I DIDN’T RAISE MY SON TO BE A SOLDIER - Tony Smith

I DIDN’T RAISE MY SON TO BE A SOLDIER

 by

Tony Smith [i]

A presentation at the AFN Conference, NLA Canberra, Easter 1916 [ii]

If Australians know any songs that lament the tragedy of the war of 1914 to 1918, it is likely that these songs were penned recently. Songwriters such as Ted Egan, Judy Small and Eric Bogle have given voice to hitherto silent plaints about the loss, waste and injustices of the period. Finding songs that were used by contemporary opponents of the war is not easy. This paper reports on my attempts to find such songs.

The paper touches on the Anzac Centenary, the opponents of the war, use of music in support of the war and songs that might have been used by protestors.

Anzac Centenary

Despite the distractions of international and domestic politics, Australians must be aware of the commemorations of the centenary of the war of 1914-1918. Perhaps astute observers sense a link between the ubiquity of the Anzac legend and some policy decisions taken by recent governments. Both the legend and the commemorations are politically significant.

To early 2016, $562m had been allocated for Anzac Centenary events. [iii] Britain and France apparently allocated $90m. each.

Scholars disagree about the war’s significance, but there has been little dissent about the Centenary. Michael Leunig’s cartoon extends the cliché that ‘truth is the first casualty in war’ to truth as the first casualty in war commemorations. Perhaps inconvenient questions are being inadvertently ignored or deliberately suppressed. [iv] Voices of dissent in the period 1914-18 were certainly silenced. Today the national consensus is that the Anzac tradition must be revered, a century ago, the consensus surrounded the importance of the British Empire to Australians.

Historians such as Marilyn Lake have questioned official interpretations of the war’s impact. [v]Lake challenges the idea that the war, the Anzac legend and the Gallipoli landing were as important to nation-building as popularly supposed. She argues that important legislation in the first decade of the twentieth century included social policies which ushered in fair wages, votes for women and support for the vulnerable. The war years undermined those reforms, splitting the Labor Party, hampering economic development, causing industrial unrest and poverty and privileging one specific kind of masculinity over other identities. The hopes of independence raised at Federation were eroded by the war ethos of empire loyalty, internment of foreign looking people and silencing of dissent.

Perhaps the Anzac legend has been an essential part of the Australian ethos, but it may be subject to political manipulation. It waned during the Vietnam years of the sixties and seventies but saw a resurgence in the eighties.

Politicians since 1915 have exploited the idea that essential Australian values are those represented most closely by white, Christian, males of a militarist disposition. They take the respect shown for sacrifices made in warfare and massage this into a consensus to disadvantage their opponents in ‘culture wars’. It will be interesting to see if the consensus holds when the centenary of the first conscription plebiscite of October 1916 arises. As the vote failed to achieve majority support, anti-conscriptionists might hold unofficial commemorations.

There is not time here to debate these wider questions but I should state my position clearly. I think that a consensus can be manufactured and manipulated for political purposes. It is also important to understand that this consensus makes it difficult to dissent during the centenary, difficult to identify dissenters of the war years, and so also difficult to appreciate how they used songs. Some Anzac legend enthusiasts might feel that this very search is subversive.

Who opposed the war?

Joan Beaumont in Broken Nation says that in 1914, a few leftist organisations questioned the war. Labor Call(of Victoria’s Political Labor Council), Australian Worker (Australian Workers’ Union), Direct Action(International Workers of the World) and even the Bushman’s Bible, the Bulletin provided a class analysis of a trade war or capitalist war. Vida Goldstein (editor of Woman Voter, the voice of the Womens Political Association and the Womens Peace Army) called on women to ‘refuse to give their sons as material for slaughter’. These voices, muted in August 1914 became louder because of growing casualties, the length of the war, cynicism about government aims and actions including introduction of censorship and the conscription Bills. Contemporary enthusiasm for the war is over-estimated if we look at crowds at today’s Anzac Day marches and by commentators who refer in hindsight to the birth of the nation at Gallipoli.

Actions taken to humiliate and silence dissenters contradicted the rhetorical claims that Australian troops were dying to protect freedom. Victorian Labor MHR Frank Anstey commented that while Australia was fighting for liberty abroad, the jailing of dissenters such as the ‘Wobbly’ (IWW) leaders was breeding tyranny at home: ‘What is the good of victory abroad if it only gives us slavery at home?’

