The Last Post

Music, Remembrance and the Great War

Alwyn W. Turner

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781781312858
• eBook ISBN: 9781781313190
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

At eleven o'clock on the morning of the 11th November 1919 the entire British Empire  came to a halt  to remember the  dead of the Great War.

During that first two-minute silence all transport  stayed still, all work ceased and millions stood motionless in the streets. The only human sound to be heard was the desolate weeping of  those  overcome by grief.

Then the moment was brought to an end by the playing of the Last Post.

A century on,  that lone bugle call  remains the most emotionally charged piece of music in public life. In an increasingly secular society, it is the closest thing we have to a sacred anthem.  Yet along with  the poppy, the Cenotaph and  the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, its  power is profoundly modern.  It  is  a response to the trauma of war  that could only have evolved in  a democratic  age.

In this moving  exploration of the Last Post's history, Alwyn W. Turner  considers  the call's  humble origins and  shows how  its mournful simplicity reached beyond class, beyond religion, beyond patriotism to speak directly to peoples around the world. Along  the way he contemplates  the relationship between history and  remembrance, and  seeks out  the legacy of the  First World War in today's culture.       

Chapter One

ROUSE

The trumpet’s loud clangour
Excites us to arms
With shrill notes of anger
And mortal alarms.

John Dryden
‘A Song for St Cecilia’s Day’ (1687)

The sound of a lone bugler playing the Last Post is one of the most distinctive gifts bequeathed to the world by the British Army. It has spanned the globe, becoming a mournful lament for the dead that has been adopted by governments of all colours, and by individuals and groups of every persuasion: by imperialists and pacifists, by conservatives, communists and fascists, by Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim and atheist. No respecter of rank or privilege, it has sounded at the gravesides of millions of soldiers, as well as those of kings and emperors, and of Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. It is perhaps best known as the accompaniment to Remembrance Day, but it has never been confined to commemorations of war: it reaches further and deeper than that, part of the national, even of international, culture. Today, when the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and even the Cenotaph have become too familiar to inspire awe, when the wearing of a poppy has become dulled by routine and the observance of the Silence perfunctory, the sounding of the Last Post retains its power to arrest the soul.

Its origins, however, are a very long way removed from its elevated modern status. It began as a simple bugle call, sounded each and every day as part of army routine and signifying nothing more than that the camp’s perimeter had been secured for the night. Over the course of a century or so, it took on additional meaning and weight, first as the accompaniment to a soldier’s funeral, then as a memorial for the dead, before being adopted by the civilian population and accepted as the music of remembrance. Perhaps it is those long roots, or perhaps simply the evocative nature of music, but the Last Post enjoys a unique, almost sacred status, virtually untouched by the attention of satirists and comedians. This anonymous melody is the most powerful piece of folk music Britain has ever produced.

The bugle is a comparatively recent addition to the musical instrumentation of the British Army, introduced only in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Its name, however, derived from bos, the Latin word for an ox, suggests the long ancestry of the instrument. From the earliest times, humans had discovered the sounds to be made from blowing through the hollowed-out horns of animals, sometimes those of oxen, antelopes or bulls, sometimes – as in the case of the Israelite forces led by Joshua before the walls of Jericho – those of rams. In most instances, these sounds were put to use in military and ceremonial functions.

The natural extension to the practice of using found instruments was to construct them, to replicate nature in metal, thereby allowing for the development of uniformity in tuning. This evolution from horn to trumpet was not confined to a single culture, and wind instruments of bronze, copper or silver were known throughout the ancient world, in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and Greece. They were known too in Britain. When the Roman armies arrived in the first century AD, they were met by Celtic forces who used the carnyx, a long S-shaped trumpet made of bronze that was held vertically, so that the mouthpiece was the lowest point and the sound came out of a bell – typically in the form of a boar or a serpent – some ten feet off the ground. Rising out of the morning mist, as the Celts charged into battle, the carnyx was a weapon of war, intended to strike fear into the enemy with its harsh, blasting noise and its fearsome appearance.

