Good-bye Maoriland: The Songs and Sounds of New Zealand's Great War

They left their Southern Lands,

They sailed across the sea;

They fought the Hun, they fought the Turk

For truth and liberty.

Now Anzac Day has come to stay,

And bring us sacred joy;

Though wooden crosses be swept away –

We’ll never forget our boys.

– Jane Morison, ‘We’ll never forget our boys’, 1917

Be it ‘Tipperary’ or ‘E Pari Ra’, the morning reveille or the bugle’s last post, concert parties at the front or patriotic songs at home, music was central to New Zealand’s experience of the First World War. In Good-Bye Maoriland, the acclaimed author of Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918–1964 introduces us to the songs and sounds of the war in order to take us deep inside the human experience.

‘Chris Bourke’s Good-bye Maoriland is an impeccably researched account of the influence of music in World War I – from military bands and concert parties to Maori music and patriotic song writing. Profusely illustrated and highly readable, it will attract anyone interested in war and the cultural history of New Zealand.’

– Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Christopher Pugsley, ONZM, DPhil, FRHistS

Chris Bourke is a writer, journalist, editor and radio producer. He has been arts and books editor at the NZ Listener, editor of Rip It Up and producer of Radio New Zealand’s Saturday Morning hosted by Kim Hill and John Campbell. He wrote the best-selling, definitive biography of Crowded House, Something So Strong (Pan Macmillan, 1997), and Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music, 1918–1964 (Auckland University Press, 2010). At the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards Blue Smoke won the People’s Choice Award, the General Nonfiction Award and the Book of the Year Award. Chris Bourke is currently content director at Audioculture: The Noisy Library of New Zealand Music (www.audioculture.co.nz).

For Tom McWilliams

GOOD-BYE MAORILAND

THE SONGS & SOUNDS OF NEW ZEALAND’S GREAT WAR

CHRIS BOURKE

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

SAY AU REVOIR AND NOT GOOD-BYE

CHAPTER TWO

BANDS OF BROTHERS

CHAPTER THREE

MUSIC IN KHAKI

CHAPTER FOUR

HELP THE LADS WHO WILL FIGHT YOUR FIGHT

CHAPTER FIVE

WE SHALL GET THERE IN TIME

CHAPTER SIX

WAIATA MAORI

CHAPTER SEVEN

KIWIS, TUIS AND PIERROTS

CHAPTER EIGHT

DAWN CHORUS

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

A souvenir handkerchief from the First World War brought back to New Zealand by Private Edwin Battensby of the Auckland Infantry Battalion, a former bushman wounded at Gallipoli. In the centre is the music of ‘It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary’ above an image of marching soldiers. A corner edge is stamped ‘Oamaru, N.Z.’.

THE KAURI MUSEUM, MATAKOHE

PREFACE

Good-bye Maoriland began on Lambton Quay, Wellington, just south of the Cenotaph. As well as the symbols of two world wars, that stretch of pavement also carries with it the ghosts of many NZEF reinforcements who marched past, led by brass bands, including a Maori contingent in 1915 whose men clutched freshly printed cards featuring the lyrics of ‘Tipirere’.

In 2010, shortly after the publication of Blue Smoke, my book about mid-twentieth century New Zealand popular music,¹ I ran into Vincent O’Sullivan near Parsons’ legendary bookshop, now gone. ‘I know what you should do next,’ he instantly said. ‘A history of New Zealand music during the First World War. All the historians are working on the war, but none will cover the music.’ At the time, Vincent was writing a libretto for Ross Harris’s opera Brass Poppies, which describes how a small group of New Zealanders experienced Gallipoli in 1915, at home and on Chunuk Bair. The lead character is Lieutenant-Colonel William Malone, now celebrated for his courage at Gallipoli. In this book he has a walk-on role as an officer whose disdainful attitude towards military musicians changed once he saw that they, too, were capable of great courage.