The War Precautions Act was used against dissidents. After authorities proscribed the song ‘I Didn’t Raise My Son To Be A Soldier’, they searched protestors’ homes including that of Cecilia John, because they believed copies of the song were secreted there.

Clearly, conscription and support for the war were distinct issues but may often have been confused in the popular mind. It is also possible that some supporters of the war changed their positions because they encountered hypocrisy in the pro-conscription case.

There were conscientious objectors and pacifists. Some of these were religious dissenters especially Quakers such as Maggie Thorp the ‘Peace Angel’. Catholics of Irish dissent were ambivalent, particularly after British troops executed the leaders of the 1916 rising in Dublin and when MPs in the House of Commons cheered news of the executions. [vi]

Left wing unions and the IWW were early dissenters. The IWW songbook contained parodies and these were particularly severe on Hughes. At their own meetings or at those they went to disrupt, the most popular song was apparently the Red Flag.

The Government exploited wounded veterans in recruiting campaigns. It also turned a blind eye to their activities. In October 1916 on a march through Melbourne of the United Women’s Anti-Conscription Committee banners were broken and eggs thrown. The organisers feared that ‘agents provocateurs’ had joined the march. By this time there were 23,000 returned soldiers and some engaged in officially sanctioned thuggery. The Government was still unsure what to do with veterans in the 1930s when the ‘New Guard’ arose from their ranks.

The Government used the WPA to censor publication of the anti-conscription arguments of a man named Heather, who lost a leg early in the war. Returned soldiers were more noticeable for disrupting anti-conscription meetings than for protesting the war, but there was a Returned Soldiers’ Anti-Conscription League. [vii]

Women flocked to voluntary war work. The Government gladly transferred work of caring for the wounded for example, to the Red Cross. Women were militarised without necessarily wearing uniforms, not least of all by encouraging men to enlist, or indeed by punishing ‘shirkers’ by giving them ‘white feathers’. Vida Goldstein expressed dread at the thought women might have sent their sons away because of their fondness for bands and uniforms.

Goldstein and Adela Pankhurst critiqued the war from a left wing perspective. Modern feminists might conclude that they did not question the traditional roles of women so much as advising women to think before committing their sons to the war. Clearly however they were conscious of bias against women and campaigned for women’s rights and advancement.

In 1917 there were strikes over food prices and the cost of living. Australian Worker warned of the ‘sweating of women and children deprived of their bread winners’ and unionists noted that ‘we do the paying, we do the slaying’. Adela Pankhurst led the Women’s Peace League in a demonstration in Melbourne in August 1917. Some 15,000 marchers chanted ‘We Want Food and Fair Play’ and sang ‘The Red Flag’. They smashed windows and pelted police with gravel. Unions stopped essential services. Scabs from rural areas camped at Taronga Zoo and the SCG. Strikers returning to work later were victimised, demoted and had their wages cut. The war was enlisted for class warfare.

Music in support of the war

Music was used for recruitment purposes and in the military. Marching bands lifted the spirits of soldiers. Bugle calls marked the periods of the day, especially Reveille and the Last Post played over graves. There were concert parties by troops and visiting civilians. Soldiers sang to express emotions such as isolation from home, pride, disdain of the enemy, contempt for the illogical actions of the high command and disillusionment with the life for which they had volunteered.

In the Centenary context, music is almost exclusively understood as these types of ‘martial’ music and the larrikin parodies of the egalitarian ‘Digger’. Special compositions have certainly expressed the tragedy of the war for individual service personnel and their families, but they do not question the idea of the centrality of the war to Australian nationhood and identity, and convey perhaps an overall sense of grandeur.

There have been a few attempts to take the opportunity of the Centenary to remind us that dissenters were active in the period but these writings and their subjects have remained largely invisible, as though the commemorations were only for those ‘in’ the war. [viii] And if dissenters were made invisible in the war years, they might also have been rendered silent, making them and their songs difficult to locate.

During 2015, an exhibition with the title ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ was held at the Percy Grainger Museum in the University of Melbourne. The curatorial staff kindly sent me the list of tunes on the iPod tour. I do not intend any criticism by observing that the list includes some 20 tunes none of which expresses dissent from the war’s aims. The closest the tunes come to dissent is when they express the poignancy of loss.

During her lifetime, Cecilia John recognised that music is not necessarily accessible to all. She established a ‘People’s Conservatorium’ to broaden opportunity. Cecilia John again!

Music against the war

For musicians, people who question war in general, who are sceptical about the ways the Anzac legend has been used, or who wish that the Centenary events could have a more inclusive focus, there is a challenge to produce alternatives.

