Eric Bogle, Music and the Great War

'An Old Man's Tears'

Michael J. K. Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138719118
• eBook ISBN: 9781351764483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Eric Bogle has written many iconic songs that deal with the futility and waste of war. Two of these in particular, 'And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda' and 'No Man's Land (a.k.a. The Green Fields of France)', have been recorded numerous times in a dozen or more languages indicating the universality and power of their simple message. Bogle's other compositions about the First World War give a voice to the voiceless, prominence to the forgotten and personality to the anonymous as they interrogate the human experience, celebrate its spirit and empathise with its suffering.

This book examines Eric Bogle's songs about the Great War within the geographies and socio-cultural contexts in which they were written and consumed. From Anzac Day in Australia and Turkey to the 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland and from small Aboriginal communities in the Coorong to the influence of prime ministers and rock stars on a world stage, we are urged to contemplate the nature and importance of popular culture in shaping contemporary notions of history and national identity. It is entirely appropriate that we do so through the words of an artist who Melody Maker described as 'the most important songwriter of our time'.

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1 Eric Bogle

Early life, work and a culture of protest

It was the woollen mills that had fed the economy of the historic Scottish Border town of Peebles for generations. In the face of stiff overseas competition and outdated manufacturing techniques after the Second World War, however, profits slowed, stalled and closures followed leaving many of the 5,000 or so inhabitants struggling to make a living. The Bogle household was no exception. Eric’s childhood (b. 1944) was spent in a home with little in the way of luxury, run on an extremely tight budget, and steeped in the gritty ideologies of post-war Britain. He recalls:

I came from a working-class family in Scotland. There was never much money, and under those circumstances you tend to grow up a fairly committed socialist in a lot of ways, and I have been that for most of my life.¹

Here, we might assume, a sense of injustice at the social, political and economic systems that had brought with them such hardship, may have been instilled. And while hardship prevailed it simultaneously played its part in creating a respect for the dignity associated with a hard-working, honourable class of people who continued to struggle within an impossible class system. John Munro is unhesitant about the impact this had on Bogle and his writing: ‘His attitude to authority is equally distrustful. And to things like privilege. Because of the way he was brought up, and probably because of his dad, he abhors privilege. He’s still very Scottish in his heart.’²

Such circumstances might also have led in equal measure to the need, and the ability, to dream. Many of Bogle’s compositions relating to home have a strong autobiographical element to them. There are early romances recalled in ‘Belle of Broughton’ and ‘Cuddy River Reverie’; an acknowledgement of a strong folk and story-telling heritage in compositions like ‘Campbell’s Daughter’ and ‘The Ballad of Henry Holloway’; and introductions to childhood heroes like Roy Rogers in ‘Front Row Cowboy’ and Elvis Presley in ‘Elvis ‘n’ Me’. In the latter it is telling to note that while home is a ‘prison’ it is music that liberates.

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For I couldn’t help thinking as we went drivin’

Of a boy I once knew from a far-away time

Who saw his whole life as a prison

And the only release he knew

Was when Elvis was singin’, and the boy would start dreamin’

As on the wings of the songs his heart flew.

But there is anger too in early compositions such as ‘Big Mansion Hoose on the Hill’ where Bogle defiantly takes aim at a class system that enslaves many.

For three hundred years how my brothers have toiled

Whilst oor masters exploited, enslaved, and despoiled

The sweat frae oor brows built their great marble ha’s

While oor children’s sharp hunger pit meat in their craws

One day I will burn down that mill

And that big mansion hoose on the hill.

John Munro then tightens the focus by emphasising that to know Bogle and his work you must also know something of his family. This, he believes, is crucial as ‘[h]is politics, his pacifism, his distrust of authority and convention, his commitment to social justice and perhaps his strongest attribute, his loyalty, were all bequeathed to him by his parents’.³ In an interview with Warren Fahey in 2000 Bogle recalled the complexity of the relationship between personality, place and time:

