Oskar

I'm Oskar Cox Jensen, part of Our Subversive Voice: a research project on the history and politics of protest song in England based at the University of East Anglia, and I'm joined by Doctor Alison Morgan of the University of Warwick. Alison, would like to introduce yourself in your own words?

Alison
Hi Oskar. So yep, I am an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. I actually teach at the Centre for Teacher Education, so my day job is teaching PGCE students, where I lead on the English course, and I'm also the deputy head of the secondary programme. In my spare time I carry on my research, particularly into radical song; radical working class song of the Romantic period.

Oskar
You introduce something that I wanted to pick up on because especially in the field of song research, it's very common that people start with something as a hobby. That's certainly where I came to things from in my teens, and started songwriting. Because you have now thought and written a lot about political and protest songs, especially as you say in the radical working class movements of the early 19th century. Where does that interest come from in the first place?

Alison
So my PhD was on Shelley and on Shelley's Peterloo poems. So it was through studying those that I kind of cast my net more widely and started to look at the connections between Shelley’s Peterloo poems and poetry and song that was being written at the time, and so that really garnered my interest. Much more so than Shelley actually at the end of my PhD! So once I’d ‘done’ Shelley I kind of went off looking for more of these songs and, I mean, more and more is being done in the last kind of – well, it's been nine years since I finished my PhD – but there was very little attention being paid to radical poems and songs at that time, so I felt it was a bit of an untapped treasure trove of things that are out there, and I still think that, I still think that, yeah, so that's how I got into it.

Oskar
But that's really interesting – and I also almost feel sorry for Shelley in this as a minor tangent – so we're talking like England in 1819, and ‘Men of England’ – does that count as one of his Peterloo poems?

Alison
Absolutely. And of course one of them is a new national anthem, so hence you know the connection with looking at radical versions of ‘God Save the King’; the Mask of Anarchy is a ballad. So I did a lot of research into the way in the way in which Mask of Anarchy both conforms and subverts the ballad genre. And also the little-known Ballad of the Starving Mother, which is one of Shelley's almost unknown poems, which really ties in with those kind of, you know, cruel mother type of ballads that were, you know, thee kind of seduced and then abandoned woman. So really from those small group of poems that Shelley wrote, I was able to go out in lots of kind of different directions and looking at different forms of vernacular song. But it's always the political protest song that keeps drawing me and that's where my real passion lies.

Oskar
Right! There are two things I want to ask you off the back of that, that would massively help us, because these are questions on the project we've been throwing back and forth for a while. One is maybe more literary and I'll start with that. You talk about Shelley’s things described as songs or ballads, but then you move from talking of poetry to the world of vernacular song. What's going on there with the difference between poetry and song? Could you help us out?

Alison
Well, I think was always battling with, what's a ballad? what's a song? You know – exactly where does one become another, and what's interesting is some of the poems that I thought originally were poems, because a tune wasn't stated, actually as I started to kind of build up my knowledge of tunes I could then see how it would fit to a specific tune. So I think there's a real blurring of the lines between what is a song or what is a poem and we don't necessarily know where these vernacular song-slash-poems, you know, where they are best situated. So I think ‘ballad’ is a good term because you're covering your bases on that. It could be a spoken ballad, it could be a sung ballad, so I think that's quite a safe term to use.

Oskar
That's very true. I will leave Shelley behind in a second! I'm sorry – it was just piquing my interest. But I mean, do you think he intended any of his songs to actually be sung? I'm thinking here, particularly a couple of generations later when Edward Carpenter and the socialists rework ‘Men of England’, change the order and set it to a tune – to an original tune I believe – and actually it is then sung, and is included in song books. Do you think Shelley would be happy with that?