The protests of 1914-1918 should not be viewed through modern frames. The context was different. Rallies were held in halls or parks and these were often denied to protestors. There was no television or ‘social media’. The youth and feminist revolutions were still five decades away and Australia was culturally less diverse. Today we have a rich culture of using songs around social and political protest movements. At rallies there are chants ready for improvisation: ‘1, 2, 3, 4’ rhymes nicely with ‘war’, ‘5, 6, 7, 8’ with ‘radiate’. Marches begin or end with music and amplifiers are available.

Movements of previous generations did not use songs the way we do. In our media rich age we accept that the days of the town hall meeting are over. Pictures from 1914-1918 show that rallies were dominated by men dressed in suits and felt hats. There is no carnival atmosphere to these sombre occasions and no children. Grief was borne more privately then and so the grieving were not expected to speak about their losses. Anyone questioning the war might be considered to be trespassing in these areas and so ill-mannered.

Of the songs which I have found, many ‘might’ have been used by protestors.

Protestors sang some songs – such as the National Anthem – to show that they were not disloyal but that they wanted war supporters to analyse the war motives critically. Joining in these songs could ‘disarm’ the militarists to an extent. Given that rallies became very violent at times, attempts to establish common ground were tactically judicious.

The Government assumed that serving troops would favour conscription. Editor of The Worker Henry Boote pointed out that while some 20% AWU members enlisted, only 2% MPs and 2% of the chamber of commerce did. Despite Hughes’ nom-de-guerre of ‘the Little Digger’ he might not have understood the troops well. They barely supported the plebiscites and Hughes was so embarrassed that he did not want the figures to be published as a whole.

While serving troops might not have been comfortable with being tagged as opponents of the war, their songs certainly expressed contempt for the way it was being conducted. The Folkstream website has a page of ‘Anti-Conscription Army Songs’ including ‘Solidarity Forever’, ‘Never Goes’, ‘Bump Me Into Parliament’ and ‘The Button That He Wore’. [ix] In the song ‘The Digger’s London Leave’ there is a strong consciousness that the values of British society had been replaced with something better in Australia.

Similarly ambivalent perhaps were songs of loss and grieving. Laments for casualties implied that the cost of the war was too great. There could be a sentiment that no more men should be sacrificed. There was an element at the time which urged women to bear their losses proudly and not to mourn dead sons and husbands. Women’s roles then were quite different to the expectations of the early 21st century. It must have taken some courage for two women to write and publish ‘Dear Anzac Pal’. It must also have taken courage for managers of music halls to allow anti-war songs.

Several pamphlets from the time suggest that words in verse form were used to express dissent. The CWA of South Australia printed a leaflet ‘A Song of Peace’ which was left on public transport. [x] The poster ‘Blood Vote’ appeared in the Australian Worker 12 October 1916. [xi]

The Victorian Women’s Ant-conscription League published songs which were also authorised by Vida Goldstein’s Women’s Peace Army. These included ‘Toilers of the Nations’, ‘Australian Hymn of Freedom’, ‘God Save the People’, and ‘I Didn’t Raise My Son To Be A Soldier’. [xii]

‘I Didn’t Raise My Son To Be A Soldier’ is particularly interesting. [xiii] Searches for both sheet music and for recordings lead only to an American song ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier’ which was popular before that country entered the war in 1917. It sold 650,000 copies in 1915 in the USA. There were many parodies of this song such as ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Coward’, so obviously the tune and lyrics were recognisable to the general public. ‘Boy’ was later changed to ‘Son’ during the Vietnam years, possibly to avoid offending Black Americans.

Searches for the lyrics produce three variations. There is the American version, the lyrics published by the Victorian Women and yet another version possibly from England around 1900. I looked for the English version to see whether the local variation resembled that, but my search was, if inconclusive, interesting as it says a good deal about folk music processes.