Good-bye Maoriland examines the role music played in New Zealand’s response to the war – at home and at the front. It describes how music was used in wartime society: the settings in which it was heard, the repertoire performed, the characters who provided it to the community. One chapter discusses some of the approximately 200 original songs written in response to the war and how they evolved as it continued. At first, many were bellicose and imperialistic, although some were poignant; by the end, they mourned the men who were left behind. ‘Good-bye Maoriland’ is the title of one, by a prolific songwriter using the pseudonym Raymond Hope. When it was published in November 1914, reviewers praised its exuberance; it was the kind of song, wrote the Southland Times, that ‘makes the rafters rattle when half a dozen full-lunged vocalists sing it. The words seem to be in entire accord with the spirit of the song and throughout there is the bold, defined beat of the march.’²

It was a recruiting song, written to inspire men to follow the Empire’s call to Europe. There is an unintended pathos to its title, which says farewell to a romanticised new world while its singer ventures to sort out the old. If New Zealand was ever a Utopia in the South Seas, that idyll is about to be lost. While many of the 200 songs refer to New Zealand helping ‘Home’ in its time of crisis, others use Maoriland imagery: not everyone thought New Zealand was just Britain’s most distant province. Now, the term ‘Maoriland’ seems almost as patronising as the imperial military authorities in Britain were towards Maori soldiers. Then, it was typically used without guile; it may have described the exotic or ‘the other’, and involved appropriation, but it also suggested positive possibilities. The war instantly rendered the term obsolete.

In Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872–1914, literary historians Jane Stafford and Mark Williams paid tribute to the writers of the colonial, pre-war era without pretending there were any lost masterpieces.³ The same can be said of New Zealand’s wartime songwriters: there is no unheralded Schubert or Berlin. (Although I do find the careful, four-part harmony of Jane Morison’s ‘We’ll Never Forget Our Boys’ deeply moving.) But their songs, and the imagery of their lyrics and graphics, express contemporary attitudes. Even the corn – be it kowhai gold or bulldog bluster – tells us how civilian New Zealand reacted to the war.

While never threatening ‘It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary’, these locally written songs were widely performed, in public and private settings. Now, what saves them from disappearing is the dedicated work of collectors such as sheet-music archaeologist and proselytiser David Dell. Ironically, considering the condescension towards Maori who enlisted – and the ruthlessness towards those who didn’t – it is the Maori songs from the period that are still heard today.

At the front, among the NZEF, the music of the rank and file was remarkably present for a military force nicknamed ‘the Silent Division’. And as 2NZEF war-song scholar Les Cleveland argued with relish, these ‘soldiers’ songs’ were as subversive towards their officers and their situation as were those of any of the more established singing armies. Most of these songs were from overseas sources, some were a century old, but they were appropriated and rewritten by Anzac troops and other Allies. Les may have viewed the military bands and touring concert parties with disdain, as music sanctioned by – and unthreatening to – the authorities. But they were ever-present, and both played a key role in the development of music and entertainment in New Zealand.

Much of this story is about the civilians’ war: after all, as Steven Loveridge has pointed out, 90 per cent of New Zealanders experienced the conflict at home.⁴ Music usually played a central role in any public activity relating to the war, and also in domestic activities that did not. Concerts took place almost unabated – in town halls, vaudeville theatres and public parks, often featuring artists touring from abroad – people bought sheet music and recordings, teachers taught pupils, and film orchestras, church choirs and organists all went about their business without a pause. I wanted to discover what musical life was like during the war, how it was affected by the war effort, and how this led to what came immediately after the armistice: the jazz age and the dance boom.

The big difference between researching this book and Blue Smoke is that there was no longer anyone to talk to who had lived through the period. My grandparents – born in the 1870s – were too old to take part, and were dead ten years before I arrived. Unlike the education-by-osmosis I received from my parents’ generation who experienced the Second World War, there was no information to be plucked from overheard conversations or nostalgic asides or popular culture. Crucially, there was no locally written and performed music to be listened to. So sheet music and the piano became the only aural resource – with manuscripts courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. In 2015, David Dell worked with Tim Dodd at Radio New Zealand to produce Farewell Zealandia, in which 20 original New Zealand wartime songs were recorded for the first time and made available online.⁵