Alison
I think so. I mean, I have a real problem with the fact that Shelley didn't get these published at the time in which they were written. You know, we've got that incredible immediate response to Peterloo; he wrote the Mask of Anarchy in ten days; he's really fired up and yet you know he didn't get them published. He kind of made a lame excuse of knowing that Leigh Hunt wouldn't publish them in the Examiner, but he could have sent them to Wooler at the Black Dwarf. He could have sent them to Carlile at the Republican and they would have been published. So I think there’s part of Shelley, he was a bit of a literary snob I think, so I think he has kind of some problem with the popular. I think he likes it conceptually rather than actually, but having said that, I think, you know, he does call ‘Men of England’, ‘Song to the Men of England’ –it's there, and similarly ‘A New National Anthem’. He didn't title it; Mary [Shelley] titled it, but it is so obviously written to the tune of ‘God Save the King’ that you can't help but look at it as a song. So I think yes, I think probably he would have been happy with them being sung.

Oskar
But that's so interesting, and we will come back to ‘God Save the King’ later because I really want to talk to you about that. But before that, I want to ask you a nasty question, which we're going to be asking a lot of people in these interviews. What for you, if anything – (you said political and protest song is the way your interest really lies) – what for you distinguishes the protest song specifically?

Alison
Oh well, when you first got in touch with me, Oskar, and was kind of asking me for protest songs rather than necessary political songs, I kind of had to get my head around that. I mean a protest song ... I suppose I see it as something that has a particular objective in mind rather than just railing about the general injustice and awfulness of life for the working classes in the Romantic period. So the ones that are advocating universal suffrage, you know – those kind of cornerstones of the radical movement in the Romantic period. I suppose I would see those, would class those very much as protest songs. What are they protesting about? And what for? What is the aim of what are they trying to achieve with the song?

Oskar
Advocacy rather than commentary. You can sort of almost define that within the the work itself, within the song itself, rather than thinking about the uses to which it's put. There's a different intention there in the writing?

Alison
I think so, yeah, and because there's so little research on the performance, as you know, it's so difficult. Particularly with the Peterloo songs. Trying to find evidence of them being performed. Yes, there are some. We see songs like Samuel Bamford's ‘Song for the Slaughter’ being performed in a lot of processions, you know, and commemorations of Peterloo, that sort of thing, so you could see it being part of that performativity about commemoration of Peterloo. And I suppose there's an extension, still, you know, protesting for the same things that the marchers were protesting about in 1819. But I think yeah, it's not always easy to know how they would have been received and where they would have necessarily been received.

Oskar
So in the background of our discussion here – we're talking about songs – but in the background is a massacre, the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. If for our wider audience you could perhaps very briefly give some context on that? But also your book, Ballads and Songs of Peterloo, has been invaluable to our project so far. So in describing Peterloo could you then maybe perhaps tell us how you came to write this book and what your hopes were to achieve with this anthology of ballads and songs on Peterloo?

Alison
Yeah, so the Peterloo Massacre ... So 16th of August 1819. Roughly about 60,000 men, women and children marched to the centre of Manchester, St Peter’s Field, to hear the radical orator Henry Hunt speak on the need for electoral reform – so there’s three pillars of of electoral reform. Universal suffrage, male suffrage, of course; annual parliaments, which I think we all think is a terrible idea; and the secret ballot. So those were the three things. So men, women, and children went to St Peter’s Field. It was a legal meeting, so all the appropriate permissions had been sought, but the Manchester magistrates were very fearful. And I think when they saw the numbers who were there, you know, Britain was still on the edge after the Napoleonic Wars and the French Revolution, and so on, and the Manchester magistrates were, you know, yes, hugely kind of repressive. And so they decided that they didn't want this to go ahead and so sent in the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry cavalry to arrest Hunt and the other speakers on the hustings. The cavalry, who were drunk and who had had their sabres sharpened, cut swathes through the crowd, killing about 18 and injuring over 600. And so it became known very, very quickly as the Peterloo Massacre.

So in terms of kind of collecting the ballads and songs, this was a seminal event in English political history, and one that really, I think, has gone under the radar in a lot of ways. So I obviously did work on Shelley and Shelley's response to that, and began to collect the ballads. So, as I did more and more digging through archives, and online archives, and so on, and collected about 70 in the book, all of these were written and published within roughly six months of the massacre, so there was this immediate outpouring of rage, of grief, of horror, you know – incitement for revolution. And what was interesting to me is that song and poetry was seen as a vehicle for that, so that, you know, largely unknown balladeers who were writing and publishing these either in radical journals or as broadsides.

