CHAPTER 3
The communications revolution of the late Victorian age literally brought Britain together. Railways encouraged travel and opened up the nation, revealing much that was new to many. People made new acquaintances and got to know those who were previously strangers. More people read daily newspapers. These, and tours by professional variety acts who performed the same well-rehearsed routines in music halls across Britain, delivered shared experiences and encouraged a sense of community that spread far beyond the previous restricted village or county boundaries people had been used to for generations.
The electric telegraph and telephone further accelerated this inter relationship and made physical distance much less restrictive.
Everything got closer.
The Hero’s Return, a popular First World War marche militaire for the pianoforte by Valentine Hemery who was well-known for his 1909 composition Sympathy. A song without words for Piano.
Whistling Tommies. Sketch for piano, 1917. ‘Frank Marsden’ was really composer Ernest Reeves who published under a range of other pseudonyms including Fabian Scott, Allan R. Cameron, René Dubois, Paul Peronne, Leon Verré and even Gladys A. Wood!
This sense of nationalism and shared purpose was of course one of the main motivators behind Britons accepting the need to go to war both in 1914 and 1939 and also permitted them to join the military, either as volunteer recruits or accepting conscription.
The media and entertainment industries exploited this sense of togetherness by promoting patriotism; lionising celebrities and promoting their songs, skits and stage personalities. In the build-up to the First World War the music hall was the primary way a sense of patriotic community was engendered. In the Second World War it was radio and the cinema that encouraged people to rally round the flag.
What we now recognise as the music hall, a type of entertainment that had previously been confined to the back rooms of public houses, or in so-called ‘song and supper rooms’ and in seaside pleasure gardens which, to the consternation of the middle class, had gone more downmarket as workers flocked to them during high days and holidays, had by the mid-1850s, evolved into something more substantial, taking place in purpose-built auditoriums, often close to the boozers where they had started. Not surprisingly, a fairly bawdy atmosphere was maintained.
The Sky Hawk was a 1929 American adventure film starring Helen Chandler, John Garrick and Gilbert Emery about First World War British aviator Jack Bardell battling German Zeppelin attacks over London.
By 1870 415 fairly substantial halls, each complete with amenities for the professional performers and a range of catering facilities for the audience, had taken root across Britain. Performers often appeared on stage, going through the same act, at several venues each night (there were thirty-one music halls in London alone in 1870). Music-hall performers were the superstars of the age.
Soon, greater regulation, with its consequent public safety implications, as well as a restriction on licensing in certain premises pushed prices up. But music hall remained a big business, such that commercial organisations like Moss, Stoll and Thornton began to dominate and their ‘Palaces’ and ‘Empires’ the destination of choice for audiences looking for a good night out.
Published right at the beginning of the war in 1939 and intended to offer ideas to cheer up the suddenly long dark evenings, proceeds from the sale of Howard Thomas’s Brighter Blackout Book, went to the Daily Sketch War Relief Fund.
Regulation continued. Performers looked to protect their hours and wages by forming the Variety Artists’ Federation and even organised the first music-hall strike. But in 1912, with the first Royal Command Performance, it was clear music hall had come of age and gained a level of respectability.
By the advent of the First World War music halls were operated more along the lines or regular theatres with food and drink banned from the auditorium.
The United States had developed a similar entertainment industry, though rather than the ‘variety acts’ of British music hall, Americans flocked to ‘vaudeville’. Not dissimilar to its British cousins, vaudeville nevertheless developed from less bacchanalian traditions and generally aspired towards a more middle-class audience. By 1910 the rapid growth of cheap-price movie theatres in the United States had taken its toll on vaudeville and was about to develop into the massive industry we know today. In fact, one of the young variety stars of British music hall, Charlie Chaplin, a featured player with the Fred Karno Repertoire Company, moved there that same year and was offered his first part in a silent movie in 1912. Very soon Chaplin was to become, perhaps, the most famous man in the world and certainly one of the richest.
In Britain music hall proved the ideal mechanism to drum up support for the war effort and artists and composers threw themselves into rallying public support.
