WW1 music Recruitment, morale & remembrance

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Striking a chord

Even before the advent of radio in the 1920s and TV in the 1950s, music was a universally popular

entertainment: singing at home, at work, in the pub, at the music hall or the cinema was a part of daily life for many of our 19th and 20th-century ancestors. Many middle-class homes boasted pianos and even gramophones in the parlour. Prior to August 1914 cheaper pianos, usually German-made, had become more widely available

Music has always played a prominent role in our society, not least during times of conflict. Amanda Randall listens in to music from the Great War.

Recruitment, morale & remembrance

and sheet music was easily purchased on most high streets. In working-class families singing together was fun, communal and free. Such was the pervasive nature of music in society that when World War I broke out it’s not surprising that music immediately took on a central role in morale-boosting, recruitment, providing entertainment, evoking nostalgia for home or remembering the dead.

Music was embedded in military life from the earliest days of organised

militias; having buglers, drummers and pipers mark time in camp or accompanying soldiers and sailors into action was a well-established practice long before a regular Army and Navy were formed. Since 1857 military musicians trained at Kneller Hall in Richmond on Thames when the Royal School Of Military Music opened at the instigation of Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, with the aim of standardising military music.

The Museum of Army Music is

housed at Kneller Hall, www.army.mod.uk/music/23294.aspx.

RecruitmentThe importance of the music hall in the lives of most working-class people meant that it was the ideal place to hold recruitment drives. Various famous music hall artists immediately became involved in recruitment, one of the best-known being male impersonator Vesta Tilley; apparently women loved her independent persona and men couldn’t resist her sharp wit. She rivalled both Kitchener and MP Horatio Bottomley as ‘England’s greatest recruiting

sergeant’. Somehow managing to retain her femininity on stage, Vesta wore military uniform for her

recruitment shows and, sometimes, young men

were asked to enlist by stepping up on

stage. She would march through the audience tapping men on the shoulder as if she was picking

them out specially. Few resisted. Music

halls not only staged recruitment drives, they

also provided a place for men to relax and read or write letters home. Alongside the burgeoning cinema industry, music halls also provided brief respite from worry about husbands, brothers and sons serving abroad.

On stage, a ragtime craze swept the music halls in 1915 with the songs of African-American musicians Joe Jordan and Dan Kildare being enormously

popular at home and at the Front. Also very popular were songs from stage musicals, especially ‘The Bing Boys Are Here’ (1916) and ‘Chu Chin Chow’ (1917).

In 1964 the BBC began a major project called ‘The Great War’ to record people’s memories of WW1; in one interview Mancunian Kitty Eckersley movingly described her husband’s enlistment during a Vesta Tilley concert. He didn’t survive the war. Decades on, Kitty’s story is still difficult to listen to. Find it at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01q7yp8.

Songs at the Front As well as songs written by professional composers (such as ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’), there were plenty of soldiers’ songs that were full of ‘the kind of language that makes the sergeant blush’, to quote the first verse of ‘Oh! What A Lovely War’. Trench songs were usually obscene or

outrageous parodies of well-known songs or hymns; ‘Take it to the

Lord in Prayer’ became ‘When this Bloody War is Over’, and ‘Abide with Me’ became

Composers at war

Ralph Vaughn Williams (for the

Army) and Gustav Holst (for

the YMCA) organised musical

activities for overseas troops.

Ivor Gurney was seriously

injured; George Butterworth

and Cecil Coles, among many

other promising musicians,

were killed.

Keeping

spirits up

Are we downhearted?

No!

Then let your voices ring

And altogether sing.

Are we downhearted?

No!

A comic band, possibly made up of patients, advertising a fundraising concert at the Firs Hospital in Cambridge, 1916.

Cover of the sheet music for ‘There’s A Long, Long Trail’ by Zo Elliott and King Stoddard, which was especially popular among US troops arriving in Europe.

‘As a swanky raw recruit in khaki’, Vesta Tilley performed her show to a packed house at the Alhambra in Glasgow in October 1915, as reported at the time in the Daily Record and Mail, available at Findmypast.co.uk.

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WW1 music Recruitment, morale & remembrance

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Film and social history have intrigued Amanda Randall for as long as she can remember, especially what early film and home movies can tell us about our past. Since completing her MA in Film Archiving she has been researching and writing about these intertwined subjects, and blogs about them at paperpenaction.wordpress.com.

About the author

When pianos became political

In the early years of the 20th century, the Bechstein Hall in London was a hub for the vibrant English-German music scene, and was closely connected with the Royal Academy of Music, home to many German music students. The Bechstein Company was world renowned for making beautiful concert pianos, supplying instruments to royalty and to the leading composers and musicians of the era. The Bechstein Hall was built in 1899 next to its showroom in Wigmore Street showcasing chamber music played on (of course) Bechstein pianos.

When the war began, anti-German feeling soon jeopardised the hall’s existence. With the passing into law of the Trading with the Enemy Amendment Act 1916, Bechstein was forced to auction the building. Debenhams bought it all for £56,500 – a fraction of its value – and the hall closed. However, it opened again in 1917 renamed after its location in Wigmore Street. Today the Wigmore Hall continues to be a renowned centre of chamber music from all over the world.

