It’s a Long Way to Tipperary

It’s exactly 100 years since the first public performance of a very famous British music-hall song, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

And it’s exactly 100 years and one day since it was written – on January 30th 1912. Well, if you’ve composed a good number, you may as well sing it to the world. In my folk-singing days I occasionally wrote a topical song one day and sang it the next – I remember the day the Berlin Wall came down…but I digress.

I’d always assumed the song was composed during World War 1, because that’s certainly when it was at its most famous, and the well-known recording by John McCormack was made in 1914. It was one of the best-loved songs among the British soldiers in 1914-18, and even though that seems a very long time ago now, I’ve only got to hear it played or sung and it conjures up  the horrors and the heroism of that “war to end all war” as nothing else can.

Like so many of the best songs, it wasn’t composed over weeks of agonised creativity. Jack Judge, a music-hall entertainer, wrote it one night in Stalybridge, near Manchester, when somebody bet him five shillings that he couldn’t come up with a good number in 24 hours. Five shillings…hardly a fortune even then! (Later some of his family, who were Irish, disputed this charming story – but I like it.) And he performed it the following night at the Grand Theatre, Stalybridge.

What turned it into an iconic war song? Serendipity, I suppose; plus the fact that it had all the ingredients for a catchy popular hit. An easy tune with a simple chorus, and the sentimental universal theme of homesickness. Irish songs lamenting the disappointments of London compared with the joys of the Emerald Isle were fashionable just then. “The Mountains of Mourne”, another such, was written only twelve years before “Tipperary.”

So many wartime favourites, not surprisingly, have had wistful wish-we-were-home themes; “There’s a Long Long Trail A-winding,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” and from World War 2, “We’ll Meet Again”. And of course “Tipperary”, from a soldier’s point of view, had a good rhythm to march to.

In its original context of the music-hall, it had a mixture of sentimentality and humour. There were some comic verses in between the familiar choruses, which the Tommies would have heard on the gramophone records they played in their dugouts, but probably didn’t sing much on the march. You can find the complete lyrics on the Internet: here’s just a tiny sample:

Paddy wrote a letter to his Irish Molly-O,
Saying “Should you not receive it, write and let me know!
If I make mistakes in spelling, Molly dear,” said he,
Remember it’s the pen that’s bad, don’t lay the blame on me.”

All good knockabout stuff, and written at a time of peace, the so-called Golden Age of Edwardian England. I wonder how Jack Judge felt when his jolly five-shilling refrain became a world-wide hit? Was he surprised…pleased…proud? He should have been proud, to write a song so universal and so memorable.

And I wonder which, if any, of the songs composed today will still be remembered in another hundred years?

Down these mean streets…

I’ve been looking up some of Raymond Chandler’s sayings, both on-line and on my shelves. Yes, of course I know I should be working…but this was much more fun. And how I wish I could write like that!

It’s all the fault of my friend Dolores Gordon-Smith, who blogged recently about pace in mysteries, at  http://www.doloresgordon-smith.co.uk/wordpress/?p=452  That reminded me of Chandler’s dictum, “When nothing is happening, send in a man with a gun in his hand.”

Remembering Chandler’s novels, I expect most of us think first of those wonderful one-liners. For instance in FAREWELL, MY LOVELY, “Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.” Or  “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.”  And how about, from THE BIG SLEEP, “Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.” I could go on all day.

However the best-known of all Chandler’s sayings must be his description of the perfect sleuth: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
(Source: an essay that first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1945)

I love this. Even though I wouldn’t presume to compare my own mysteries with Chandler’s, I do agree with him about sleuths (I can’t call my crime-solvers detectives, not in Roman Britain!) My Aurelia Marcella is, on the whole, “neither tarnished nor afraid.” Well of course she’s afraid sometimes, she’d be a fool otherwise, not to mention quite implausible as a character; but she won’t let fear stop her doing something she thinks is right.

She’s also, to change the gender of Chandler’s ideal sleuth, “a complete woman and a common woman and yet an unusual woman….a woman of honor. She talks as the woman of her age talks…” That last bit delights me, because I’m sometimes told off for making Aurelia sound “too modern” in her language. I find this slightly odd, as of course in 100 AD she’d have been speaking Latin or Greek or the Celtic lingo of the native Brits…but she’d have been using the kind of words, including slang, that they did. Thanks, Mr. C!

Chandler’s essay, THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER published in 1950, contains some wonderful insights. I wish I had room to quote extensively from it, but here’s a comment that strikes me as spot-on.  “I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.”

Hear hear! Any good piece of fiction can inform, entertain, amuse, stimulate – but that’s not all it does. “Escapist” has come to be used as a put-down for books; but I’m proud if any work of mine helps a reader escape into another world. What’s good enough for Chandler is good enough for me!

Timing that nine-minute egg

Here I am, as promised, with the answer to the puzzle I posted last year.

Although only one person has been brave enough to claim she’s solved it, a quick glance at my blog statistics tells me that quite a few others dropped in for a look. Either you worked out the solution but were too exhausted by the effort (or just plain lazy) to blow your trumpets; or else – like me – you didn’t, so you couldn’t.

The problem: using two egg-timers that run on sand, one for four minutes and a larger one that goes for seven, how could you time nine minutes…for a ridiculously over-cooked hen’s egg, or perhaps a giant one laid by an ostrich?

It seemed to me that I could only achieve 8 minutes (2 X 4) or eleven minutes (7 + 4.) But I missed something obvious.

Start both the timers off together. When the four-minute one is empty, turn it over immediately to begin another four minutes. The larger timer still has three minutes to go; let it run its allotted time and turn it over immediately to begin another seven. At this point the smaller timer has run three out of its four minutes. Leave it be.

The smaller timer finishes its second run, having totalled eight minutes, still a minute short of the target. But the larger one has only had time to run for one minute so far. Turn it over and its sand will run back for just one minute till it is empty…total elapsed time nine minutes.

Easy peasy. Then why didn’t I see it for myself?

Karen, I assume you worked it out…well done to your Little Grey Cells. You’re obviously in for  a very bright and brainy 2012. Let’s hope the rest of us can catch you up.

I wish everyone a very good New Year, with time for happy reading, especially (of course) plenty of puzzling mysteries.