Chartist poetry and song in HEART Café

Sheila Chapman writes:

The Voice of the People 9 March, Heart Café

We were all Chartists on Saturday night. We listened to a talk about their movement, their beliefs and their values, we listened to their poetry/lyrics, we discussed their ideals amongst ourselves during the break, we sang their 'hymns' and we endorsed their six-point charter demanding suffrage for the working man with three rousing cheers.

Jeff Beaumont, Ian Parks, Richard Wilcocks, John Hutton

Ian Parks, drawing on research for his new anthology of Chartist poetry The Voice of the People, evoked not only the history and intellectual core of the Chartists but also their humanity and their love of poetry. The Chartists were the voice of the people but their poetry cannot be found in anthologies of English verse - it was poetry by the people for the people and it is largely ignored. 

For the Chartists, poetry was not an inaccessible 'highbrow' activity but an essential part of their movement. The movement grew out of unrest about the conditions of the working classes, the restriction of suffrage to the middle and upper classes and various oppressive measures such as the Poor Law of 1834. 

They spread their message in a number of ways: through mass meetings e.g. the Kennington Common meeting of 1848 (the first crowd photograph ever was taken of this meeting); through smaller local meetings; through discussion groups and through newspapers - now more widely available because of reduced taxation. Poetry was an important of the message. It was published in their newspapers, it was written in response to important events and it formed the lyrics for their songs. Song was a binding force in the movement and it was underpinned by poetry.

Ian's talk was accompanied by sung poems. These songs (vocalist Richard Wilcocks, with Jeff Beaumont, mandolin, and John Hutton, guitar) were set to the tunes actually used by the Chartists and where these were unavailable alternative appropriate tunes had been sourced. The songs roused us today as they would have roused the Chartists of the mid nineteenth century. As one member of the audience said, they made sense of the Chartist poems. One such song was called The Steam King by Edward P Mead sung to the tune of We Plough the Fields and Scatter. It contains memorable lines such as:

There is a King, and a ruthless King;

Not a King of the poet's dream:

But a tyrant fell, white slaves know well,

And that ruthless King is Steam.

...

Like the ancient Moloch grim, his sire

In Himmon's vale that stood,

His bowels are of living fire,

And children are his food.

We listened to these songs as Ian unfolded the history of the Chartists. There were two tendencies within the movement. William Lovett espoused the 'moral force' tendency arguing that working men would get the vote through self improvement, temperance and hard work while Feargus O'Connor was more revolutionary and supported the 'physical force' tendency calling for direct action and armed insurrection. The activities of the Chartists reflected these two tendencies ranging from: peaceful mass demonstrations and petitions to parliament, to the Newport rising in November 1839, in which 22 Chartists were shot dead by soldiers. The poetry also reflected these tendencies some of it being 'quietist' and some more revolutionary.

The poetry appeared in Chartist newspapers and notably in The Northern Star newspaper edited out of Leeds and owned by Feargus O'Connor. Every edition of this eight page newspaper carried a page of poetry.

The Chartist movement culminated in its final petition, with six million signatures (although a number of these were later found to be fake), presented to Parliament on 10th April 1848 after the huge meeting on Kennington Common.

The demands of the Chartists were

1. A vote for every man over the age of 21;

2. A secret ballot;

3. No property qualification for members of Parliament;

4. Payment for MPs (so poor men could serve);

5. Constituencies of equal size;

6. Annual elections for Parliament.

None of these demands were granted during the lifetimes of most Chartists, and Chartism gradually faded away, or was absorbed into other movements, but all of us now take the first five of their demands for granted. 

We ended the night singing (to the tune of Auld Lang Syne) the chorus of All Hail Fraternal Democrats written in 1846 by John Arnott, who was General Secretary of the National Charter Association, and a noted singer:

That mitres, thrones, misrule and wrong, 

Shall from this earth be hurled, 

And peace, goodwill, and brotherhood, 

Extend throughout the world. 

All in all this was a moving, educational and uplifting evening! Thankyou to Ian, Richard, Jeff and John.

Dwellers on the Threshold: Dr Sean Campbell at HEART

Síle Moriarty writes:

Dwellers on the Threshold: Second-Generation Irish Musicians in England

On the ninth of March I met a lady who had attended this talk. She is married to an Irishman and she told me how the insights given by Dr. Sean Campbell had helped her understand her husband’s experience of life in this country more closely ‘because he would never talk about it himself’. Such was the impact of this humorous and knowledgeable speaker,  who started the evening with a roll call of second generation Irish musicians in popular music – Lonnie Donegan, Lennon and McCartney, Dusty Springfield (aka Mary O’Brien), John Lydon, Elvis Costello, Boy George, Oasis, the Smiths were some of the names mentioned. These people, the sons and daughters of Irish migrants, did not just perform popular music - they also had a huge influence on its shape and direction.