The carnyx, however, did not survive, and it was the Romans whose influence was to shape musical developments in Britain. They used a variety of bronze and copper instruments, some straight, up to four and a half feet in length, some curved; but more importantly they used them for military functions beyond mere aggression. The trumpet, it was discovered, could be blown to control tactics on the battlefield, and to regulate the everyday life of the soldier. ‘Their times also for sleeping and watching and rising are notified beforehand by the sound of trumpets,’ wrote the historian Josephus, describing the Roman army in the first century AD, ‘nor is any thing done without such a signal.’

These instruments – known retrospectively as natural trumpets to distinguish them from their modern descendants – remained largely the same over the centuries: simple cylinders of metal, with a mouthpiece at one end, a bell at the other, and no holes, keys or valves to vary the pitch; that was achieved solely through the embouchure of the player, squeezing notes out of the instrument by tightening the lips when blowing. The longer the tube, the greater the range of harmonics available, and therefore the more subtle the music that could be played.

A thousand years on from the Roman departure from Britain, little had changed in terms of trumpets, though new military instruments were being introduced. In ‘The Knight’s Tale’, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote of:

Pypes, trompes, nakers, clariounes
That in the bataille blowen blody sounes

while Edward III’s victory over the Scots at Halidon Hill in 1333 was commemorated in a ballad that made specific reference to the instruments deployed by the English:

This was to do with merry sowne,
With pipes, trumpes and tabers thereto,
And loud clarions thei blew also.

Tabers – more normally spelt tabors – and nakers were early forms of side-drum and kettle-drum respectively, first encountered in the ranks of the Saracen armies during the Crusades. There was a clear division between the two, reflecting a traditional and long-lived class distinction in the army. The kettle-drum, along with the trumpet, was increasingly reserved for the elite regiments of cavalry, employed for ceremonial functions and associated with royalty; the side-drum was used by the more lowly infantry.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, drums had taken on three distinct military functions. They beat out time for an army on the march; they communicated orders on the battlefield; and they marked out the passage of the day in camp. The last of these roles was perhaps the least appreciated in civilian society, but it was where the greatest impact was made on the psyche of the soldier, establishing a diurnal rhythm that shaped military life. The camp was roused at daybreak by the beating of Reveille, and it closed down at night with a sequence of two beats that were known collectively as Tattoo: first came a signal that the officer of the watch had commenced his inspection of the sentry points; then, some thirty minutes later, a final beat as the inspection concluded and the camp was declared secure for the night. The word ‘Tattoo’ gave some indication of the recreational preferences of the British soldier; it was borrowed from the Dutch doe den tap-toe, an instruction to turn off the beer taps in taverns at the end of the evening, and the first beating served as an order to those drinking outside the barracks that it was time to return.

The cavalry, meanwhile, were evolving their own set of trumpet calls for use in camp, with a repertoire in the seventeenth century of six calls: Butte Sella, Mounte Cavallo, A la Standarde, Tuquet, Carga and Aquet, the last of which – also known as the Watch – was used both first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

The numbers of such calls steadily increased so that by the mid-eighteenth century there were fifteen different drum beats used either on the battlefield or in camp, but in both arenas the limitations of the drum were becoming increasingly apparent. With medieval weaponry replaced by muskets, manoeuvrable cannon and finally rifles, the sound of a drum struggled to be heard in conflict, while the lack of variation in tone meant that there was a finite number of beats that a soldier could be expected to remember. And so, in place of the drum, came the bugle-horn, introduced during the reign of George III and adapted from a type of bugle used by the Hanoverian military.