Creative New Zealand awarded me a writer’s stipend in 2012 to get started on this book. While contemplating the approach, I got a call from Kate Hunter, associate professor at Victoria University, asking me to talk to some stage one students about the Blue Smoke period. Kate, I learnt, taught a stage three course in the social and cultural history of the First World War. So I returned to my alma mater and got a solid grounding in the historiography of the war and issues that didn’t concentrate on politicians and campaigns. Kate also pointed me towards Judy McKoy’s honours research essay ‘Expressions of Manliness during the Great War: New Zealand’s Sons and War Music 1914–1918’, the only scholarly consideration of original songs written in New Zealand during the war.⁶

Two years later I was back on campus at the Stout Research Centre when professors Richard Hill and Lydia Wevers responded to my plea for a quiet but convivial place to work for a few months. The period also meant I could have many stimulating conversations with Steven Loveridge, then turning his doctoral thesis into Calls to Arms: New Zealand Society and Commitment to the Great War.⁷

The body which enabled Good-bye Maoriland to be actually completed was the Lilburn Trust, which awarded me its biennial research fellowship in 2015. This gave me a berth in the Alexander Turnbull Library to research and write, and to discuss ideas, difficulties and any number of musicological issues with Michael Brown, who became the curator of New Zealand music that year.

Blue Smoke offered evidence that New Zealand was more reactive to international music developments than was realised, and that the inter-war period had seen the country – while still heavily influenced by British music in terms of education, the record industry and broadcasting – also build stronger musical connections with the United States. The influence and participation of Maori in New Zealand popular music emerged from the research like a photograph in developing fluid. Similarly, Good-bye Maoriland shows a young society with a rich musical life, enjoying strong connections with not just Britain but also Europe and Australia. While conscious of the British influence – which remains strong to this day through the Royal Schools system – it was salutary to realise just how strong the musical links with Germany were when the war began. Not just repertoire, but teachers, conductors, musicians and instruments.

Immediately the war was under way, New Zealand’s musicians enlisted: its songwriters and performers, in uniform and out, male and female. New Zealand’s Great War may not have left behind a local ‘Tipperary’ – instead ‘Hoea Ra Te Waka Nei’ and ‘E Pari Ra’ are its legacy – and its soldiers were not part of a ‘Silent Division’. This was not a silent war.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Patience and generosity beyond the call of duty have been required from family, friends, colleagues and institutions in the time it has taken a proposed book about New Zealand music during the First World War to become Good-bye Maoriland.

First of all, I must thank Vincent O’Sullivan for the idea, which immediately felt like it needed to be done, even though I was ignorant of the challenges. My partner Mel Johnston must feel that with the arrival of the armistice, it’s time for the jazz age. Our son Barney was about to be born when I started, and will start school about the time this is going to press. When I told him I was a writer not a firefighter, he said, ‘But writers don’t do anything.’

At the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, Chris Szekely the chief librarian and Michael Brown the curator of New Zealand music have given outstanding assistance to this project. Being awarded the Lilburn Research Fellowship for 2015 was an honour and a godsend, and I must thank Keith McEwing, secretary of the Lilburn Trust. Thank you also to Catriona Ferguson and Jill Rawnsley at Creative New Zealand, which awarded me a writer’s stipend with which to start the research.

Peter Downes has once again been a great support, and always ready to provide assistance and quick with answers to arcane questions. At the Hocken Library in Dunedin, Amanda Mills was especially helpful. Without the knowledge and generosity of David Dell of the Music Heritage New Zealand Trust, this project would have been much more difficult.

At the Turnbull and the National Library, I would like to thank all the librarians and support staff who have made me feel at home, as well as offering leads and finding treasure and getting around obstacles (literally after the Kaikoura earthquake in November 2016): Chris Anderson, Peter Attwell, Trish Beamsley, Hannah Benbow, Jocelyn Chalmers, Jenni Chrisstoffels, Paul Diamond, Rachel Esson, Roger Flury, Glenda Gale, Fiona Gray, Gillian Headifen, Peter Ireland, Barbara Lyon, Joan McCracken, Sean McMahon, Natalie Marshall, Heather Mathie, Cecilia Ng, Fiona Oliver, Denise Roughan, Patty Smyth, Matt Steindl, John Sullivan, Roger Swanson, Ariana Tikao, Eva Weber, Kirsty Willis, Ruby Yee, and the national librarian, Bill Macnaught.