Two patriotic music-hall compositions kicked off the war in 1914.
Keep the Home-Fires Burning (’Till the Boys Come Home) was a combination of Welshman Ivor Novello’s music and American Lena Ford’s patriotic lyrics:
They were summoned from the hillside,
They were called in from the glen,
And the Country found them ready At the stirring call for men.
Let no tears add to their hardship,
As the Soldiers pass along
And although your heart is breaking,
Make it sing this cheery song.
Your King and Country Want You (‘We Don’t Want to Lose You, but we think you ought to go’) featured words and lyrics by Paul Rubens, the English author of some of the most popular Edwardian comedies. The latter was intended as a recruiting song for women and the profits from Ruben’s famous creation were given to a fund for women with none other than Queen Mary as its patron.
Written by Jack Judge two years before the outbreak of hostilities, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ has nonetheless become one of the songs most associated with the Great War. Although songwriter and music-hall entertainer Judge performed his song on numerous occasions, it was Irish tenor John Francis Count McCormack who made it world-famous. It is best remembered for its chorus:
While you’ve a Lucifer to light your fag,
Smile, boys, that’s the style.
What’s the use of worrying?
It never was worthwhile, so pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag,
And smile, smile, smile.
The Lambeth Walk, a song from the 1937 musical Me and My Girl, has become synonymous with the ‘Blitz spirit’ of working class Londoners. In 1939 a film of the same name played to packed audiences.
Made famous by Vera Lynn in 1939, We’ll Meet Again was a hit again in 1943 when the ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’ played the lead role in a musical of the same name.
‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag’ was a 1915 classic penned by Welshman George Henry Powell, under the pseudonym George Asaf, with music by Felix Powell. Ironically, the song’s lyricist was a pacifist and a conscientious objector whose conscription had to be imposed in 1916.
Songwriters and music publishers weren’t averse to sentimentalism or a bit of emotional blackmail when targeting men for enlistment to the colours and naturally the authorities were 100 per cent behind their promptings.
In December 1915 ‘F.W. Ramsey’, the pseudonym of Fred Douglas, the lead singer in a comedy duo called the ‘Two Gilberts’, performed ‘All the Boys in Khaki Get the Nice Girls’, a sentiment echoed the same year by the famous cockney singer Marie Lloyd when she intoned, ‘I didn’t like you much before you joined the army, John, but I do like yer cockie now you’ve got your khaki on.’
Entitled ‘What did you do in the Great War, daddy?’ and made famous by Tom Clare, the London-born music-hall singer who had already had a success with ‘Who Bashed Bill Kaiser?’, this piece was designed to prick the conscience of all those who had tried to avoid the call to arms and were, perhaps, even indulging in some black-market profiteering. How would they explain their lily-livered behaviour to their children when the fighting was over and the troops had come home?
Come and sit beside me, Daddy
Tell me the tale once more
I often asked you to tell me, Daddy
What you did in the great Great War?
As the war progressed and there was no hiding the casuality figures and the apparent deadly stalemate in the trenches, songs became less motivational, almost subversive.
Humours of ARP by the cartoonist Giles was published in 1941 and followed by Laughs With the Home Guard and similar books about each branch of the forces. Now quite rare, you should expect to pay as much as £50 for a copy. Carl Ronald Giles was awarded an OBE in 1959 and died in 1995.
Not to be confused with its modern soft-core porn incarnation, the original Men Only actually dates back to 1935 when it was founded by C. Arthur Pearson Ltd as a pocket magazine. It was similar in format to the more famous Lilliput magazine which followed it in 1937.
Telling the story of three fictional soldiers on the Western Front suffering from homesickness and their longing to return home, ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’ was written by Arthur Mills, Fred Godfrey and Bennett Scott, and was especially popular when it was first performed in 1916. Perhaps it was no coincidence that in July that year, on one day alone, 20,000 young men were killed as they battled through no-man’s-land on the Somme.