The structure of the new instrument differed in several key respects from the existing cavalry trumpet. Where the trumpet was cylindrical for almost its entire length, before flaring out into the bell, the tube of a bugle was conical from mouthpiece to horn, giving a more abrasive, less mellifluous sound. The piping was shorter and – at this early stage – was coiled into a circular shape or curved into a half-moon like a hunting horn, making it a more compact instrument, suitable for carrying on the march. The familiar modern shape of the bugle, wound twice around and looking akin to an unkeyed cornet, was to follow in the first half of the nineteenth century, though the image of the original shapes survived on the cap badges of several regiments. Still without keys or valves, it was restricted to five or six notes, but even so offered far greater flexibility than a drum.

This was an instrument for a new age, functional rather than ceremonial, its stubby shape speaking of humble utilitarianism rather than showy ostentation. There was no room on the restricted length of a bugle for hanging a banner. It lacked the elongated elegance and aristocratic bearing of the cavalry trumpet, and it replaced the rich, sonorous tones with a brash, shrill urgency. In short, it looked and sounded as though it were designed for the industrial revolution not for the Restoration court.

It was also perfectly suited to a new style of warfare in which mobility was a prized attribute, and its arrival coincided with the development of the light infantry in the British Army, regiments of riflemen who were to make their name in the Napoleonic Wars. Even before that conflict, however, a battalion of such troops was to be seen in Hyde Park in 1777, practising its manoeuvres before embarking for service in the American Revolutionary War, and being ‘regulated by the sound of a bugle-horn’. A report from the following year similarly emphasised this use of the instrument to control soldiers: ‘The movements of the Light Brigade are performed, with amazing address and agility, to the sound of a buglehorn.’ It was with the light infantry that the bugle was to become particularly associated, so that a soldier serving in the Peninsular War with the 95th (Rifle) Regiment could boast that ‘the buglers of his regiment formed a band over twenty strong’.

Its use, however, was not restricted to these ranks. Bugles sounded the advance as Wellington’s army left camp for the battle of Waterloo, and had by then even been adopted by some cavalry regiments, most notably the Scots Greys. In so doing, of course, they were blurring the distinction that had grown up between the instrumentation of the infantry and that of the cavalry, a fact that attracted official disapproval. In 1835 British cavalry regiments were prohibited from using bugles, though the ban was not to last: the size of cavalry trumpets made them less practical on the battlefield, their lower pitch meant their calls did not pierce the noise of conflict in the way that bugles could, and the greater range of notes made mistakes more likely. Consequently a variant on the bugle was produced, with the same length of tubing but more loosely coiled into a longer, more elegant shape.

The emergence of the infantry bugle necessitated the adoption of a fresh set of calls, since those used by the trumpet could not be played on the new instrument, and the period of transition was not without problems. Perhaps the most risky of all calls was Parley, played when approaching enemy lines for the purposes of negotiating. This was the one signal that needed to be understood not only by the player’s comrades but also by his adversaries, and the shift from trumpet to bugle was fraught with danger: in 1778 a British detachment found itself under fire from the French at St Lucia when the new bugle Parley was not recognised. (In later years a different problem arose. During the Boer War it was reported that, in a distinctly underhand trick, ‘the Boers had learned our bugle calls’ and played the Cease Fire to confuse the British troops.)

It was largely in response to such episodes, and as part of a wider push towards conformity across the Army, that in 1798 James Hyde, trumpet major of the London and Westminster Dragoons and a trumpeter in the orchestra of the Covent Garden Opera House, was asked to lead an inquiry into the various calls that were then being used. The stated intention was ‘to revise the trumpet and bugle soundings, and to reduce them to uniformity, which is hereafter to be strictly observed in all regiments and corps of cavalry in His Majesty’s service’. Hyde was paid the not inconsiderable sum of thirty pounds for his work, and the results were published later that year, effectively spelling the demise of the drum as the preferred instrument for signalling orders in combat; the battlefield use of the drum survived, but henceforth it was primarily employed for purposes of morale. Unfortunately the document that resulted from Hyde’s endeavours, The Sounds for Duty and Exercise, was so riddled with errors and typographical mistakes that it was of little immediate use, and in 1799 he published his own version with the addition of ‘The Bugle Horn Duty for the Light Infantry as used in the Foot Guards’. Included therein was the call that would later become famous as the Last Post, but which was then known under the title Setting the Watch, the bugle equivalent of Tattoo.

