Anti-War 'Nursery Rhyme' discovered

Transcription:

SING A SONG OF EUROPE

HIGHLY CIVILISED;

FOUR AND TWENTY NATIONS

WHOLLY HYPNOTISED –

WHEN THE BATTLE OPENS

THE BULLETS START TO SING:

ISN’T THAT A SILLY WAY

TO ACT FOR ANY KING?

THE KINGS ARE IN THE BACKGROUND

ISSUING COMMANDS

THE QUEENS ARE IN THE PARLOUR

PER ETIQUETTE’S DEMANDS.

THE BANKERS IN THE COUNTING-HOUSE

ARE BUSY MULTIPLYING;

THE COMMON PEOPLE AT THE FRONT

ARE DOING ALL THE DYING.

Thanks for this (and the satirical ‘If’ parody below), to Alison Ronan, who found it in the papers of a local Manchester Conscientious Objector, Arthur Turtle.

Ali is a feminist historian interested in dissent and resistance. Her current research is about anti-war and pacifist women in Manchester and North-West England, 1914-1918.

Her book 'A Small Vital Flame: anti-war women in NW England 1914-1918’ is published by The Scholars' Press.

(A Pacifist’s Parody on Kipling’s “If”)

If you can talk and not get bread and water,

Or if reported take your pegging like a man;

If you can scrub like any woman’s daughter,

And eat your dinner from a rusty can;

If you can “pick that step up” every morning,

And “swing those arms” as round the ring you crawl;

If you can rise before the daylight’s dawning,

And wash your share of landing in the hall;

If you can take the daily Wormwood rumour,

With little more than just a pinch of salt;

And treat as nought the officer’s ill-humour,

But simply think his liver is at fault;

If you can bear to hear the news you be given,

Change and increase till it’s nowise true;

And though to tell it truly you have striven,

Keep calm when its new version comes to you;

If you can hope and not get tired of hoping,

For the freedom which must come soon or late;

And never let your comrades see you hoping,

But patiently and gladly work and wait;

If you can watch your shadow getting thinner,

And still with smiling face go bravely on;

If you can think of your last decent dinner,

And not complain and think you’re put upon;

Then, my brother, though all the world may scorn you,

And make your name a jest for thoughtless folk;

You’re the saviour of the country that has borne you,

You’ll surely break Conscription’s evil yoke.

Written by William Harrison.

in Wormwood Scrubs, March, [year missing from typescript]

An online search finds inter alia that the nursery rhyme was published anonymously in: THE IRON WORKER Vol.1 No 4 1928, but the 'If'' parody does not appear to have been widely distributed, if at all.(The fact that this page looks as though it was produced on a duplicator, however, suggests an attempt to make it more widely known, at some point.) See comment below with reference to William Harrison.

For A’ That

Burns Night – as seen 56 years ago.
Gastronomic Immortality?

All over the world, at this time, elaborate preparations are being made to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of “Scotland’s National Bard” and to “honour” the ploughman poet who has found for himself a place, if not in the hearts, at least in the stomachs, of a wide variety of people in many countries and climes.

So now would seem as good a time as any for me to confess that I have never attended a Burns’ Supper. Not that I have any rooted objection to supping, or to Robert Burns – although he wrote almost as much bad verse as he wrote good – but rather because I cannot reconcile in my own mind two such separate appetites as one for food and one for poetry; and I feel that by trying to combine the two I would only succeed in confusing both. For me, there is no common link between a palate for whisky and haggis and an aesthetic appreciation of lyrics.