The same year music-hall artiste Vesta Tilley had a hit with the song ‘I’m Glad I’ve Got a Bit of a Blighty One’ in which the hugely popular male impersonator played a soldier delighted to have been wounded and in hospital. ‘When I think about my dugout,’ she sang, ‘where I dare not stick my mug out … I’m glad I’ve got a bit of a Blighty one.’ The phrase ‘a Blighty one’ soon becoming the lingua franca in the British Army for a wound that would require hospitalisation back home.
However, despite the somewhat questionable sentiments of ‘I’m Glad I’ve Got a Bit of a Blighty One’, Tilley’s popularity knew no limits during the First World War. Indeed, she and her husband ran a military recruitment drive and, dressed in the guise of characters like ‘Tommy in the Trench’ and ‘Jack Tar Home from Sea’, Tilley performed songs like ‘The army of today’s all right’ and ‘Jolly Good Luck to the Girl who Loves a Soldier’. Tilley soon earned the nickname ‘Britain’s best recruiting sergeant’, and often at her shows young men were asked to join the army on stage there and then.
Costing the British an estimated 275,000 casualties against the German’s 220,000, making it one of the war’s most costly campaigns, the Battle of Passchendaele, the Third Battle of Ypres, took place on the Western Front between July and November 1917. The same year one of the most notorious of music-hall songs, ‘Oh! It's a lovely war’, was performed by Ella Shields, yet another male impersonator. Ms Shields was an American and performed there in vaudeville with her sisters until a talent scout lured her to the London stage in 1904. In 1910 she appeared at the opening night of the London Palladium and it was at this time that, like Vesta Tilley, she became a male impersonator.
In 1915 her British husband, William Hargreaves, wrote ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow’, a huge hit. Ella’s moment came when she sang the words and music penned by John Long and Maurice Scott:
Oh it’s a lovely war!
Up to your waist in water, up to your eyes in slush,
using the kind of language that makes the sergeant blush,
Who wouldn’t join the army? That’s what we all enquire.
Don’t we pity the poor civilian sitting by the fire.
In 1939, the irony of British soldiers marching back to Flanders fields to fight the Germans again little more than twenty years since the ‘war to end all wars’ had finished was not lost on those at home and especially not by the ‘poor bloody infantry’ who manned defensive positions a mere yards from the ones their father’s had previously occupied. As the troops dug in, assuming a replay of the previous conflict but fearing a stalemate that would be made all the more terrible by what Churchill called ‘the lights of perverted science’, they nevertheless clung on to familiar things which reminded them of home. A particular tonic was visits to the front from film stars and popular musicians.
Despite getting into hot water with the suggestive lyrics of his 1937 song ‘With My Little Stick Of Blackpool Rock’, George Formby’s cheeky-chappie demeanour made him hugely popular, especially with the troops of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) shivering in the dugouts in France during the ‘phoney war’ of the winter of 1939–40.
Turned down by the army for having flat feet when he tried to enlist in 1939, Formby joined the Home Guard instead. He was the first big star to visit the BEF in France in 1940, and enjoyed a tremendous welcome from the troops. The newsreel recorded at the front in March and showing Formby entertaining troops there has become legendary. His performance of ‘Imagine Me in the Maginot Line’, while he played his faithful ukulele, displayed an empathy with the men which they never forgot.
Published in 1943, Nice Types featured the range of popular RAF characters created by Anthony Armstrong, the wartime pseudonym of Squadron Leader Anthony Armstrong Willis.
The 1941 British documentary film Target for Tonight about the crew of a Wellington bomber won an honorary Academy Award in 1942 and ‘Best Documentary’ by the National Board of Review in 1941.
Hitler can’t kid us a lot,
His secret weapon’s Tommy Rot,
You ought to see what the sergeant’s got!
Down in the Maginot Line.
On 19 August 1943 George was back with the troops again, this time with the Entertainments National Service Association in North Africa. He also toured the battle fronts of Malta, Sicily, Gibraltar and Italy and in less than eight weeks had entertained a quarter of a million men.
