Stan Hugill was born in Hoylake, Cheshire, England, to Henry James Hugill and Florence Mary Hugill (née Southwood). His sailing career started in 1922, and he retired to dry land in 1945. He notably served as the shantyman on the Garthpool, the last British commercial sailing ship (a "Limejuice Cape Horner"), on her last voyage which ended when she was wrecked on 11 November 1929 off the Cape Verde Islands.
After four and a half years as a German prisoner of war during World War II, Hugill was an instructor at the Outward Bound Sea School in Aberdyfi from 1950 to 1975.In the 1950s he also taught sailing skills (and sang sea shanties) on the sail-training ship Pamir but was not on its ill-fated last voyage. Fluent in Japanese and Spanish (as well as speaking Maori, Malay, and Chinese and various Polynesian dialects), he also worked as a Japanese translator from 1951 to 1959.
He married Bronwen Irene Benbow in 1953; they had two children, Philip and Martin. He anchored the BBC programme Dance and Skylark from 1965 to 1966, and wrote monthly the column "Bosun's Locker" for Spin (a Liverpool folksong magazine).
When laid up with a broken leg in the 1950s, he began to write down the shanties that he had learned at sea, eventually authoring several books and releasing several LPs of performances later in coordination with a Merseyside folk group called Stormalong John.
Although "shanty" is also spelled "chantey", Hugill used the former exclusively in his books.
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