The Nine Muses: Part 3
Matriarchy versus Patriarchy (24)
MELPOMENE: TRAGEDY
The most tragic incident of the Great War I’ve come across is an obscure ‘sketch’ that is barely known, highly significant and quickly glossed over. Should today’s revisionist historians come across it, they would ignore it as it doesn’t fit the propaganda lies they’ve been carefully ramming down our throats since the millennium.
In February 1918, the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig, visited Colonel Nicholson’s division and was invited to a concert given by The Balmorals troupe of players. He looked old and careworn, nevertheless this did not stop the delivery of ‘occasional jibes’ aimed in his direction.
The show included a sketch entitled ‘A Peep Into The Future. In the trenches in 1967’.
It depicted the last British and last German soldier.
They were using the same parapet, the Tommy was entrenched on one side, Fritz on the other. Fritz was shown using the ‘bayonet periscope’ held up by the Tommy as a shaving mirror.
Officially, ‘the exact meaning of the sketch is not known’, but that’s because the incident is recorded by Colonel Nicholson in his book Behind the Lines.
To the rest of us, its exact meaning is bloody obvious. Especially as it’s set in 1967!
It has a similar tone to a Spitting Image sketch today.
It must have taken tremendous courage for the players to perform that sketch in front of the Mass-Murderer-In-Chief. I would guess it was ordinary soldiers, not officers, who dared to write and perform it, inspired by the Muse of Tragedy.
Nicholson claims there was ‘no intentional reflection on the Commander-in-Chief.’
Really?! You’ve got to be kidding me!
He was just too thick to see the irony. I’m sure that’s how those kids got their sketch through without censorship.
Bravo!
John Wagner and I would get our seditious material past similar dumb censors on Battle, Action and 2000AD. But our readers got our message okay.
It’s said in another account of the event I read that Haig watched the sketch, grim-faced, and left without comment.
I’m so pleased.
THALIA: COMEDY
A fairly recent member of the Cambridge Footlights claimed that the really clever and satirical comedy could only be written and performed by highly intelligent chaps such as himself and it was therefore the province of the elite. That’s the message that’s been going out to us since the days of Monty Python and At Last the 1948 Show.
By his criteria, working class comedy is crude, like the Carry On Films or stand-up comedians like Bernard Manning, and can easily be dismissed
In fact working-class comedians in the Great War were writing and performing satirical sketches long before Monty Python, and may well have influenced the Circus, although they will never be acknowledged, they’re only cannon fodder after all, which is why I’m obsessed by acknowledging them here.
The sketches and comedy sketches produced by these anonymous working-class heroes I’ve come across are pure Python, and pre-date it by a lifetime. There’s the song Fred Karno’s Army featured earlier, which is very Pythonesque.
Then we come to the soldiers’ response to a revolting recruiting song usually performed by middle-class women, probably as they handed out white feathers to reluctant recruits.
We've watched you playing cricket and every kind of game
At football, golf, and polo you men have made your name
But now your country calls you to play your part in war
And no matter what befalls you, we shall love you all the more
So, come and join the Forces as your fathers did before
Oh, we don't want to lose you, but we think you ought to go
For your king and your country both need you so
We shall want you and miss you, but with all our might and main
We shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you, when you come back again
Doubtless there will be a modern, suitably ‘cool’ variation if Starmer brings back conscription and sends young men to die and be mutilated in the Ukraine for the arms industry.
It’s stirring stuff.
VADS – VoluntaryAid Detachment women – delivered it at a concert party for ‘our gallant boys’ and here was the ordinary soldiers’ lustily sung response:
For we don’t want your loving
And we think you’re awfully slow
To see that we don’t want you
So, please, won’t you go.
We don’t like your sing-songs
And we loathe your refrain
So don’t you dare to sing it
Near us again
I’d say that was up to Cambridge Footlights standard.
Those young men driven by the Muse of Comedy were not only bright, but taking a helluva chance singing such sedition. They could all have been put on a charge, even faced the crucifixion of Field Punishment Number One for such disrespect to these middle-class harridans.
The VADS also objected to these kids playing Ragtime.
The Compere VAD, the wife of a high-ranking officer had this to say:
“I believe Ragtime is known as black man’s music. There is really no need to encourage such a coarse, animal sound. The soldiers want pretty music, sentimental ballads, to make them think of home.”
Like Keep The Home Fires Burning – a mega-hit in its day.
The impact of propaganda can’t be underestimated then and now. Keep The Home Fires Burning by Ivor Novello literally sent thousands of young men to their deaths.
Anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon knew this only too well and intended to murder Ivor Novello. Seriously! He was all set to kill him. But he ended up sleeping with him instead. Well, Novello was very handsome.
Ordinary soldiers were NEVER the obedient cannon fodder the State-backed historians so desperately want us to believe, so a new generation of kids can be sent to die in the Ukraine. These young heroes of the Great War always challenged authority as far as they dared. And beyond.
So in the Christmas Truce of 1914 this was the kind of Christmas song they sang across to the Germans.
It was Christmas Day in the workhouse,
That season of good cheer,
The paupers’ hearts were merry,
Their bellies full of beer
The pompous workhouse master
As he strode about the halls
Wished them a Merry Christmas
But the paupers answered “Balls!”
That angered the workhouse master
Who swore by all the Gods
That he’d stop their Christmas pudden,
The dirty rotten sod
Then up spake a bald-headed pauper
His face as bold as brass
“You can keep your Christmas pudden
And stick it up your arse!”
No Stille Nacht for the Brits!
During the truce they would have imitated comedian George Robey, The Prime Minister of Mirth, (“Cease this unseemly levity.”) to great applause from both sides.
And recited the mildly bawdy The Showman, a Pythonesque comedy sketch popular with the troops which shows how British humour – and our national character – has changed very little in a hundred years.
And they need the credit for it, alongside the Cambridge Footlights.
URANIA: ASTROLOGY
Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt". In April 1917, an ordinary piece of plumbing chosen by Duchamp was submitted for the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, to be staged at the Grand Central Palace in New York.
The work is regarded by art historians and theorists of the avant-garde as a major landmark in 20th-century art.
Duchamp, a leading light of Dada, was fiercely anti-war and had a great interest in astrology. So perhaps it was the Muse of Astrology that inspired him to produce Fountain.
To me, it also comes across as Punk and sticks two fingers up to all forms of the establishment, whether artistic, military or political.
Some have suggested that the original work was by the female leading Dada artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who had submitted it to Duchamp as a friend.
Her works were fiercely against the patriarchy. If that’s true, she wouldn’t be the first. Similarly Robert Graves wrote the iconic The White Goddess, the definitive book on an ancient Matriarchy. But it’s claimed Graves actually stole the concept from his girlfriend, Laura Riding.
Fountain is not directly anti-war, but Dada arose during the Great War and its core inspiration is the sheer pointlessness of life.
That’s how all those unknown young Dada artists, poets, musicians, writers and comedians, inspired by the Nine Muses, must have felt as they were murdered by the State for the faux use of patriotism.
“Cease this unseemly levity.” Sounds awfully similar to the Python line delivered by Graham Chapman as The Colonel “Stop that, it’s Silly.”
Cheers Pat, another fascinating read. And ye gods, what a joy it is to picture Haig's face watching that sketch...