Propaganda and Dissent in British Popular Song during the Great War

Abstract

The need to gain and maintain general acceptance for the waging of a war in which casualties would reach unimaginable heights involved what was no doubt the most ambitious propaganda campaign in British history, mobilizing politicians, intellectuals, feminists, trade union leaders and popular heroes such as the music hall stars. It is the relation of popular song with the war propaganda which will be the main subject of our paper, through the study of a large corpus of contemporary songs.We will argue that this form of propaganda through song was essential to the successful construction of a patriotic consensus, in particular because it could speak to a mass audience who were often wary of declarations coming directly from the moneyed classes. However, contrary to the standard image of music hall songs, jingoism disappeared rapidly once the war had become a war of attrition, to be replaced by hopes for the end of the war and a return to normal living.The tradition of music hall had long included a capacity to deal with the everyday life and sufferings of ordinary people, and this is evident in some of the wartime songs, almost all of them forgotten today. Resistance to war priorities was possible because of the links of the singers with their audience, and the shared opposition to some of the ruling class’s values. It was almost never direct resistance to the war project, but often to the price paid by ordinary people and the absolute lack of priority given to their needs. These voices of dissent were strictly limited by the “respectability” of music hall theatre owners, and their need not to alienate sections of their audience, but were nevertheless present in music hall songs, though less prominent than in the “trench songs” written and sung by the soldiers themselves. In the last part of the paper we will look at the sarcastic and disillusioned dissent in soldiers’ songs.