The Show Must Go On! Popular Song in Britain During the First World War

John Mullen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317016113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Pop Music

Using a collection of over one thousand popular songs from the war years, as well as around 150 soldiers' songs, John Mullen provides a fascinating insight into the world of popular entertainment during the First World War. Mullen considers the position of songs of this time within the history of popular music, and the needs, tastes and experiences of working-class audiences who loved this music. To do this, he dispels some of the nostalgic, rose-tinted myths about music hall. At a time when recording companies and record sales were marginal, the book shows the centrality of the live show and of the sale of sheet music to the economy of the entertainment industry. Mullen assesses the popularity and significance of the different genres of musical entertainment which were common in the war years and the previous decades, including music hall, revue, pantomime, musical comedy, blackface minstrelsy, army entertainment and amateur entertainment in prisoner of war camps. He also considers non-commercial songs, such as hymns, folk songs and soldiers' songs and weaves them into a subtle and nuanced approach to the nature of popular song, the ways in which audiences related to the music and the effects of the competing pressures of commerce, propaganda, patriotism, social attitudes and the progress of the war.

Chapter 1
Portrait of an Industry: Producing Popular Music, 1914–1918

A number of authors have recounted the history of the Victorian music hall and the gradual emergence of a true entertainment industry;¹ there has been far less work done on early twentieth-century music hall.² After sketching out the context of entertainment and leisure in this period, this chapter will describe the industry as it was at the beginning of the Great War. The different actors – companies, showmen, workers and others – will each be examined. In the following chapter we will look at the different genres of musical show of the time, along with their contents, their market shares and their audiences.

First let us look at the range of musical entertainment available in 1914 to the various social classes. Dancing was not yet a mass activity for urban workers – that would come at the end of the 1920s. But already on bank holidays, dance halls in seaside resorts were becoming popular. The new dances, such as the foxtrot, which was introduced in 1914, were easier to learn and thought of as more sensual than the formal dances of previous decades, and the waltz was now danced more slowly and intimately.³ For middle-class young people, more and more tea dances were available at the Lyons Tea Houses or elsewhere. There they could try out the latest crazes (the tango or the Boston, the Turkey Trot, the Camel Walk, the Bunny Hug or the Grizzly Bear). Dances were ever bigger – in 1911, 4,000 people came to a ball in honour of William Shakespeare.⁴

Amateur singing was widespread. Elite families, with a little help from their servants, organized musical evenings at their homes, in which classical singing around the piano was often mixed in with the singing of a few music-hall numbers of which they had bought the scores, even though they might feel themselves too ‘respectable’ to frequent the halls themselves. They would also sing numbers from the latest musical comedies. In working-class homes too, at family parties, each person had to know one or two ‘party piece’ songs to sing⁵ (as late as the 1920s, in the army, the tradition continued that everyone present at an evening should ‘sing, say, pay or show your arse’).⁶

Singing was sometime accompanied on the banjo or the accordion, but group singing was generally centred around a piano, both a precious entertainment tool and a symbol of social ambition or at least respectability. In 1914 there were between two and four million pianos in Britain – around one for every fifteen inhabitants.⁷ Robert Roberts tells us how his parents, in the slums of Salford, bought a – rather rickety – family piano for two pounds.⁸ During the war, the buying of pianos by men and women workers in the munitions industry, who were enjoying better wages than they were used to, was much commented upon.⁹ And those new social layers – office workers, minor civil servants, or sales representatives, earning between three and six pounds a week – bought pianos in large numbers. The automatic piano, or Pianola, which played by itself using perforated rolls which encoded the music, sold well, and could be bought on credit for 65 pounds in all. The Pianola would never become as popular as it did in the United States in this period, however.

