Songs of the First World War: sounds and silence?

Last week, we held a lovely special event at Crocus Cafe in Lenton: a sing-song of songs from the First World War. Outside the folk circuit, people rarely get together these days just to sing; and doing so felt like a 'way in' to the atmosphere of 1914-18, when this type of get-together was common. But what was really interesting was to see how enduring some of these songs from 100 years ago are. Even if people don't know all the words, they somehow know the tunes and vaguely what the songs are about. How does that happen?

singers at Crocus Cafe

Take a song like Hanging On The Old Barbed Wire. There are any number of versions of it. I sing one passed down from my granddad, who fought in WW1; Chumbawamba's version is slightly different, and the ones I've heard other singers do are different again. That's the beauty of this kind of song – you can make it personal. Was it the quartermaster, the major or the sergeant who was to be found drinking all the company's rum? - well, that depended on who was the biggest, greediest drunkard in your company. When a song is made to be customised, like this, it's not surprising it gets remembered and handed down: there is something about the adaptability, and the personalness of the satire, that makes us feel we're hearing something real.

But what about songs like Pack Up Your Troubles or It's A Long Way to Tipperary: songs that didn't spring from the soldiers themselves, but were written by professional songwriters, and which superficially look quite anodyne and manufactured? How and why do we all know those,100 years on? Well, many of us learnt at least some of them in primary school; and I think primary teachers right through to the 1980s, when they decided to teach us those songs, were influenced by the hugely popular 1969 film Oh! What A Lovely War, adapted from  a groundbreaking 1963 play by theatre director Joan Littlewood. Both the film and the play used these old songs to great effect, just at the point (50 years after the War) that they were starting to fade from living memory.  Along with the poems of soldier-poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, it shaped a generation's view of the War.  That's part of how the songs have stayed in the public consciousness.

But why are they so effective  and memorable? It's the powerful effect of bringing the past into the present. Songs about old wars resonate across history because the passage of time transforms them. The bland cheeriness of Pack Up Your Troubles might have been mildly ironic to a soldier at the time; but looking at it with what we now know about WW1, it gains a layer of depth that it never had in 1915. And Keep The Home Fires Burning,with its apparently outmoded message of “Don't question the War!” is nevertheless poignant and touching today, because although we no longer love the idea of “keeping a stiff upper lip”, we know that women are still, today, bravely waving their husbands and sons off to wars “although your heart is breaking”. Cerys Matthews' version (which she did as a nod to the Welshness of the songwriter, Ivor Novello), still carries all the tear-jerking power it had in 1915, albeit for slightly different reasons. These songs gain a lot from the knowing, sideways glance born of 100 years of retrospect.

looking at the touring exhibition at Crocus

But our 11-11-11 project was about non-British views of WW1. And the interesting thing about our folk night is that once we'd sung Eric Bogle's brilliant 1970s commentaries And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda and The Green Fields of France, there wasn't much from outside Britain that we all knew. The best-known Irish songs of the period are about the Rising, not the War – although a song like The Foggy Dew does reference the War in lines like “T'was better to die 'neath an Irish sky/than in Suvla or Sud El Bar”. Still, the song was written after the fact, in about 1920 - it seems that what the Irish soldiers were singing in the Trenches was the same as what the Tommies were singing. And as for the Indian, Caribbean, South African, Australian, Canadian etc soldiers: again, it seems it was mostly the same. If there were Hindi songs about the War, or calypsos, we haven’t found them.

Music and songs are a repository of history; and especially, of the attitudes that don't get into the official history books, and the lived experience of those who were there. But even so, there are still certain perspectives that don't even seem to have got into the songs. As far as we have been able to tell, the British Empire's soldiers were pretty much all singing the same songs. So if any of them had a different perspective on the War, due to being Jamaican or Trinidadian or Indian or Irish, that didn't get sung about. Is there a hidden history of songs that reflect this difference of perspective, that we have yet to uncover?. Or was it a deliberate thing, aiming to unite all those disparate identities under the banner of the British Empire?