A librarian at the National Library found that Hamish Imlach recorded the song with ‘Son’ in the lyrics. In the sleeve notes to the album, Imlach attributed the song to ‘Little Englanders’ people opposed to Britain projecting its power around the world, specifically towards South Africans. I eventually found a thread on Mudcat Cafe. The song does not have a chorus but each verse begins with the title line, while the American and Australian versions have choruses. In reply to my enquiry, Ewan McVicar revealed that some time in the 1970s Imlach was trying to reconstruct a song from fragments. McVicar rewrote the lyrics according to Imlach’s thoughts. So this version describing events of 1900 originated no earlier than 1970. [xiv]

Cecilia John [xv] is the name most frequently associated with the song here. [xvi] We can be confident that the song was sung at protest rallies and that authorities found its popularity troubling because it was banned under the WPA. How effective the ban was is difficult to assess. At one rally at least, military authorities threatened to arrest anyone who sang the song but when hundreds immediately broke into the song, arrests were not made. However homes were searched, mail opened and protestors harassed because they might be harbouring the lyrics sheets. [xvii]

The lyrics in the ‘Australian’ version which attracted the attention of the authorities who suspected the singers of disloyalty included the following chorus.

‘I didn’t raise my son to be a soldier

I brought him up to be my pride and joy

Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder

To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?

The nations ought to arbitrate their quarrels

It’s time to put the sword and gun away

There’d be no war today if mothers all would say

I didn’t raise my son to be a soldier!’

Today we might want to change ‘mothers’ into ‘parents’, or possibly ‘fathers’.

‘I Didn’t Raise My Son To Be A Soldier’ was potentially the song most likely to survive and form part of a tradition of anti-war protest, but it seems to have largely been forgotten. While other songs such as ‘The Red Flag’ have survived and been used, their focus has been both broader in content and more likely to be used by a specific section of society. Anti-war songs today tend to be those which can be adapted to the latest crisis and can be learnt quickly for marches rather than town hall meetings. They have more in common with the advertising slogan than the longer appeal to emotions. While it is possible that further research could reveal other songs of the 1914-1918 period which express dissent from the war, it might be difficult to fit these to twenty-first century expectations.

Bibliography

Antiwar Songs at http://antiwarsongs.org

Australian Government ‘Songs of war and peace: from Heroes to Loss and Protest’, http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/songs-of-war-protest

Beaumont, Joan 2013, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War, Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest

Damousi, Joy 1995, ‘Socialist Women and Gendered Space: Anti-Conscription and Anti-War Campaigns 1914-18’ in Damousi and Marilyn Lake (eds) Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, Oakleigh Melbourne

Evans, Raymond 1995, “‘All the passion of our womanhood’: Margaret Thorp and the Battle of the Brisbane School of Arts” in Damousi and Lake (eds) Gender and War

Fahey, Warren 1989, The Balls of Bob Menzies: Australian Political Songs 1900-1980, Angus and Robertson, North Ryde

Galvin, Patrick 1962, Irish Songs of Resistance (1169-1923), Oak NY 1962 (3rd print).

Gowland, Pat 1980. ‘The Women’s Peace Army’ in Windschuttle, Elizabeth (ed) Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia 1788-1978, Fontana, Melbourne

Holden, Robert 2014, And The Band Played On, Hardie Grant Melbourne (‘How music lifted the Anzac spirit in the battlefields of the First World War’)

Honest History http://honesthistory.net.au/

Inson, Graeme and Russell Ward 1971, The Glorious Years of Australia from the Birth of the Bulletin to Versailles, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane

Lake, Marilyn 2013, ‘Fractured Nation’, Honest History, 6 October http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/lake-marilyn-fractured-nation/

Newton, Douglas 2014, Hell-Bent: Australia’s leap Into the Great War, Scribe, Brunswick Victoria

Roweth, Chloe and Jason ‘The Riderless Horse’, http://www.rowethmusic.com.au/Site/Riderless_Horse.html

Shute, Carmel 1995, ‘Heroines and Heroes: Sexual Mythology in Australia 1914-18’ in Damousi and Lake (eds) Gender and War

Smart, Judith 1995, ‘Feminists, food and the fair price: the cost of living demonstrations in Melbourne, August-September 1917’ in Damousi and Lake Gender and War

Digger Songs, Allans Music Australia, Melbourne

NOTES AND REFERENCES

[i] I am a former academic with a strong interest in folk music. I busk, perform at folk festivals when opportunity arises and write songs. I write articles and reviews for Trad & Now and online publications. I gave a paper at the 2014 AFN Conference. The Paper was called ‘We were on the Cornwallis: an exercise in tracing the provenance of folk tunes’. As a result of AFN posting the paper online I have been contacted by some ‘new’ distant cousins.

I was also contacted by a woman from Devon who had made a bonnet for my great great great great grandmother Mary Horrell in a project called ‘Roses from the Heart’. Hobart conceptual artist Christina Henri invited people to make bonnets for the thousands of female convicts transported to Australia. The song ‘A Bonnet for Mary’ is on soundcloud.com.