Oskar

That final point is very interesting here, because if if people know anything about the response and results of Peterloo, a lot of people maybe think of the Manchester Guardian [i.e. Observer] coming out of this and think about the press response. Could you talk maybe a little bit about the forms in which these these songs protesting, commemorating, commenting upon the events were were disseminated, and how far you think that distinction between journalism and maybe street literature is relevant here?

Alison
I think there's a real blurring between street literature and radical journalism. I mean, we see it in the 1790s with Thomas Spence really harnessing the energy and the immediacy of the ballad in Pig’s Meat. And we also see it in Politics for the People as well. So there is a precedent in the 1790s for those radical journals to print poetry and song. And so you know, we kind of have a bit of a dip and then post-1815 we see more of these radical journals, so the Black Dwarf being the most famous probably, Wooler’s Black Dwarf, which started in 1817 – again, a key publisher of poetry and song.

But interestingly, a number of radical journals emerged after Peterloo. So you know, we start to see the Theological and Political Comet; the Briton; Medusa had been around for a few months; and all of these were publishing poetry and song, as was the Manchester Observer as well, which is obviously the forerunner of the Guardian. So there's a real kind of culture of radical journals as publishers of song. And you can also see there are some examples that are found where songs are published both in radical journals and as broadsides. So there's that real borrowing, stealing, going on across them, and then of course some of them were published as broadsides, but I think in terms of their kind of readership or audience, they are largely appealing to the same people.

Oskar
So we make a real mistake to try and divide the written word, print, from the thought of something that might be sung or performed. And I suppose in a working-class audience in particular, prose journalism might also be read out too, so there could be an oral element in any of this?

Alison
Absolutely. And we know that something like the Black Dwarf was selling 10,000 copies a week in 1819, so you know, how many people would have read or had the Black Dwarf read to them? You know, that's a huge kind of readership there. Manchester Guardian, sorry, Manchester Observer also had quite a large readership. So they would have reached a lot of people both in London, interestingly, with the London-based journals, as well as up in the northwest.

Oskar
So you collated or compiled about 70 of these songs and ballads and poems in the book, which is published by Manchester University Press. It is available to buy if anyone is interested – Ballads and Songs of Peterloo, I thoroughly recommend it. Do you have a favourite or are there any particular songs in there you might like to talk about? Which is really springing it on you, considering it's been out a little while.

Alison
I mean I, I worked with some musicians in the run up to all the commemorations around the Bicentenary and a project came out of it called The Road to Peterloo. Now I am not musical in any shape or form, so I think for me ... they selected some of the songs and then know worked on them and performed them. So for me, hearing those songs come to life in performance was incredibly gratifying. And actually – another plug – a journal article that I wrote in conjunction with the musicians is about to go live on Romanticism on the Net with three audio files. So for some of them, they used the tunes that were stated; for others if they weren't stated, they had to create them. So there's a great ... you know you take something like Allen Davenport’s ‘St Ethelstone's Day’, which is a really raucous, you know, irreverent song, and hearing that sung to the tune of ‘Geho Dobbin’ is you know, like something out of the pantomime or carnival. You really get that sense of the way in which the tune and the words and the performer come together to give those added layers of meaning. So I think for me, the ones that the musicians brought to life are my favourite ones.

Oskar
I think that's a really good answer, Alison, thank you, and that speaks to a lot of what we might be thinking about – what it means to add music, add performance, add the projection of a sonic element to these texts. That's really important. I can testify that ‘Geho Dobbin’ is an excellent tune to sing as well as to listen to. It's rollicking and the original song is very bawdy, I don't know if you know it? Yeah ...

And I know that, Alison, you and I have both seen the Mike Leigh film about about Peterloo. There's a moment in that where things are gearing up. It's on the day itself, and there are marching bands coming in and performing a whole series of tunes, some of which have nothing necessarily to do with radical protest – things like ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ – that in some ways they’re quite neutral. But they're very well known, and it was having a real haptic effect upon me. There were goosepimples going down my spine and so on. Is there any more you think you might speak to about what a tune can do to you, or a particular tune can do to elevate a particular song?

