The Day We Went to War (49 page)

‘Doing the Lambeth Walk, Oi!’ Men of the Royal Air Force join Lupino Lane and the rest of the cast of
Me and My Girl
at the Victoria Palace. The show was one of the first to reopen after the outbreak of war.

The King and Queen at a performance of George Black’s review
Black Velvet
at the London Hippodrome, 27 November 1939. ‘This is a good evening’s fun, thanks mostly to Vic Oliver’ wrote a critic in
Punch.

J.B. Priestley’s
Music at Night
at the Westminster Theatre was the first serious new play to open in wartime London.
Punch
’s critic was usually disdainful of theatrical first nights, ‘because commonly the audience is more anxious to have its features registered by the society papers than to allow the curtain to be rung up’. But, he conceded, after ‘six weeks of play-starvation’, the opening of
Music at Night
was quite different: ‘Gripping gas masks and torches, and mostly glad in day clothes, the audience surged under the dim blue bulbs in the hall hungrily on into its seats as if the play was all that mattered and there was not a moment to be wasted in getting at it.’

Florence Speed went to see the play just after it opened: ‘It was interesting and original in its setting, but hardly ideal for wartime. It is played in some darkness with only the individual players spotlighted. It’s the story of several people’s reaction to Music and their varying thoughts as they listen . . . Each in his thoughts criticize the others, then they think of their childhood, are visited by the ghosts of their dead . . . and banal finish, come down to whiskies and soda. The first two acts held you but the third I’m afraid was too highbrow for me and a little dreary.’

Gradually other plays such as
Dear Octopus
,
The Importance of Being Earnest
and Emlyn Williams’s
The Corn Is Green
began to reopen. By Christmas, thirty London theatres, of which twentythree were in the West End, were ‘welcoming crowded audiences . . . the queues have been lengthened as the promised Christmas leave began to operate, and husbands, brothers, sweethearts came back from France eager for charm and jollity’.

Outside of London, the provincial theatres were also doing good business. By December, there were reckoned to be over eighty touring companies putting on serious drama, comedies, musicals and revues, together with about thirty resident repertory companies. Gifted amateurs also did their bit, as when society photographer Cecil Beaton and friends staged their own pantomime,
Heil Cinderella
, for the troops. Putting on a pantomime was, Beaton thought, ‘like running a war and I cannot think that Hitler feels more unnerved and responsible than I now do . . . The Russians bomb Finland and it matters less to us because we have to still find a Dandini.’

One of the most popular features of Beaton’s pantomime, as it toured army camps around Salisbury Plain, was the community singing of some of the first wartime hits, including a parody of ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’, popularised by Arthur Askey. The revised lyrics substituted ‘Adolf’, Goering and Goebbels in the refrain. As Mass Observation noted, with the outbreak of war, Britain’s music business, centred on London’s Denmark Street – ‘Tin Pan Alley’ – ‘reacted immediately and sensationally’. The hits of the summer like ‘South of the Border’ and ‘Little Sir Echo’ gave way to a spate of warrelated songs. One of the first and certainly the most popular was Jimmy Kennedy and Michael Carr’s ‘We’re Gonna Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’. Its inspiration was a cartoon by St John Cooper in the
Daily Express
where ‘Young Bert’, writing home to his mother, says, ‘I’m sending you the Siegfried Line to hang your washing on.’ By Christmas, the song’s sheet-music sales had reached 300,000.

But in Germany, the
Daily Telegraph
reported on 6 October: ‘The incorrigible flippancy of the new British war song “We’re Gonna Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line” has given great offence . . . Indignant references have been made to it in the German propaganda wireless broadcasts in English. The statement by the BBC that the song was written by men of anti-aircraft units is said, by the German wireless, to be obviously untrue. “This is
not a soldiers’ song, because soldiers do not brag,” it was stated. “It was not written in the soldiers’ camps, but by the Jewish scribes of the BBC. The Englishmen’s washing will be very dirty before they come anywhere near the Siegfried Line.”’

Almost as popular was Ross Parker and Hughie Charles’s ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ which sold 200,000 copies at one shilling (5p) each. Gracie Fields’s ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’ from the film
Shipyard Sally
was a perfect song for wartime partings, and was sung with equal enthusiasm both by evacuees and the men of the British Expeditionary Force off to France. And her ‘I’m Sending a Letter to Santa Claus’ (‘to send back my daddy to me’) was a big success at Christmas.

The same theme of separation and reunion was a popular one that autumn with songwriters turning out such titles as ‘Goodbye Sally’, ‘It Won’t Be Long’, ‘We Won’t Be Long Out There’ and Ivor Novello’s sentimental and nostalgic ‘We’ll Remember’, which he co-wrote with
Daily Mail
journalist Collie Knot and which failed spectacularly to match the huge success of his 1914 song ‘(Keep the Home Fires Burning) Till the Boys Come Home’. Much more popular was Michael Carr’s ‘Somewhere in France With You’.

