers like that don't come every day so naturally we accepted. At all times Garry's professionalism came through.

Not long afterwards we were invited to view his efforts which we found outstanding. And the site grew and grew to finally include a complete Copper Family discography and lyrics database. A great achievement and a site to be proud of.

Silly, I know, but we always assumed that Garry was based in the UK - how amazing therefore to discover that all this activity was going on in Australia! Yes, I know .au is a certain clue, but not in those far-off days. All this proved what a remarkable means of bringing cultures together the Internet is.

In short, Garry Gillard we salute you! Your creation put The Copper Family on the Internet in a very professional way. Sadly, pressures of work meant that Garry had to stand down as our webmaster. Within a few weeks of that, at the time of Bob's passing, Molly Mockford and Howard Makin of Pagination Associates volunteered to take on the monumental task of bringing the website up to date and introducing some new features. On more than one occasion Molly has talked about her amazement at the amount of work Garry had put in, which underscores our immense debt to him.

So thank you Garry, and thank you Molly and Howard, for the generous gifts of time and ability you have put into a project which brings you no pecuniary reward. We are delighted and humbled in equal measure.

The Copper Family

The rest of Garry Gillard's original web site - a huge piece of work incorporating just about all the great folk songs of England, which he worked on and kept updating for years - was for some years maintained and added to by Reinhard Zierke at Hamburg University, Germany, and was an invaluable folk song resource, which suddenly disappeared in December 2005. Fortunately, Garry Gillard still held an archive of his site as it was when he handed it over to Reinhard, and re-uploaded it while Reinhard's site was unavailable - it was at www.garrygillard.net/folk/. Reinhard was able to reintroduce his web site in the summer of 2007, so it is once again available at www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~zierke/folk/index.html.

The current webmasters of the Copper Family web site have rationalised the site's structure and applied a new design to it, while at the same time updating the coding behind the pages. We have tried to ensure that anyone who attempts to access an old page will automatically be taken to the appropriate new one. If you do find any errors or broken links on the site, or have any photographs or material to offer for the site, please e-mail Pagination Associates at coppers@pagination.co.uk.