But Dr. Campbell, himself second generation Irish, wanted to look below the surface of pop success and explore how the complexities of being ‘second generation’ were expressed through music and in doing so he gave us a fresh insight into the challenges and opportunities faced by the second generation (of whatever nationality).

He chose three bands of the 1980’s (Dexys Midnight Runners, The Pogues and The Smiths) and through interviews with individuals in the bands - Keith Rowland (Dexys),Shane MacGowan and Cait O'Riordan (the Pogues) and Johnny Marr (The Smiths) - and wider research he showed us how these second generation Irish musicians used the duality of their cultural heritage as a creative driving force.

He chose 1980’s bands because, for him, this was the time when the children of the Irish immigrants of the 50’s and 60’s came of age. It was also a time when relationships between the UK and Ireland were strained because of the ‘troubles’ and it was the era of the ‘thick Paddy’ jokes.

These jokes rankled with many Irish people and Keith Rowland (Dexys Midnight Runners) hit back at them in Dance Stance where the chorus references great Irish writers: Oscar Wilde, Brendan Beehan, Sean O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Gene O’Neil, Edna O’Brien, Laurence Stern. Rowland said ‘Irish jokes make me sick’, I wanted ‘to show the other side of being Irish’ and to ‘correct the misunderstanding’. He wanted to address the British fans and said that it gave him great pleasure when he heard a young English student singing the chorus of Dance Stance to herself while walking through campus.

In another song, The Waltz, Rowland is more direct with the final line ‘Here is a protest’ being repeated. This song was originally called Elizabeth Wimpole and Katherine Ní Houlihan to point up the English v Irish nature of its subject matter but was renamed The Waltz because Rowlands was afraid of the reception the original would get – although whether this was from the English or Irish community was not clear.

In a sense Rowlands tried to mediate between cultures whereas The Pogues, in contrast, tried to evoke the experience of being London Irish. ‘The Pogues were the first people who helped define what you could be as a second generation Irish person in this country’ (Martin Mc Donagh). Their songs were very different from the songs of sentimental longing favoured by the first generation. They evoke the excitement of being here a sort of ‘love for the oppressor’ (Philip Chevron, guitarist with the Pogues) although Shane McGownan would deny this – he has moved from accepting the label London-Irish to calling himself Irish. However this love of London and rejection of sentimentality is demonstrated in Transmetropolitan which starts with a gentle traditional-music style introduction and then breaks into a fast aggressive, tour of London. The Pogues’ imagination was focussed on London, not Ireland and their musical style reconciled punk with traditional Irish music.

The Smiths launched in Manchester at the same time as the Pogues in London. Their experience of being second generation is encapsulated in the following quotes: ‘I’m one of us on both sides’ Morrisey, ‘I’m Mancunian-Irish’ Johnny Marr. Marr spoke to Dr. Campbell of the schizophrenic experience of having parents who were excited to be in England (the land of opportunity) but who ran a home immersed in Irishness where you sleep and swim in Irish life. Marr is repulsed by ‘...bullshit Irish romanticism’ – ‘The Smiths wanted to evoke the feeling but not the sound of the Irish in 1960s Manchester.

This ambivalence of melancholy and vibrancy is reflected in The Smiths songs e.g. Back to the Old House – I want to be here but I long to be there and Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want – originally called The Irish Waltz with the word Erin printed in the run-off groove. Morrisey’s lyrics – ‘When you walk without ease/on these streets where you were raised’ also express this ambivalence and lack of belonging.

Dr. Campbell showed that ambivalence ‘not quite the definite article ... more the floating article’ (Marr?) can be a well-spring of creativity. As McDonagh says ‘... the ambiguities are more interesting than choosing a strict path and following it’

During the lively Q&A session that followed - the discussion ranged from the extremes of nationalism to the policy of the Church in the 1960s/70s to educate second generation Irish children as ‘English Catholics’ - it was clear that Dr. Campbell had touched the sensibilities of his full-house audience many of whom were, like myself, ‘dwellers on the threshold’ in terms of being second (or even third or fourth) generation Irish. 

Dr Sean Campbell is Reader in Media and culture at Anglia Ruskin in Cambridge and author of 'Irish Blood, English Heart': Second-Generation Irish Musicians in England (Cork University Press, 2011).