Working-class people enjoyed singing and dancing in the streets. Many accounts of the beginning of the war tell of group singing of patriotic songs at recruitment centres, or to accompany soldiers to the train station.¹⁰ At pub doors, singers would try to earn a few pennies, and sheet music was also sold. Many of the performers were more desperate than they were talented, but several major stars such as George Lashwood or Harry Champion, began their career as street singers.¹¹

More formal organizations of musical leisure – choirs and brass bands – involved very large numbers of people. Any town with more than 20,000 inhabitants would have at least one mass choir with 100 to 300 singers, often subsidized by local employers. Since the 1880s regular competitions were organized. The pieces sung became technically more challenging,¹² and the repertoire included classical song and opera, but also some music-hall hits.¹³ The brass bands, organized by groups of workers from the same mine or factory, by the Salvation Army, or by secular organizations, had hundreds of thousands of members: there were more than 30,000 brass bands in the country in 1900.¹⁴ The town of Bradford alone had twenty brass bands and thirteen choirs, as well as its two major music halls.

Far more people went to see shows even than joined choirs or bands, and musical shows will be at the centre of this study. The gramophone was still a rare luxury: many soldiers saw one for the first time during the war. Music hall, musical comedy, and other shows were big business where millions were won and lost gambling on mass taste. Sheet music based on the songs heard on stage sold in millions to those who wanted to sing them at home or on the streets. A fully fledged entertainment industry had emerged after 1880. It hoped to make profit from mass demand, but had to deal with elite fears of seeing large numbers of workers gathered to listen to working-class singers. The result was an industry which was ever more dominated by big companies, and truly obsessed with the principles of ‘respectability’, an ideology which it hope would ward off the two principal demons of the ‘dangerous classes’: vulgarity and political radicalism.

In Victorian times, elite campaigns for ‘rational leisure’ for workers had often condemned music hall out of hand, but by 1914, music hall was considered to be far more acceptable. Even the King attended occasionally, in particular since the first music-hall evening organized specially in his honour, the Royal Variety performance of 1912. Nevertheless, working-class music shows were still looked upon with suspicion. When theatres needed their licence renewed, managers had to demonstrate to magistrates that they were not allowing vulgar songs to be performed, that the women on stage were not too scantily dressed, and that the establishment’s foyer or promenade was not being used by prostitutes to pick up clients.

The two key dynamics which explain the entertainment industry in this period are then the economic drive to the concentration of capital and the ideological drive to building respectability. Economic concentration was limited, however, by the nature of the shows. Once the record industry had taken off, US domination would gradually arise, as it would in film production. A mechanically reproduced product – a record or a film – allows a far more centralized industry than does a live show: music-hall evenings, presented in hundreds of towns across Britain every night, could not be dominated by US artistes. They would have been more expensive, and would have had more difficulty building the rapport with local audiences which was still important for a turn to be a success. Thus, if the entertainment industry was becoming national, it was not fully transnational.

Variety theatres and theatre chains

We shall be looking in turn at the main active components of the industry. The first is the entrepreneur, theatre owner or even owner of a chain of theatres. Considerable expansion led to there being, in 1910, 63 halls in London and 254 in the rest of the country.¹⁵ So, for example in Glasgow, in 1914, there were 18 music halls and six ‘legitimate theatres’,¹⁶ while in 1888 there had been only three music halls.¹⁷ In Newcastle at the start of the war there were three music halls and three ‘legitimate theatres’.¹⁸ A larger hall could sell 70,000 tickets a week, and more than a million tickets were sold in London each week.¹⁹ In Burnley, the two main music halls could seat 7,000 people a night – that is, more than 5 per cent of the town’s population!²⁰

The industry was ever more professional, and theatres were tightly run businesses. Every year, they were bigger and involved more and more capital investment, partly to match new fire regulations, but mainly to allow them to attract a socially mixed audience in a highly competitive market. The appearance of luxury was essential, and this characteristic is suggested by the very names of the theatres: The Empire, the Palace, the Coliseum or the Alhambra. At the Oxford theatre in London one moved among ‘Corinthian columns and bars smothered in flowers and glittering with mirrors’...