You see, I’m a casualty from a family, a society, a generation even, where communication between members of that family/society/generation, had all but ceased. I often think that, their human sensibilities savagely assaulted by two world wars and a Depression, our parents and grandparents had lost much of their faith and optimism, and therefore found it hard to give their children any positive or moral guidance. Confused by their world that had turned upside down in so short a time, desensitized by war and want, and resentful of the indifference of their children to their sacrifices, they turned inwards, seeking comfort in materialism and in their generation’s shared experiences. Between every generation there is a gap, between our parents and my generation it was a chasm. Maybe it just existed in my own family, that lack of communication, that wary circling of confused human beings trying to find some frail bridges that would carry us across the chasm to where peace, love, happiness and all the other deepest yearnings of the human heart awaited us on the other side. So maybe I am more of a bridge-builder than a songwriter.⁴

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Figure 1.1 ‘Things ain’t been the same’: Laurence and Nancy Bogle.

Source: Eric Bogle collection.

Bogle felt that for his parents, Laurnie (Laurence) and Nancy (Figure 1.1), he would be ‘[m]y mama’s future heartbreak and my daddy’s short-lived joy’.⁵ He also had two sisters, Laurette, two years older, and Sandra, Eric’s twin. Laurnie, he recalled, was ‘[a]n uneducated but intelligent man, and like so many of his generation he was a casualty of the Depression, war and the British class system’.⁶ He was a proud man, the war veteran evacuated out of Dunkirk, then the signalman who, when laid off by British Rail during the infamous Beeching cuts of the 1960s, had faded away – left only with his railway jacket and a paltry pension. In ‘No Use For Him’ Bogle recalls:

But they broke him in the end when they’d no use for him

So I watched him growing older and more bitter every day

As his pride and self-respect slowly drained away

There was nothing I could say – they had no use for him.

Father and son had also built a tenuous relationship through poaching salmon from the River Tweed, which was the property of the Earl of Wemyss, as were all the salmon therein. Poaching a few of them combined financial gain with political statement.⁷ In ‘Poacher’s Moon’ Bogle remorselessly states that ‘Nothing tastes sweeter, nothing tastes as good / As a poor man’s belly fu’ o’ rich man’s food’. An introduction to music of sorts came through his father too as Bogle recalls how he

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often used to bring around his drunken mates to our house on Saturday nights. They sang and played their accordion and their spoons and the mouth organ. My father played a poor man’s mouth organ – a paper and comb! So in those days we were a lot more exposed to live music than the generation who came afterwards.⁸

Beyond this, his relationship with his father, though important, was distant. He recalls ‘[f]rom the day I was born to the day my father died we were mostly strangers to each other’.⁹ To another interviewer he admitted ‘[w]e lived in the same house for 23 years on and off and we were total strangers. I didn’t know and still don’t know what made my father tick.’¹⁰ He suggested in the song ‘The Dalai Lama’s Candle’ that today he owns only one photograph of them together though, crucially, in it are ‘work-roughened hands / Resting lightly on my shoulders’. With palpable frustration Bogle also recalls that as he was writing his first poems his father too was jotting down his observations of society, his hopes, dreams, his well-concealed love of the family . . . then hiding them in a drawer. John Munro describes the sequence of events that followed Laurnie’s death:

On opening a drawer he found a great many sheets of paper. Here and there Eric came across poems and parts of poems. Fascinated, he read and re-read these apparent scribblings that soon revealed themselves to be treasures that demonstrated a sensitivity and ability to analyse the world around him that had not been evident in Laurnie’s day to day interaction with his family. Eric of course was quite distressed and saddened that, whilst he had been developing his own skill...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Eric Bogle, Music and the Great War
• Routledge Studies in First World War History
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Other books by Michael J. K. Walsh
• Dedication
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface: a songwriter among historians
• Introduction: Eric and me
• 1 Eric Bogle: early life, work and a culture of protest
• 2 ‘Tired old heroes from a forgotten war’: ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’, Australia and Gallipoli
• 3 ‘When this war is over’: remembering and forgetting in Australia
• 4 ‘A warm summer breeze’: ‘No Man’s Land’, Ireland and the afterlives of Willie McBride
• 5 ‘A stranger without even a name’: an interview with Eric Bogle at the Somme, 2016
• 6 ‘Old men still talk and argue’: remembrance, education and the future of the past
• Conclusion: ‘Again and again and again and again . . . ’
• Bibliography
• Brief discography
• Index