"The Old Dun Cow" is a comic song about a pub fire. The Old Dun Cow catches fire, and the regulars do not run for the street. They run for the cellar, break into the stock, and drink what they can before the fire gets it. By the end of the night the pub is burning down around a room full of men too drunk to care, and the whole thing is played for laughs.

The song is English, written for the London music hall. Its long life in Irish and Scottish pubs is a story of adoption: a stage song that pub singers took over, kept, and made their own for more than 130 years. That carrying is the story worth telling, and it starts with the man who wrote it.

Harry Wincott Wrote It in 1893 — and Died Broke

"The Old Dun Cow Caught Fire" — Roud 5323 — was written in 1893 by Harry Wincott. Wincott was a songwriter, one of the working writers who supplied the music halls with new material week after week. Harry Champion, one of the biggest music-hall stars of the day, recorded the song in 1911, and a Champion recording was a powerful way for a song to travel.

Wincott claimed to have written some 2,000 songs. He sold them cheap, made little money from them, and died in Yeovil in 1947. That was the music-hall writer's bargain: the songs could outlive everyone who heard them first, while the man who wrote them got a flat fee and moved on to the next one. "The Old Dun Cow" is still sung in pubs on two sides of the Atlantic. Its writer's name is the part that nearly got lost, which is a fair reason to put it back at the top of the post.

The themes that made the song portable were in Wincott's trade: humor, working-class regulars, drink, and a disaster handled by ignoring it as long as possible. No audience needed the joke explained.

Why Everyone Shouts "MacIntyre!"

At some point in the song, the whole room shouts "MacIntyre!" It is the moment audiences wait for, and it is often the loudest thing in the set.

The honest answer about the name is a short one. MacIntyre is in the lyric itself: "Somebody shouted, 'MacIntyre'" is a line of the song, naming one of the regulars caught up in the fire night. Singers and crowds picked that name up and turned it into a shout, and once a room learns to shout it, the shout becomes the tradition. Why that name, beyond the lyric, is not documented — nobody has produced a source that explains it further, and this post is not going to invent one.

That is often how pub songs work. A name, a line, or a chorus gets taken up by the room, and the room's version becomes the real one. The shout is also practical: it gives everyone, including people who do not know the verses, one guaranteed moment to join in at full volume.

How a London Music Hall Song Became a Pub Standard

The song's survival did not depend on recordings. It passed from the music hall into oral tradition — people singing it from memory, writing it down, and teaching it to the next room. Jim Copper, of the Copper Family of Sussex, a family famous for keeping English songs alive across generations, had "The Old Dun Cow" in a handwritten songbook in 1933. A song written for money in 1893 was, forty years on, sitting in a family's handwritten collection, kept because people liked singing it.

That path — stage song to family singing to folk standard — is how a London number ended up as a staple in Irish pubs. Irish and Scottish singers were never short of their own drinking songs. They kept this one because it worked: a simple story, a fire, a cellar, and a shout.

Set it beside the other disaster-and-drink songs in this blog. Dublin Whiskey Fire tells the true story of the 1875 Dublin fire, when burning whiskey ran through the streets — the real event behind a hundred jokes like this one. The Night That Pat Murphy Died is pub chaos played as celebration. Rare Old Mountain Dew puts the drink first and the law second. And Irish Pub Song and Seven Drunken Nights come from the same room, with the same crowd in them.

For the song's paper trail — the Roud number, Harry Champion's 1911 recording, and the Copper Family's handwritten copy — see Mainly Norfolk's page on The Old Dun Cow Caught Fire. Harry Wincott's own hard-luck career is laid out in his Wikipedia biography.

— hear us play it live (video above).