Tipperary song is still marching 100 years on

It is 100 years since a little known music hall act wrote the song that became the marching anthem of the First World War, outlasting it to become one of the most popular songs of the 20th century, writes David Robson

AMONG the plethora of heartbreaking items in the archives of the Imperial War Museum is a dark purple-covered booklet so thin and small it will sit in the palm of your hand. Issued gratis during the First World War, it is called Songs Of Our Soldiers.

The foreword reads: “I hope the words of favourite songs that have shortened many a weary mile may increase that melody on the line of march, which is the expression of the buoyant spirits for which the British soldier has always been famous.”

The second song in the booklet is It’s A Long, Long Way To Tipperary, composed 100 years ago this month in a pub in Stalybridge near Manchester by Jack Judge, a minor music hall performer who had never been to Tipperary.

He wrote it in an evening, thereby winning a £5 bet, and sang it for the first time at the town’s Grand Theatre. A romantic, jaunty song, it went down well with the audience and was taken by a London music publisher for Florrie Forde, one of capital’s top entertainers.

But it wasn’t Florrie Forde who imprinted Tipperary indelibly into the national consciousness. It was a report from a British journalist watching troops marching through Boulogne on August 12, 1914. “A company of Connaught Rangers passed us singing with a note of strange pathos in their rich Irish voices, a song I’d never heard before,” he wrote.

It was the first week of the war. Enthusiastic nationalism was rampant, unfettered by any intimations of endless misery or fear of slaughter.

Tipperary became a sensation, its lyrics reprinted in all the newspapers; orchestras played it everywhere; you heard it in cinemas and cafés; people sang it in the street. Such a catchy tune, such emotion, but such love and such hope.

The Connaught Rangers marching through Boulogne that day were the 2nd battalion, reservists called up three weeks previously and summoned from Ireland to Aldershot. The song may have “shortened many a weary mile” but within a fortnight nearly a third of them were dead.

Of the Battle of Le Cateau on August 25 one soldier wrote: “It is said by some that through the course of the entire war never were British troops so heavily outnumbered.”

In the retreat at Le Grand Fayt, part of that battle, 100 Rangers fought a rearguard action against two battalions of German infantry. They held out for two hours, lining a road and occupying farm buildings, but were virtually annihilated. The typed report to headquarters in the aftermath of the battle said: “Up to date six officers and 280 men are still missing from this day’s operations. I should like to state that during all the fighting that occurred on this day all ranks behaved with perfect coolness and even at the last there were no signs of panic.”

In October scores of the 2nd Battalion were killed at Ypres — their names are inscribed on the gateway memorial there. By December, only 300 of the 1,000 men who had started the war survived. Exhausted and horrified by what they had endured, they were merged with the 1st battalion.

At La Brique in Flanders, with only wet handkerchiefs to protect themselves, the Rangers were attacked with poison gas. In 10 days 354 Rangers were killed. Within six months horribly few of those men the journalist heard singing Tipperary survived.

IT had quickly become a popular marching song for other parts of the army but by the end of the year it had lost its appeal for men trapped in the hell of the Western Front. New arrivals were howled down if anyone started to sing it.

But that was far from true at home, where Tipperary remained immensely popular and of all First World War songs it has perhaps had the longest afterlife.

There were many songs more poignantly related to the war. Indeed Tipperary had nothing to do with war, it was just a jolly romantic ballad written two and a half years earlier.

Ivor Novello and Lena Ford’s Keep The Home Fires Burning, written in 1914, or Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag, published in 1915, were of the essence.

As late as 1930 there were publications about the songs and slang of soldiers and the Daily Express published a book, Songs That Won The War. But as the song-filled ’60s play and film Oh! What A Lovely War powerfully showed, death was the greatest victor.

It’s A Long, Long Way To Tipperary is a song that has gone round the world. In one of the greatest of all war films, Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937) there’s a boisterous rendition by British prisoners; in the 1981 film Das Boot the German submarine crew throw themselves into singing it (actually the voices are the Russian Red Army Choir).

The version that first made it an international hit in 1915 was by John McCormack, the Irish tenor and world star in the days when operatic tenors and sopranos ruled the roost in houses that had gramophones.

Judy Garland sang it jauntily in Me And My Gal, a 1942 film made during a world war but portraying patriotism in the previous one; her daughter Lisa Minnelli gave a camp, slick mix of Tipperary and Pack Up Your Troubles at Radio City Music Hall in New York (see them all on YouTube). And even if you’re tone deaf, it’s a belting song to sing.

It is credited to Jack Judge and Harry Williams. The shared credit was a debt of honour. Jack was useless with money and couldn’t write music. His friend Harry Williams, disabled wheelchair-user brother of Jack’s local pub landlord, wrote down the music of the songs Jack wrote and lent him money. In return Jack promised to name him if he ever got a song published.

The Judges were an Irish family who had moved to the West Midlands a generation before. Jack worked on the family fish stall in Oldbury until he went full-time on the halls. He was 39 when he had his big hit.

Stalybridge Historical Society is planning a centenary celebration on January 30, with an open invitation for people to come and sing Tipperary in the Market Square.