Interview with Roger McGough

Read Chris Bond's Yorkshire Post interview with our guest, Roger McGough, here - http://bit.ly/Z69Vno

Yarnsmith - bring the kids

Two sonnet sequences on love

Listen to George Szirtes here.

Hear him again in HEART Café on the evening of Friday 15 March.

Kay Mellor at the New Headingley Club

We're all looking forward to Saturday 23 March at 3pm!

This appeared recently in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus:

http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/10210078.New_Kay_Mellor_TV_drama_filmed_in_Bradford/?ref=twtrec

Pablo Neruda's body to be exhumed

A Chilean judge has ordered that the remains of poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda should be exhumed in an investigation into whether he died of cancer as commonly believed or was killed by agents serving Augusto Pinochet. The exhumation was announced by the foundation that manages his literary legacy. The leftist poet, who died twelve days after the 1973 military coup that ousted socialist president Salvador Allende and brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, was long believed to have died of prostate cancer, but officials in 2011 started looking into the possibility he was poisoned by agents of the Pinochet regime, as claimed by Neruda's driver and aide. Neruda is best known for his love poems as well as his Canto General - an epic poem about South America's history and its people. 

This story will no doubt be of great interest for those who were at the special showing of Il Postino at the Cottage Road Cinema almost a year ago, which is about how the poet was forced into exile in Italy. Read the review here: http://headingleylitfest.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=neruda

Wartime Hospital at Beckett's Park

UPDATE - website for published book Stories from the War Hospital is at www.firstworldwarhospital.co.uk

Thanks to all those who have been in touch offering (and requesting) information. We are now realising that a separate website for our project on the 2nd Northern General Hospital at Beckett's Park during the Great War 1914 - 1918 would be a good idea, so one should appear online in the next couple of weeks, if all goes well. The URL will be put on the blog. The original press release  from when we started can be found if you simply scroll down a little.

There are so many names of people who were there, particularly members of the RAMC (Royal Army Medical Corps). We are hoping that there are plenty of searchers trawling the web for information on their ancestor, who might have been a nurse, or a wounded soldier, or...  so if we put plenty of names online, along with a few photos, we'll get results.

In the meantime, here are just a couple of photos which might bring results:

1) The cigarette case. An articial limb race so many years before the Paralympics! Do you know anything about either Douglas Longmate or CQMS (Company Quartermaster Sergeant) G W Browning? Below is a photo of an engraved silver cigarette case sent to us by a retired antiques dealer who wants to give it to any descendants we find:

2) The Irish Nurse. The granddaughter of a Red Cross Nurse who served at Beckett's Park between 7 August 1917 and 31 March 1919 sent us this photo from Ireland. It is of Mary (Polly) Dunne. She had two sisters, Kitty and Josephine, all of whom came from a small rural community and trained in England (St Alban's) as nurses. Do you know anything about nurses from Ireland in the Great War generally?

Contact us by email at headingleyhospital@gmail.com

And thanks for the feature in the Yorkshire Post, Chris Bond - 

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/features/horror-humour-and-humanity-the-untold-stories-of-a-hospital-in-wartime-1-5383600

Congratulations to Sharon Olds

Congratulations to Sharon Olds, who was awarded the £15,000 prize for her collection, Stag's Leap, at the T S Eliot Prize Ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London a few days ago. She was shortlisted before - in 2009. Two thousand poetry enthusiasts were in the audience.

 Poet Laureate and Chair of the Judges, Carol Ann Duffy, said: "It was a really strong shortlist, with so much talent and grace, and it was particularly strong in women. We were particularly pleased to have six fantastic books by women." Carcanet is delighted that two of its most long-standing authors were shortlisted among such talented writers. See the Carcanet blog here.

LitFest gets Co-operative support

On Tuesday 15 January, Sheila Chapman, Chair of Headingley LitFest committee, accompanied by Sally Bavage, LitFest Fundraiser, was pleased and proud to accept a cheque from local Co-operative Community Fund representatives Jean and Ken Martin.  The money, which comes from members’ donations of all or part of their share of the profits, has been voted to us to support our first Youth Fringe day, on Saturday 29 June at the Heart Centre in Headingley.

Taking receipt of the cheque at our local friendly Co-op store on Cardigan Road,  Sheila acknowledged the opportunity this will give LitFest to pilot activities for young people in our community, with the programme decided upon by young people themselves.  Watch out for more details of the programme in the coming weeks.

Roger McGough at Headingley LitFest