Other helpful librarians include Kate De Courcy, Keith Giles and Marilyn Portman at Auckland City Library, Mark Hector of Radio New Zealand, Sarah Johnston at Nga Taonga Sound & Vision, and David Murray at the Hocken.

Former lecturers and current friends at Victoria University of Wellington made a significant contribution to the book. For my six months at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies as a non-stipendiary researcher, thank you to the directors Richard Hill and Lydia Wevers, as well as the administrator Deborah Levy and Steven Loveridge. Thank you to Kate Hunter of the history department, and Peter Walls, formerly of the music department.

Others who have suggested leads, angles and personalities include: Alex Calder, Peter Clayworth, Vicky Hughes, Timothy Hurd, Samantha Owens, Jock Phillips, David Robinson, Jennifer Shennan, Sydney Shep, Sarah Shieff, Jane Tolerton, Piripi Walker, and Denis Welch.

My colleagues at AudioCulture.co.nz – the ‘noisy library of New Zealand music’ – have been tolerant and encouraging: Janine Faulknor, Simon Grigg, Nicky Harrop and Steven Shaw. Thank you to Paora Allen at Toi Poneke, Wellington.

For assistance with photos, thank you to Marie Brown, John Ellings, Dolores Ho at the National Army Museum, Dudley Meadows at Tairawhiti Museum, Sarah Murray, Rangi Parker of the Kia Ngawari Trust, Matthew Pomeroy, Charles Ropitini, Zandia Taare, John Whiteoak, Gareth Winter of the Wairarapa Archive, and the Kauri Museum at Matakohe.

Other family and friends whose support has been valued include Nick Bevin, Mary Anne Bourke, Elizabeth and Randall Cottrell, Jane and Michael Howley, Elayne and Ian Johnston, Vicky Pope, Robert Sarkies, Stan Sarkies, Judith Vickerman, and Heather Walker.

Auckland University Press must be thanked for their forbearance and encouragement: Sam Elworthy, Anna Hodge, Katharina Bauer, Katrina Duncan and Andrew Long. Thanks also to designer Keely O’Shannessy, editor Mike Wagg, proofreaders Fiona Kirkcaldie and Rosa Shiels and indexer Diane Lowther.

Cheered by thousands of onlookers, 280 soldiers of the 2nd Contingent, Auckland Territorials, enter the Queen Street railway station to join the New Zealand Expeditionary Force being formed in Wellington. Photograph by William A. Price, 10 August 1914. ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY, WELLINGTON, 1/2-000184-G

A large crowd gathers on Trafalgar Street, Nelson, for the Daffodil Day parade; leading the procession is the New Zealand Boys’ Training Farm Band. Photograph taken by F. N. Jones, 16 September 1916.

NELSON PROVINCIAL MUSEUM, 312366

‘Canterbury’ – from the Gallipoli Album of photographs taken in Egypt, Gallipoli and England, collected by N. J. Preston. The soldiers are presumably from the Canterbury Infantry Battalion. Photographer unknown.

AUCKLAND WAR MEMORIAL MUSEUM, PH-ALB-382-P22-2

Buglers practice tormenting the recruits from the First Post to the Last at the Featherston Camp. WAIRARAPA ARCHIVE, 16-138/15

INTRODUCTION

Spirits were high on a troopship taking New Zealand soldiers from Egypt to Gallipoli in 1915. ‘We were a gay party on the Caledonia,’ recalled Sergeant Trevor Holmden of Auckland. ‘It was no use brooding over the inferno we were approaching. Why worry? was our motto.’ Two ‘cheery souls, generally in their cups’, led the singing, ‘their ribald song being taken up by all the subalterns – and shouted with great glee as we called for more drink. I still remember one of those ditties.