Alison
Yeah, I mean if you take for example ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’, which we know was played by the bands marching to Peterloo. It was played when Hunt rode into London following his arrest. Also, we see there's at least two of the songs in my book that were written to this tune. So for me the importance of tunes is that not only does it, you know, bring songs to life, but they contain within them all those meanings of other songs that have been sung to the same tunes, so you necessarily, you know, bring in well, obviously it's Handel, ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’. So you've already got that, that kind of mix of what we would now consider high culture with vernacular culture, which I think is quite interesting. A lot of the tunes were borrowed from the theatre, from the Pleasure Gardens in London, so we get that kind of almost like a culture clash. But they’re both speaking to the new song and the existing songs as well. So I think that intertextual dialogue between tune and original song and new song All add to the meaning.

Oskar
I think that's really important there. There's a claiming of cultural capital by taking maybe a more highbrow tune, but also tunes with a national or respectable resonance, and appropriating them. For anyone, for any audience members, I should point out that luckily one of those to the tune of ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ – ‘National Song No. 1’ – is on our list of our 250 songs, it's got in there, as is a song by Allen Davenport, not related to Peterloo. But moving on because time is against us: I wanted to spotlight another writer of protest song that you've been thinking about quite a bit too, and this is a man named John Stafford. Could you tell us a little bit about him please?

Alison
Yeah, so John Stafford was an illiterate spinner from Ashton-under-Lyne, which is now one of the Manchester boroughs, but would then have been in Lancashire. And Stafford and his family were going to Peterloo but were told to turn back because you know, by the time they were getting there all Hell had broken loose. But Stafford wrote two songs, one called ‘Peterloo’ and the second one called ‘Another Song Concerning Peterloo’. Which is the best title ever! So I'd kind of come across these and published them in the book, and actually the first Peterloo song is sung on the Road to Peterloo project as well.

But then Stafford had actually published, in 1840, I think it's about 12 songs called Songs, Comic and Sentimental. And I met his great-great-great-great-grandson when I did a talk at Ashton-under-Lyne library. And so he'd published this kind of book on his ancestor, and gave me copies of all these songs. And what's amazing is this, you know, this guy was illiterate, but his songs – just this dozen span from Luddites through to, well, it was published in 1840, so you've got a song about Queen Caroline, you've got Peterloo, you've got ones about, you know, various Chartist things, you've got ones about elections, so he kind of ... these small number of songs give us a picture of of working class life in Ashton at that time. So yeah, really interested in starting to do a bit more work on that one.

Oskar
It's amazing to think of someone who was formally what we would term ‘illiterate’ in fact engaged in deeply literary work, as well as musical work here I suppose. I mean, we have one of John Stafford’s songs on our list too, and you’ve sent me a few that I've read with great interest and actually should probably try singing, because he specified tunes to his songs as well didn’t he?

Alison
Yes he did and he sang at Chartist dinners, so we've got a few bits of evidence from the Northern Star whereby he would sing usually his Peterloo song, but not always, at the Chartist dinners that were held to commemorate Hunt’s birthday. So every November there would be a dinner with toasts and singing. And I think, yeah, I've got about 5 or 6 bits of evidence from the Northern Star that Stafford sang at these dinners. And he was seen as one of the leading Chartists in Ashton, which itself is a very Chartist town in the 18, you know, particularly in the 1840s. So yeah, really interesting character.

Oskar
It's fascinating that we're talking about into the 1840s here, and yet you say the song he’s still being asked to perform most often is one that was topical in 1819. Thinking in terms of politics and protests, what's it doing then, do you think, that he is still singing and being asked to sing this song 20 years later?

Alison
Well, Henry Hunt was very much a kind of folk hero, so the fact that his birthday was commemorated each year, certainly during – yes, well into the 1840s; I think Hunt died in about 1835 – just as you’d get celebrations for Paine’s birthday. But Hunt was seen as this real kind of, you know, leader of the people, and there's that connection with Peterloo. But of course you know, in towns like Ashton hundreds, thousands of the inhabitants would have been there. You know: would have marched to St Peter’s Field in 1819, so it's partly keeping that memory alive for them. But also we know that Chartists looked on Peterloo as one of those kind of, you know, cornerstones of British working-class history, which I think it is. And so the Chartists themselves saw it as part of that narrative, part of their own narrative. And so again, wanted to keep it alive.

