Ratcliffe Highway, in Stepney, was one of the most notorious thoroughfares of early 19th century London. It was an area of sailors' lodgings (and of the young, and not so young, ladies who preyed on the sailors' earnings) and today is lost beneath more modern buildings. Running along the Lower and Upper Pool it was a place where sailor Jack could find all the excitement he required. Dives, dens, pimps and whores were ready to supply his needs and help him forget his last trip. Then, when his money was all gone, crimps (shanghai merchants) could always find him a ship and get him to sea again. According to the Victorian writer Henry Mayhew it was, “a reservoir of dirt, drunkenness and drabs”. At least three London printers—Pitts, Catnach and Edwards—issued broadsides of the song prior to 1830, under the title "Rolling Down Wapping". Several English Edwardian collectors noted the song and Jimmy Knights had his version from Charlie 'Didles' Baldry, an uncle of Jim Baldry who recorded the song for the BBC in 1953. A version was collected from Mrs Howard, Kings' Lynn, Norfolk in 1905 by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Mrs Howard's text is supplemented from an unpublished version collected in Sussex in 1954 and from a broadside by Catnach. It is included in the Roud Folk Song Index as #598. It was printed in Hugill's Shanties from the Seven Seas (1987).