A mere old Penny purchased Cinegram No. 78 which was all about Alexander Korda’s latest movie, Q Planes (Clouds Over Europe in the United States). Starring Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier and Valerie Hobson, this action-packed spy film sees a mysterious foreign ship beaming a powerful ray at top-secret prototype aircraft and their crews to discover their secrets.
The Crazy Gang of Bud Flanagan, Chesney Allen, Jimmy Nervo, Teddy Knox, Charlie Naughton and Jimmy Gold were a hit on the wireless and played to packed theatre audiences during the darkest days of the Second World War.
Formby was in Normandy less than a week after D-Day. His visit made the front page of the Daily Mail, whose headline suggested that now George Formby was on hand to support Montgomery, the war was as good as won.
The Crazy Gang made their first appearance at the London Palladium in 1931. They made the most unlikely troupe of acts ever assembled on the stage for a single show. Comprising a pair of slapstick artists, an acrobatic high-wire act and a couple of comics who laced their jokes with schmaltzy songs, they seemed unlikely to hit the big time. But they did, and how. The Crazy Gang topped the bill for over thirty years, making their final appearances at the Victoria Palace Theatre in 1962.
Individually they were well-established acts before they came together in 1931 and each of their names headlined variety bills. Jimmy Nervo and Teddy Knox combined the agility of a high-wire act with an hilarious slow-motion wrestling performance and a spoof ballet display. Ten years older than the rest of the ‘Crazies’, Charlie Naughton and Jimmy Gold, a pair of slapstick comics famous for decades on the London pantomime scene, harmonised perfectly with Nervo and Knox. Charlie Naughton’s mastery of the art of double-talk being something audiences never forgot.
In 1926, while touring with Florrie Forde, the famous Australian-born singer, best known for her rendition of ‘Down At the Old Bull and Bush’, comic Bud Flanagan met and teamed up with fellow funny man Chesney Allen. Though the pair’s first inclination was to throw their combined talents into setting up a bookmakers, Flanagan and Allen’s performances went down so well they were swiftly booked by Val Parnell for a debut at the Holborn Empire in 1929.
Although the Crazy Gang appeared to consist of pairs of variety acts who had each come together due to their obvious synergies, there was one ‘lone wolf’ in the troupe – juggler turned comic (often described by fellow comics as the funniest man in the world) – ‘Monsewer’ Eddie Gray.
Following their London Palladium debut the Crazy Gang found a regular home and began a popular residency, ‘Crazy Week’, at the Victoria Palace Theatre. They also made several films, starting with O-Kay For Sound in 1937, but are probably best remembered for their war-time film Gasbags in 1940. From the moment this movie began, with a senior officer inspecting the disposition and readiness of a local balloon barrage, only to discover that the one controlled by the Crazy Gang was being used to advertise the team’s fish and chips businesses and was connected to the ground by a cable from which a series of pennants streamed promoting the various dishes on offer, audiences knew what they were in for.
‘Hitler’s Crazy Gang’ may have been an apt epithet for the hard-line Nazis who surrounded Hitler and put his radical theories in to practice. It was no joke, however, to those in occupied Europe, especially Jews.
Ever popular, like George Formby the Crazy Gang took their turn to entertain the troops during wartime, appearing in Normandy only a few weeks after D-Day.
With so many people, men and women, serving in the regular or auxiliary forces, both at home and abroad, it was clear that something better than simply relying on the naturally biased services of theatricals like Val Parnell and Lew Grade to select and arrange variety bookings had to be organised. So in 1939 the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) was established.
One of the founders of ENSA was Basil Dean, the English actor, writer and producer/director of both theatrical and cinema productions who founded Associated Talking Pictures, which later became Ealing Studios and who worked closely with stars such as Gracie Fields and George Formby. Basil had all the necessary clout to run the government-sponsored body responsible for bringing live performances to the armed services.
The other prime mover behind ENSA was Leslie Henson, an English comedian, actor, and like Dean, a successful producer for films and theatre, and a film director. Born in London’s Notting Hill Gate, Henson had made a name for himself as far back as the Edwardian era and starred in silent films and musical comedies to huge public acclaim – he was famous for his bulging eyes, malleable face and raspy voice.