Oskar
That's fascinating, Alison, thank you. There's one other subject that you mentioned there that Stafford had written upon, besides things like the Luddite movement, all of which makes a lot of sense in the context of a working-class labourer and factory worker. But you mentioned Queen Caroline there, and so this is the Queen Caroline Affair of 1820, which if anything, in terms of the songs that are written in response to it and the protest songs, is even bigger than Peterloo, I might say – I don't have any figures and there are none.

But on the face of it, this might seem a rather unlikely thing to also be something of a cornerstone of working class radicalism. The trial of a queen and the controversial divorce case from her husband. Is there a connection between the two events and do you have any thoughts on the 1820 Queen Caroline Affair when it comes to song as well?

Alison
As you said, there are a lot of songs that were written about the Queen Caroline Affair. I mean radicals kind of leapt on it because, you know, George the Fourth was so hated that anything that was seen to be, you know against him, radicals thought it was a good thing, you know. I mean, we see [William] Hone, don't we, doing The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder. So this was, you know, this was a big event.

And even in places like Ashton, which you think perhaps wouldn't be bothered with the shenanigans going on in London, they actually held kind of mock coronations as if Queen Caroline were being coronated. So I think there is that connection for radicals. Remember by the end of 1819 beginning of 1820 really the radical movement was in disarray. Most of the leaders were in prison, so the Queen Caroline Affair gave them something for those other radicals to kind of latch on to.

But I still think yeah, it's interesting that Stafford chose to write about it, and he does it from from the perspective of the Italian who was brought in to give evidence at the trial, who kept saying ‘non mi ricordo’, you know, ‘I can't remember what's going on’, and Stafford uses this in the song, so clearly he was well informed. So one assumes that perhaps at these kind of radical gatherings people would read newspapers to him, so he would have that kind of understanding of what was going on.

Oskar
That's really interesting. And another really good reminder that there is no level of literacy below which people are necessarily disengaged from the political process and having an affect on it. Quite a few of the Queen Caroline songs were then variants on ‘God Save the Queen’, the whole point being to change the words and put them to a different purpose that is in fact against the king. And you see my incredibly subtle segue here, coming around to the topic of ‘God Save the King’ as maybe the unlikeliest protest song of all, looking at it from the moment. And I wanted to to wrap up by talking about that song in particular. Or perhaps that tune and title and set of associations. It’s a really big thing from the 1790s to the mid-19th century to be writing new versions of that particular melody. Maybe if you have a few thoughts on on that aspect, first, it would be really interesting why people are continually going back and back to this tune to write songs that are protests quite often against the monarchy itself?

Alison
Yeah, I did quite a bit of research on this a few years ago, actually, and it's interesting that nobody really knows who wrote the tune, but it looks as though it started life as a Jacobite drinking song. So somehow it was appropriated by the English. You know, we see it, we see ‘God Save the King’ emerging in the theatres, in Drury Lane in 1745, as part of a kind of, you know, rousing the British, well, the English against the Jacobite rebellion that was taking place at the time. So you've already got that interesting connection between a song that was Scottish being used by the English against the Scottish.

Oskar
With that notorious verse in the official version about the Scots?

Alison
Yes! It's hugely xenophobic, anti-French, anti-Scottish. And then of course, it becomes hugely popular, and so we see in the, particularly in the 1790s, lots of radical versions. ‘God Save Thomas Paine’. ‘God Save the Rights of Man’. That are sung in places like the London Corresponding Society.

I think what's going on, what was happening at the time, is that contest for English identity, and I'm really interested in the concept of Englishness and the radical concept of Englishness. So there is that sense of radicals trying to harness what they saw as being English identity and taking that away from what they very much saw as a German monarchy. So for them you've got this foreign monarchy; a kind of aristocracy that's, you know, that's made up of various kind of foreign bits and pieces, so they see themselves as the true English and kind of hark back to, you know, Anglo-Saxon rights and all of that sort of thing. So it's that contest that's being played out – so you have this, almost this battle between what is it to be English in that period. And using, not just ‘God Save the King’, but also ‘Rule, Britannia!’ is another one that gets, you get so many different versions of that, about that contest for identity.