Goodbye Isabel Isabel

I’m going to Hell

Somehow I think you are right

So let’s get tight tonight tonight

‘I taught this to my battalion later and at many a stand-to did we shout it across at the Turk.’¹

A year later, another New Zealand soldier, Sergeant Alexander Aitken, was about to lead his platoon in an attack at the Somme. After a tactical planning meeting in Captain James Hargest’s dugout, he heard someone call out:

‘What about a sing-song?’, which for the moment surprised me, since New Zealanders were supposed, rightly as I believe, to be laconic and undemonstrative. I recalled few songs sung on the march; one or two in Trentham, none at all in France; in Ismailia, on the home stretch of a route march, only the monotonous ‘Ayalissa’ or ‘Saliana’, copied from the Egyptian bargees of Lake Timsah. But now we sang, a little self-consciously at first; songs, already beginning to be rather out of fashion, from the Scottish Students’ Songbook – ‘Riding down to Bangor’, ‘In a cavern, in a canyon’, and others like these, and, for a close, ‘Vive l’amour, vive la compagnie’. We saw no irony then in these words; we might have, could we have foreseen that at the same hour three nights later almost all the singers would be lying dead or wounded in no-man’s land.²

‘Britain Calls Again: the King of Patriotic Songs’ by Horace and Harry Stewart was performed at the Auckland Town Hall on 18 November 1914, by pupils of the Marist Brothers. Horace was a piano tuner in Ponsonby before the war; Harry died in 1919. © MUSIC HERITAGE NEW ZEALAND TRUST

Within 48 hours, Aitken was among the wounded. ‘My mind was at rest; the long responsibility had ended.’ He was repatriated to New Zealand, and continued the university studies that would see him become an internationally renowned mathematician. But Aitken was also an amateur musician, who once said he spent 75 per cent of his time thinking about music. During his overseas service, even at Gallipoli, he carried with him a violin, won by a friend on board his troopship.³ It was contraband – excess baggage – but to Aitken and his fellow soldiers it became like a talisman, a reminder of civilised life. ‘It became virtually a platoon mascot even before they left Egypt,’ says Sarah Shieff. ‘A community object. It became a group task to protect it.’⁴

Wherever war is waged, there is also music made. During the First World War, music was an essential element of the war effort – and the war experience – of civilians and soldiers alike. On the home front, patriotic songwriting and concerts became part of everyday life: the purpose of the songs and shows was to boost morale and raise funds.

For the soldiers, in training camps and war zones, music was central to military rituals, formal and informal. Accompanied by military bands, they learnt how to march, were sent into battle, and later mourned their dead. At the front, touring concert parties performed songs and skits to give soldiers a brief respite from the horror in which they were participating. The soldiers themselves adopted and created a repertoire of their own songs, which mocked authority and military discipline, and complained about shirkers, discomfort and food.

There was hardly an area of New Zealand’s experience of the war that didn’t in some way have a musical accompaniment. It was used for propaganda, fundraising, recruiting, morale boosting and – once the fighting was over – remembrance. When the war began, New Zealand had a vigorous music scene, and no tributary was unaffected: the war’s impact was felt upon music in schools, at public gatherings, formal concerts, vaudeville, and in the home. Anything even slightly connected with Germany – musicians, teachers, the locally owned Dresden Piano Company, and the music by its composers – came under suspicion.

The brass band movement was immediately altered by the war. Many of its musicians quickly joined up to become members of military bands. Inside the army, a few soldiers found their musical talents were welcomed by the fledgling concert parties. At home, professional and amateur musicians found their talents were also needed to serve the cause, and a chorus of patriotic songwriters was inspired to express themselves and make a contribution.

This book explores the role played by music in New Zealand’s war effort. It describes the musical environment when the First World War began, and how the music community responded. It explores the ways in which music was part of the soldier’s life, from the moment they arrived in training camps and discovered that bugles ruled their lives, all day, every day – from ‘First Post’ to ‘Last Post’. Travelling to the war, the soldiers took part in music-making on the troopships, then during marches, at the front, in hospitals, and after hours.