‘There’s a Street in Cairo Full of Sin and Shame’. These songs were a good way of letting off steam about food, officers, the enemy or the daily grind of war, for example, ‘Bombed Last Night’:

‘Gassed last night, and gassed the night before.

Going to get gassed tonight if we never get gassed anymore.

When we’re gassed, we’re sick as we can be.

For phosgene and mustard gas is much too much for me.’

The comic ‘Three German Officers Crossed the Rhine’ was sung to the tune of ‘Mademoiselle from Armentieres’ and is too rude to publish here!

The men loved nostalgic songs about family and girlfriends (‘Daisy Bell’, ‘If You Were The Only Girl In The World’) and morale boosters (‘Are We Downhearted? No!’). Here are a few other popular Front-line songs, you probably know them all! – ‘Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kitbag’; ‘They Didn’t Believe Me’; ‘Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts’; ‘Over There’; ‘Goodbye-eee’; ‘Take Me Back To Dear Old

Blighty’; ‘The Rose Of No-Man’s Land’ and ‘Never Mind’. Listen to a wide selection of contemporary recordings, plus pictorial slideshows and lyrics, at www.ww1photos.com/WW1MusicIndex.html.

Taking music to troopsIn 1914, Lena Ashwell (1872-1957), actress, impresario and suffragette, became a formidable advocate of taking culture, especially music, to troops in the trenches. She believed it was essential for the men to be provided with ‘food for the mind and spirit as well as the body’. The War Office flatly refused her plan to organise concert parties in military camps, both at home or abroad. However, the authorities soon realised that her suggestion was a way of providing wholesome entertainment that might divert the men’s attention

away from drink and local brothels. It was noted that they quickly

became bored in camp and had begun to

organise their own entertainment, often in dubious taste.

Working with the Women’s Auxiliary Committee of the YWCA, Lena found a

royal patron – Princess Helena Victoria – who

cautiously supported the idea of sending concert

parties to France. In February 1915 the scheme took off; in the first two weeks, 39 concerts were staged in base camps and military hospitals. By the end of the war 25 small companies (each comprising six musicians and perhaps a ventriloquist or a conjuror) entertained troops in every theatre of war, including some all-male concert parties who performed close to the Front line. These were known as Firing Line Concert Parties.

Concerts were staged everywhere –

in huts, warehouses, wards and at the roadside. One forces’ senior chaplain wrote to Lena: ‘Tell all who sent you here that we bless them; if they only knew how much the music means to the men, they would send Firing Line Concert Parties out in crowds.’ She brought classical music, poetry and Shakespeare’s plays to grateful, enthusiastic audiences, sometimes as many as 2,000 at a time. Lena said in 1917 that injured men ‘were never too ill to enjoy beautiful music’.

Longing for homeTwo songs from the time particularly embody thoughts of home: one jaunty, the other melancholy. Legend has it that ‘It’s A Long Way to Tipperary’ was written by John Judge for a 5/- bet in 1912, but it’s very similar to the earlier variety song, ‘It’s A Long Way to Connemara’, which was co-written by Jack Judge and Harry Williams. Whatever the truth of the story it was an instant hit and, once war broke out, it became a firm favourite at

home and abroad.Ivor Novello’s first hit, ‘Till the

Boys Come Home’, was published in October 1914. Novello composed the music and American poet Lena Guilbert Ford wrote the lyrics. Novello performed the song for troops in the autumn, proving so popular that soon it was heard everywhere – people whistled the tune on the street, it was incorporated into pantomimes that Christmas, and it played in restaurants and at the cinema. In 1915 the song was renamed ‘Keep the

Home Fires Burning’. This song resonated with

everyone caught up in the conflict.

Lena Ford and her son were killed in a Zeppelin raid on London in 1918.

WW1 songs popped up again in WW2 and, today, they are

strong reminders of past conflicts. In 1963,

Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop staged the biting satire, ‘Oh What A Lovely War!’, a musical that revived many of the war songs our ancestors had known so well. Part of a 1960s’ rekindling of interest in the Great War, the play influenced how the conflict has been remembered since then.

Look online

l tinyurl.com/ngclv7w –

Download a PDF of Tommy’s

Tunes, a popular book published

in 1917 that collected songs

specifically for soldiers.

l www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/

education/tutorials/intro/trench/

songs – read trench songs in The

First World War Digital Poetry

Archive.

Homesick soldiers

Take me back to dear old Blighty!

Put me on the train for London town!

Take me over there,

Drop me ANYWHERE,

Liverpool, Leeds, or Birmingham,

well, I don’t care!

Major AJ Stretton (centre), senior director of music at the Royal Military School of Music during World War I, with fellow musicians, 1914-1915.

An American song sheet for ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’, which indicates the song’s popularity outside Britain.

The remarkable Lena Ashwell, organiser of much-lauded concert parties for troops overseas.

A report of ‘Miss Lena Ashwell’s party at the Front’ entertaining French and British troops, which appeared in the Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 10 August 1915 (from the British newspapers collection at Findmypast.co.uk).

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The Bells of Hell

The Bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling,For you but not for me.And the little devils have a sing-a-ling-a-ling,For you but not for me.Oh death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling,Oh grave thy victory?The Bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling,For you but not for me.