I think another perhaps more prosaic reason that some of these tunes were used is that, you know, as a way of kind of going under the radar of the spies who were out and about. So we know that there were huge number of spies and agents provocateur and so on, and so you kind of wonder if somebody wandering past though, you know, Hopkins Street Chapel or the various taverns where a subversive version of ‘God Save the King’ was being sung, perhaps they just heard the tune rather than the words, so there may be a reason there.

Oskar
You mentioned Samuel Bamford earlier, one of the organisers of the Peterloo protest, and in his trial when he was tried as one of the organisers, he did make a strong point of saying, ‘the tunes to which we marched and sung were all loyal and respectable and national tunes’, and they may well have been, but he said nothing about what the words were that they were singing to them, so I think that's a really, really canny point.

I think a lot of this also sounds eerily relevant in 2021 as well. If you think about the furore over Jeremy Corbyn a few years ago refusing to sing the words to ‘God Save the Queen’, and then Kier Starmer’s attempts with the Labour left to grapple with where Englishness sits in the view of his party politics – are there any lessons that can be learned from the radical movement of the early-19th century for the left today?

Alison
I think what the radicals managed to do was create this sense of English identity which was inclusive, well, certainly inclusive of other races, other cultures, but against those in authority. Because they saw the people in authority as usurpers. I mean this, you know, this age-old myth of the Norman yoke, which again comes out in the radical period, whereby – you know this kind of trope of the English being a colonised people. So since William the Conqueror, the English have been colonised by the, you know, by the French; by the Welsh with the Tudors; by the Scottish with the Stuarts; with the Germans and the Hanoverians. So it's that kind of looking backwards to the – ironically – Anglo-Saxon time for English identity, and trying to harness that.

And I think they do successfully manage to navigate it so it's not an English identity that's based on Othering other nations and other peoples. But it's looking for those kind of great qualities of liberty and democracy that, you know, I don't think that we would disagree with. So perhaps we need to invent some new versions, radical versions of ‘God Save the Queen’ for the 21st century.

Oskar
Thank you Alison – I don't know if you know the Asian Dub Foundation and Stewart Lee song ‘Coming Over Here’ that's been out recently where it goes back to ‘you Anglo-Saxons coming over here with your mead halls and your Beowulf and things – learn to speak the language!’ he’s saying. There's something in there, there really is.

A final point, perhaps, to wrap up is just to explore something you trailed, if you like, in starting to talk about ‘God Save the King’. You mentioned ‘Rule, Britannia!’ as well, which originally ironically is itself to an extent a protest song. It's commissioned by the Prince of Wales in exile from the court and his father the king in 1740. And it's articulating a political position that’s contrary, maybe, to official policy. But you're saying that even ‘God Save the King’ itself begins as something quite different to what we might think about. Could you just give us the sort of potted history of the probable Jacobite origins of that song?

Alison
Well yeah. When I did some digging it did seem to be that it was this kind of drinking song, so obviously kind of anti-English as it would be, yeah, but I think it's just a great example of the way in which tunes are borrowed, which is, you know, it's part of the vernacular culture and has been for centuries and centuries. But something that we would see as being so iconic and so fundamental to who we are as a nation actually started off as something very, very different. And I think it says a little bit to us about our identity. That actually we've all started off as something a little bit different from where we ended up. And you know, and the fact that ‘God Save the King’, ‘God Save the Queen’ as the national anthem does not actually mention the country once! So to what extent it can be seen as a national anthem is a little bit bizarre, isn't it?

Oskar
Do you know Alison, that is a point that had never previously occurred to me, and I am going to go away and think about that a bit more – about what that means about the very idea of nationhood is fascinating. Alison, thank you so much, this has been an eye-opening and also very much ear-opening discussion. We shall make sure for audience members that there are links to some of the things we've mentioned in this that you can follow up because there's a lot you can go to from here. I think all that’s left to say is, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you.

Alison
Thank you very much. Lovely to speak to you too.