In France too, there was a similar glut of topical and patriotic war songs. Maurice Chevalier’s ‘Ça Fait D’Excellents Français’ (‘All This Makes Fine Frenchmen’) was, an American journalist thought, ‘a complete portrait of France’s democratic army’. While his ‘Paris sera toujours Paris’ was a light-hearted catalogue of the changes that war had brought to the French capital; gas masks, petrol rationing, sandbags and the blackout. The
Entente Cordiale
was celebrated with such tunes as ‘Bonjour Tommy’ and ‘Tommy and the French Girl’. Ray Ventura and his band had big hits with both a musical tribute to Britain’s Prime Minister, ‘La Chamberlaine’ (The Umbrella Polka), and their own version of ‘We’re Gonna Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’.

In Germany, as in Britain and France, there were war songs in
circulation that autumn. ‘Erika’ was a great favourite with the troops, but it was ‘Wir Fahren gegen Engelland’ (‘We Are Sailing against England’), that received immense official plugging. But even Dr Goebbels, when writing about war songs, had to admit the relative weakness of Germany when it came to producing such tunes. In any case, most Germans preferred songs without a war theme, like the huge hit ‘Bel Ami’. Amazingly popular too that autumn was band leader and accordion ist Willi Glahé’s version of a 1934 Czech tune, now retitled ‘Rosamunde’. It enjoyed equal popularity in Britain, where it was one of Churchill’s favourites, under the title ‘Roll Out the Barrel’.

In Britain, most songs on topical wartime themes enjoyed only a transient popularity. The blackout inspired no less than five hit tunes, including ‘Till the Lights of London Shine Again’, ‘They Can’t Blackout the Moon’ and Tommie Connor’s ‘The Blackout Stroll’. The services came in for their share of topical tunes with such titles as ‘Lords of the Air’, ‘Oh, Ain’t It Grand to Be in the Navy?’, ‘Wings over the Navy’ and ‘Reckless Jeff of the RAF’. But the most unlikely tune that autumn to achieve popularity was dance-band leader Harry Roy’s ‘God Bless You, Mr Chamberlain’, the lyrics of which referred to the Prime Minister’s 1938 flights to Germany and his famous umbrella. Roy wrote to 10 Downing Street to seek the Prime Minister’s permission to publish the song, and ‘in reply Mr Chamberlain said he had no objection to the lyric’.

As the year drew to a close, Mass Observation undertook a survey of current song releases:

43 per cent were war songs

49 per cent plain love songs (many actually written or prereleased before the war)

2 per cent were ballads

2 per cent were comic

A music publisher told Mass Observation: ‘Generally speaking the people go back pretty much to normal songs. The ordinary sentimental ballad type will lead. A song like – what shall I say? – like “We’ll Meet Again”, a song we’re putting out now – that sort of sentiment. To you – no doubt – and even to us it is just emotionalism, but the public like it . . .’

But as the year ended, and despite the best efforts of Tin Pan Alley, the press was still asking, ‘Where are our marching songs? Can we not do better than “Roll Out the Barrel”?’

For more-serious-music lovers, there were the National Gallery lunchtime concerts, where ‘every day from Monday to Friday, you can hear world-famous artists . . . for one shilling (5p) a time’. The idea for the concerts came from pianist Myra Hess. When war broke out she initially thought of giving up music and going into some form of war work. But then she realised that ‘now of all times was the moment when her music was needed’. Cheap lunch-hour concerts, which would avoid the problem of the blackout, at a shilling a time seemed to be the answer. The money raised would go to the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund.

The National Gallery, with most of its paintings now removed to safety, seemed to be the ideal location for the concerts. Director Sir Kenneth Clark was approached and he welcomed the idea. He agreed to the concerts being held in the dome hall of the National Gallery, where the old Italian masters had hung before they were evacuated to Wales. The Home Office gave permission for the concerts to take place, and HM Customs and Excise exempted them from entertainment tax. Within the space of a fortnight, the first programmes had been drawn up. Myra Hess herself gave the first concert and played Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ and her own arrangement of Bach’s ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’. Sir Kenneth confessed that ‘in common with half the audience, I was in tears. This is what we had all been waiting for – an assertion of eternal values.’

‘The compère of the Entente Cordiale’. Maurice Chevalier at Arras, 12 November 1939, before an Anglo-French audience which included Dominions Secretary Anthony Eden, Lord Gort and the Duke of Gloucester.

‘It was left to the initiative of a single woman, Myra Hess, to pierce the black-out by producing her own concerts and peopling the central hall of the National Gallery with humans instead of evacuated masterpieces.’ Her audiences were enthusiastic:

Wife, thirty-five: ‘Terribly exciting!’

Officer, forty: ‘Yes, such fun! We must come tomorrow. A lovely programme – Bach.’

Myra Hess was delighted at the public’s response: ‘It has been the greatest experience of my life. We thought we might get perhaps 300 people. But as many as a thousand try to find a place. They even sit on the marble floor – and we have to turn scores away.’ The Queen came, and soon the idea of lunchtime concerts caught on all over Britain.

During the First World War, it was not until February 1915 that any attempt was made to provide entertainment for the troops. But in September 1939, under the forceful leadership of theatre and film director Basil Dean, the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), quickly came into being. Only a week after the declaration of war, ENSA gave its first concert, starring Frances Day, at Old Dene Camp, Camberley. By the end of the year, from its headquarters at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, ENSA had sent out concert parties that had entertained nearly a million soldiers, sailors and airmen.