Written by Ulster songwriter Jimmy Kennedy, while he was a Captain in the British Expeditionary Force during the early stages of the Second World War, We’re Going to Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line became a morale-booster during the Battle of France.
Published in 1939 and made famous by comedian Arthur Askey, Adolf contained inspiring lyrics like, ‘Adolf, you toddle off, and all your Nazis too! Or you may get something to remind you of the old red, white and blue!’.
I’m Sending You the Siegfried Line (To Hang Your Washing On) was a popular 1939 composition, which, as things turned out, was a proposition which would take much longer to achieve than most Britons thought at this stage of the war.
Good Night (got your torchlight?) was the perfect accompaniment to the Blitz and published in 1941, by which time the blackout and regular night bombing had entered its second year.
‘The badge from your coat will be close to my heart. It will always remind me of you, ’wrote Annette Mills, of string puppet ‘Muffin the Mule’ fame, and Horatio Nicholls (the nom de plume used by songwriter Lawrence Wright) in 1940 after allegedly seeing a woman who had been dancing with an officer at a club in Blackpool take a badge from his coat as a souvenir.
We’re Gonna Have To Slap, The Dirty Little Jap, and Uncle Sam’s the Guy who can do it was first performed by Carson Miller a mere matter of days following Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. America’s indignity and disgust is evident in lyrics such as: ‘We’ll skin the streak of yellow from this sneaky little fellow and he’ll think a cyclone hit him when he’s thru it. We’ll take the double crosser to the old woodshed, we’ll start on his bottom and go to his head, when we get thru with him he’ll wish that he was dead.’
ENSA stars included Arthur Askey, Gracie Fields, Vera Lynn, George Formby, Tommy Cooper and Joyce Grenfell. In 1945 Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir Ralph Richardson were both made honorary lieutenants in the British Army and joined ENSA to embark on a six-week tour of Europe performing plays by William Shakespeare.
This was pretty apt because Olivier was fresh from the success of his 1944 British film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Henry V. With its moving score by none other than ‘The’ William Walton, the film was originally ‘dedicated to the ‘Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain, the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture.’ Henry V won Olivier an Academy Honorary Award for an ‘outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director in bringing Henry V to the screen’.
The first ENSA concert took place on 10 September 1939 in Surrey, while the last performance the organisation produced was in India on 18 August 1946. Even though there is no doubt that it lured the best performers, and paid them handsomely too, ENSA was not without its critics and sometimes deserved its soubriquet, ‘Every Night Something Awful’.
Full of innocent games – there was even one entitled ‘Hitler’s favourite game’ which involved making a swastika out of playing cards! – at this stage of the war Blackout Puzzles and ARP Crosswords seemed to promise shortlived interludes before normal service was resumed and peace came. Little did they know.
Like the Brighter Blackout Book, 101 Things to do in War Time (1940) was a noble attempt to offer alternatives to the boredom of sitting in the gloom of a blacked-out sitting room. Ideas ranged from knitting balaclava helmets for the navy to indoor croquet games!
Although it’s beyond the scope of this book, which is, of course, designed as a guide to the variety of wartime ephemera available to collectors and this narrative simply to provide background to the society and cultural influences that produced each piece, no mention of radio during the Second World War would be complete without mention of Tommy Handley.
It’s That Man Again, more commonly known as ITMA, was a programme that ran from 1939 to 1949. The title refers to a contemporary expression concerning the ever more frequent news stories about Hitler in the lead-up to the Second World War, and specifically a headline in the Daily Express written by Herbert ‘Bert’ Gun, who coined the phrase. The acronym ITMA was adopted by Tommy Handley, a popular comedian who had served with a kite-balloon section of the Royal Naval Air Service during the First World War and went on to work in variety after the end of hostilities. Handley became a regular broadcaster on radio, and wrote many scripts himself. He later starred in the ITMA film in 1942 and in Time Flies in 1944. Such was the pressure of ITMA that the regular scripts required for this enormously popular radio show were written by the prolific Ted Kavanagh.