I’m reasonably hopeful that many of my posts will be light-hearted, but perhaps not this one… As a socialist and sometime activist in the peace movement, I have to face the fact that extreme, uncritical, flag-waving nationalism will always be associated with Music Hall, if for no other reason than that the word “jingoism” actually comes from the Halls.
According to the Oxford English dictionary, “jingo” was originally a word used by magicians, equivalent to something like “Hey presto!”. In the early 19th century “by jingo” became a jokey alternative to swearing in the Halls and elsewhere. It is in this sense that jingo was used in MacDermott’s War Song (aka “The Jingo Song”) with its chorus:
We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too. We fought the bear before, and while we’re Britain’s true, The Russians will not have Constantinople.
This was a song written by GW Hunt and first sung by MacDermott to great acclaim in 1877. Russia had declared war on Turkey, and Disraeli’s Conservatives were backing the Turkish and threatening to launch a war against Russia.
The Tories, staunch defenders of the British Empire, backed the Turks hoping to block Russian attempts at imperial expansion. The Liberal Party and most of the organised left, opposed any military action, and tended to be anti-Turkish as a result of “the Bulgarian atrocities of 1876” in which thousands of Bulgarian Christians were massacred by Turkish troops.
This was the context in which The Jingo Song was hugely successful – it was one of a number of patriotic, pro Empire songs that featured heavily in Music Hall repertoire from the 1870s on and off until the First World War (to get a flavour of pro-war songs in the lead up to 1914, take a look at the film Oh What a Lovely War!).
“Jingoism” became a by-word for extreme nationalism – William Morris and others who opposed the war were attacked on the streets by right-wingers who were described by people from both sides of the argument as “jingoists”.
It would be going too far, as some authors do, to say that the Music Halls backed the Tories and their war-mongering in the 1870s. However, the fact that so many songs of this type were written in this period must mean that they were reasonably popular with the largely working-class and lower-middle-class audiences in the Halls.
That said, we need to be careful: we don’t always know how the songs were sung, and how audiences responded to them, and we can’t assume that these jingoistic songs represent in a straightforward way the views of the audiences. If you look at the repertoire of MacDermott and other “pro Empire” singers, jingoistic songs formed only a small part of their repertoire – people were not descending on the Halls to listen to entire evenings of pro Empire, pro-war songs.
The owners of the music halls were always desperate to appear respectable, and there is evidence that they consciously encouraged the singing of such songs with that in mind. (Reflecting an ongoing battle with respectable mainstream theatre and the censors).
Many figures on the left at the time, and in the Liberal anti-war movement, saw the Music Hall as downright reactionary. JE Hobson, a Liberal writer whose analysis of imperialism was highly influential at the time, provided a neat summary of this view in the introduction to his book The Psychology of Jingoism:
Among large sections of the middle and labouring classes, the Music Halls are a more potent educator than the church, the school, the political meeting, or even than the press. The [music hall] artiste conveys by song or recitation crude notions upon morals and politics, appealing by coarse humour or exaggerated pathos to the animal lusts of an audience stimulated by alcohol … The glorification of brute force and an ignorant contempt for foreigners … make the music hall a very serviceable engine for generating military passion.
The language here (crude notions … coarse humour … Animal lusts ..stimulated by alcohol … glorification of brute force … ignorant) no doubt reflects a deeply held snobbishness about the lower classes, but it’s important not to ignore that for some on the left of the political spectrum as it existed at the time, there was an equally deeply held suspicion that Halls were a mechanism for whipping up war fever amongst the lower classes.
So finally, back to the middle-class, Fabian folksong collectors of the late 19th and early 20th century that were so keen to keep Music Hall songs out of their collections. Is it possible that it didn’t just represent a snobbishness about the musical tastes of the urban working class, but additionally reflected a dislike of crude Jingoism?? [I hope to investigate further..]
Sources:
- Russell: Popular Music
- EP Thompson: William Morris
- JE Hobson: Psychology of Jingoism
Last Updated on May 31, 2020 by John Baxter | Published: January 4, 2020