I noted in the song I composed for the 2014 paper, ‘Coal River Pilot’, that there was no school at Newcastle when William Eckford and his family were exiled there. Newcastle East began in 1816 and 5 of the original 17 pupils were Eckfords. The school which has an ‘Eckford House’ celebrated its bicentenary in February as the oldest continuously run school in Australia. I marked the occasion by writing the song ‘Jane, Jane, What Did You Learn?’ also on soundcloud.

I have used the information from Damousi and Lake’s Gender and War and elsewhere to write some songs that seemed to be needed. Available at www.soundcloud.com listed as tracks of ‘The Sheep Teacher’. See The Last Man and the Last Shilling, The Peace Angel, War to End All Wars, Conscription of Wealth! and The White Feather Brigade. The first three are available on the ‘Bleatings’ CD, The Sheep Teacher © Tony Smith 2015.

[ii] Special thanks for assistance to: Kiah McCarthy (Grainger Museum), Chloe Roweth, Mark Gregory, Bruce Watson, Danny Spooner, John Shortis, Professor Grace Karskens, Professor Joan Beaumont, Professor Peter Stanley, Professor Marilyn Lake, Professor Douglas Newton, Meg Rigby, Danelle Edmondson, Rachel Pryor, Krysia Clack, Chris Scobie, Nicholas Wall, Ewan McVicar, Kerri Ward and especially Gene Smith.

[iii] http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/centenary-watch-updates-december-2015-january-2016/; The term ‘Anzackery’ is used there to draw attention to ways the Centenary could be used for political ends.

[iv] Michael Leunig SMH 18 April 2015

[v] Marilyn Lake 2013, ‘Fractured Nation’, Honest History, 6 October http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/lake-marilyn-fractured-nation/; see also Douglas Newton 2014, Hell-Bent: Australia’s Leap Into the Great War, Scribe, Brunswick Victoria, which casts some doubt on the notion that Australia was innocently answering the call of the mother country.

[vi] Patrick Galvin 1962, Irish Songs of Resistance, Oak, NY, p.59:

O did you hear the Members cheering, cheering? O did you hear the Members cheering?

As Asquith told them of the shooting, shooting The Irish scum that stopped recruiting

When Paddy Pearse fought and died And noble Plunkett lost his bride –

To set the Members cheering, cheering Sure soldiers must be shooting, shooting

To cool such wicked Irish pride Ye’ll not forget the Members cheering!

[vii] Our first landlord Jack Dobbie was an original Anzac and when he returned he joined an organisation called Anzacs for Peace.

[viii] There are some. See for example Paddy Gourley 2014, ‘Lest We Forget Comes Out of the West’, Honest History 7 October, Review of Oliver, Bobbie and Sue Summers (eds) Lest We Forget: Marginalised Aspects of Australia at War and Peace, http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/lest-we-forget-collection-reviewed

Also ‘Marginalised Remembrance’, Honest History, review http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/oliver-bobbie-sue-summers-marginalised-remembrance

[ix] Anti-Conscription Army Songs 1917, http://folkstream.com/reviews/conscriptionarmy.html

[x] Dowlingville Branch CWA of SA, A Song of Peace, ‘Please leave this card on seat’. http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-an22084221

[xi] In ‘Blood Vote’ a woman expresses her guilt at having condemned a man to death by voting for conscription.

[xii] Women’s Anti-Conscription Songs 1916, Victorian Womens Anti-Conscription League, http://folkstream.com/reviews/anticonscription.html Authorised by Mrs Bremner and Miss Hilda Moody.

[xiii] Or ‘Boy’. The cover on the sheet music (Lyricist Alfred Bryan, composer Al Piantadosi) has ‘Boy’ in the title. Here the ‘Son’ song was banned under the WPA. I have heard recordings of ‘Boy’ but not ‘Son’. The ‘Son’ lyrics distributed by the Women’s Ant-Conscription League fit well enough with the Boy tune, except for the first verse which seems awkward.

[xiv] The Mudcat Cafe, http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=124040, Ewan McVicar says that Hamish Imlach used a 6/8 rhythm quite different from the strict march tune of the American song.

[xv] Gowland, Pat, ‘John, Cecilia Annie (1877-1955)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol 9 1983, MUP. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/john-cecilia-annie-6849

[xvi] Canberra’s Chorus of Women was apparently ‘considering’ performing the song in a concert, or so claimed ‘Gang-gang’, Canberra Times 10 November 2014.