{"id":476,"date":"2020-01-04T18:05:33","date_gmt":"2020-01-04T18:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/folksongandmusichall.com\/?p=476"},"modified":"2020-05-31T09:20:25","modified_gmt":"2020-05-31T09:20:25","slug":"jingoism-and-music-hall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/folksongandmusichall.com\/index.php\/2020\/01\/04\/jingoism-and-music-hall\/","title":{"rendered":"Jingoism and Music Hall"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m reasonably hopeful that many of my posts will be light-hearted, but perhaps not this one\u2026 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 \u201cjingoism\u201d actually comes from the Halls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the Oxford English dictionary, \u201cjingo\u201d was\noriginally a word used by magicians, equivalent to something like \u201cHey presto!\u201d.\nIn the early 19th<\/sup> century \u201cby jingo\u201d became a jokey alternative to\nswearing in the Halls and elsewhere. It is in this sense that jingo was used in\nMacDermott\u2019s War Song (aka \u201cThe Jingo Song\u201d) with its chorus:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
 We don\u2019t want to fight, but by jingo if we do,<\/em>\n We\u2019ve got the ships, we\u2019ve got the men, we\u2019ve got the money too.<\/em>\n We fought the bear before, and while we\u2019re Britain\u2019s true,<\/em>\n The Russians will not have Constantinople.<\/em> <\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
This was a\nsong written by GW Hunt and first sung by MacDermott to great acclaim in 1877. Russia\nhad declared war on Turkey, and Disraeli\u2019s Conservatives were backing the Turkish\nand threatening to launch a war against Russia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cthe Bulgarian atrocities of 1876\u201d in which thousands of Bulgarian Christians were massacred by Turkish troops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was the\ncontext in which The Jingo Song was hugely successful – it was one of a number\nof patriotic, pro Empire songs that featured heavily in Music Hall repertoire\nfrom the 1870s on and off until the First World War (to get a flavour of\npro-war songs in the lead up to 1914, take a look at the film Oh What a Lovely\nWar!). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cJingoism\u201d became a by-word  for extreme nationalism \u2013 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 \u201cjingoists\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It would be\ngoing too far, as some authors do, to say that the Music Halls backed the\nTories and their war-mongering in the 1870s. However, the fact that so many\nsongs of this type were written in this period must mean that they were\nreasonably popular with the largely working-class and lower-middle-class\naudiences in the Halls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That said, we\nneed to be careful: we don\u2019t always know how the songs were sung, and how\naudiences responded to them, and we can\u2019t assume that these jingoistic songs\nrepresent in a straightforward way the views of the audiences. If you look at\nthe repertoire of MacDermott and other \u201cpro Empire\u201d singers, jingoistic songs\nformed only a small part of their repertoire – people were not descending on\nthe Halls to listen to entire evenings of pro Empire, pro-war songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The owners\nof the music halls were always desperate to appear respectable, and there is\nevidence that they consciously encouraged the singing of such songs with that\nin mind. (Reflecting an ongoing battle with respectable mainstream theatre and\nthe censors).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many figures\non the left at the time, and in the Liberal anti-war movement, saw the Music Hall\nas downright reactionary. JE Hobson, a Liberal writer whose analysis of imperialism\nwas highly influential at the time, provided a neat summary of this view in the\nintroduction to his book The Psychology of Jingoism:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Among large sections of the middle and\nlabouring classes, the Music Halls are a more potent educator than the church,\nthe school, the political meeting, or even than the press. The [music hall]\nartiste conveys by song or recitation crude notions upon morals and politics,\nappealing by coarse humour or exaggerated pathos to the animal lusts of an\naudience stimulated by alcohol \u2026 The glorification of brute force and an\nignorant contempt for foreigners \u2026 make the music hall a very serviceable\nengine for generating military passion.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
The language\nhere (crude notions \u2026 coarse humour … Animal\nlusts ..stimulated by alcohol \u2026 glorification of brute force \u2026 ignorant) <\/em> no doubt reflects a  deeply held snobbishness about the lower\nclasses, but it\u2019s important not to ignore that for some on the left of the\npolitical spectrum as it existed at the time, there was an equally deeply held suspicion\nthat Halls were a mechanism for whipping up war fever amongst the lower\nclasses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So finally, back to the middle-class, Fabian folksong collectors of the late 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> century that were so keen to keep Music Hall songs out of their collections. Is it possible that it didn\u2019t 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..]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sources: <\/p>\n\n\n\n