The antiquity, let alone the authorship, of the piece is entirely lost, though the call almost certainly predates Hyde and the cavalry version may have been well over a century old by this stage. It has been speculated that the long melodic lines of infantry calls like Reveille and the Last Post, reaching far beyond simple repetitions, might indicate that they were assembled from several sources, a compilation of calls from different regiments, possibly put together by Hyde. Others have argued that the subtlety of these pieces suggests the hand of an experienced composer, with the name of Joseph Haydn being mentioned. Haydn had recently been a huge success on his two visits to London, during the latter of which (in 1794–5) he wrote his Military Symphony, featuring fanfare trumpets, but there is nothing to link him directly to the bugle calls published by James Hyde.

Setting the Watch was to remain the official name of the call for well over half a century. A book titled Barrack Calls for Sappers and Miners, published in 1850, was still listing Setting the Watch: 1st Post and Setting the Watch: 2nd Post, and it was not until the King’s Regulations of 1873 that there was the first official reference to what was now called the Last Post of Tattoo. Common usage, however, had already renamed the call by that point, as an account of ‘Life in a Barrack’ from a decade earlier made clear:

Tattoo is divided into the First Post and Last Post. The First Post sounds at nine, when all the men’s names are called in the barrack-rooms; the names of those who are absent being taken down. As many men as return before the Last Post has sounded, at half-past nine, have their names scratched from the list, which is then taken up to the orderly officer. As the absentees drop in they are marched to the guard-room, which is pretty full by midnight, with deserters, absentees and men drunk.

The timings varied. Officially the First Post was to be sounded at nine o’clock in winter and at ten o’clock in summer, but, depending on local circumstances and preferences, it could be later still. And the Last Post – despite its name – was not the final call of the day: it was followed fifteen, or sometimes thirty, minutes later by the brief sounding of Lights Out. The man who played these calls would then sleep in the guardhouse, so he could be woken next morning in time to sound Reveille, the first call of the day.

The number of signals grew still further with the advent of the bugle. The schedule for a Rifle Volunteers encampment at Woodsome, Yorkshire, in 1873 showed a daily routine of twenty-six calls. Then there were the other calls heard infrequently in camp (Alarm, Fire Alarm) and a further set that were used on the battlefield. ‘There are altogether over sixty different calls in constant use,’ noted an officer in 1885. There were also calls specific to each regiment and battalion, sometimes to each company too, which were played immediately before the main call, to inform soldiers in action that they were being addressed directly.

Apart from the obvious function of ensuring that soldiers were in the right place at the right time in an era when few possessed watches, there was a psychological dimension to the sounding of the daily calls, reminding those serving of their place in a larger machine. ‘All bugle calls denote that a soldier’s life is a watch and a vigil,’ Stephen Graham, who served in the Scots Guards during the First World War, was later to reflect. ‘He does not go by the clock, or claim any time as his own, but gives obedience instant upon the demand of his superior. The bugle call is the voice of the King.’

There was, in the first half of the nineteenth century, no special meaning or resonance to the Last Post that might distinguish it from all the other calls heard daily by serving soldiers. In later years, there would be much talk of its eerie, haunting nature, but this was not how it was perceived by those whose days were marked out by the duty bugler. Its associations were not with deat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: The Last Post
• Chapter One: Rouse
• Chapter Two: General Salute
• Chapter Three: Charge
• Chapter Four: Cease Firing
• Chapter Five: Alarm
• Chapter Six: Fall In
• Chapter Seven: Stand Fast
• Chapter Eight: As You Were
• Chapter Nine: Dismiss
• Epilogue: Reveille
• References
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Copyright