A pre-war brass band without any military pretensions, playing popular music for the community somewhere in the Stratford area, c. 1910. ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY, WELLINGTON, 1/2-023999-G

What can we learn by studying the First World War through its soundtrack? Besides what it tells us about the development of music in New Zealand – its place in society, in performance or composition, and its evolution – it is an aid to understanding the human experience of being at war, on the home front and in the war zone. The songs written and performed express the emotions of the public and the soldiers: the sense of loss, separation, loyalty, sacrifice, patriotism, national identity, and of fighting a cause. If the first wave of books about the war documented its campaigns, battalions and officers, and the second wave the personal narratives of the rank and file, a third brought a more scholarly approach to the first two. The recent, centennial wave considers the evidence left behind: the objects, the memorials, the cartoons and editorials, the popular culture and the shifts in memory. Also, with the increase in interest in the war and genealogy – and the digital availability of diaries, personnel records and newspapers – there is an even greater concentration on personal experiences.⁵

The music of the war was written to be topical, rather than to be escapist, and to convey a message: whether it was to rally the troops or lament their loss. The songs created by the soldiers are an unexpurgated expression of their war: boredom, hardship, futility, scepticism, waste. The shows performed by their concert parties are a diversion from those feelings.

Examining the messages conveyed by the music at home and in the trenches is another way of understanding the war, and the inner feelings of the allegedly ‘Silent Division’ whose men said so little when they returned. The way music works in a society – where and how it is created, distributed, used and absorbed – helps us understand the way a society works. New Zealand’s experience of music of the First World War shows its evolution from a fledgling, colonial outpost to a dominion finding its place in a more globalised world.

‘Britain’s Sons’ was published in the second month of the war, and the cover of its sheet music used the full palette of the Empire’s imagery. After being performed by an NZEF infantry band in Auckland on 21 September 1914, conducted by the composer, hundreds of soldiers then sang the song from supplied word sheets. NEW ZEALAND HERALD, 24 SEPTEMBER 1914, P. 4; NATIONAL LIBRARY OF NEW ZEALAND

Of the 100,000 New Zealand soldiers who served during the war, approximately 58 described themselves as musicians, singers, entertainers or organists; another nine were music teachers.⁶ While the numbers seem low, it indicates how music-making was a part-time occupation or a hobby – and how much women contributed to the music scene, especially as teachers. The figure may indicate how few regarded music as their means to a living, but it doesn’t indicate the vast numbers of New Zealanders who took part in music in their domestic lives: in church, at parties where they were expected to perform an item, or around the piano with family and friends on the weekends.

These aspirant soldiers included members of orchestras and cinema pit bands, army buglers, concert pianists, church organists and choral conductors, brass band instructors and music teachers. Most were infantrymen and took part in the fighting; a few, late in the war, became members of the touring concert parties, which also recruited men who had only ever seen themselves as amateur entertainers. To these men, and their audiences, music was a constant companion throughout the war.

New Zealand’s fighting men were described as the ‘Silent Division’ because of their alleged reluctance to sing while on the march, unlike their allies the British, the French, the Canadians and the Australians. In fact, while the country was too new to have a tradition of its own ‘soldiers’ songs’, the New Zealanders shared a social and musical culture with what was still called Home. While on exercises, marches or at rest, New Zealand soldiers adapted the vernacular songs learnt by armies universally. There are many examples of music heard at the front, even on the godforsaken slopes of Gallipoli.

It was the first time New Zealand’s musicians and songwriters had rallied en masse to a cause. They may not have been conscious of being part of a concerted effort: they were just getting on with the job, according to their talents. Almost 200 songs by New Zealanders were published during the war, many by the composers themselves. There were local hits such as ‘Good Old New Zealand’ and ‘Sons of New Zealand’, bombastic novelties including ‘New Zealand’s Sons, Fall In!’ and ‘When We Meet with Kaiser Billy in Berlin’, and imperialistic statements, among them ‘British! Every One!’.

Performers in the New Zealand Pierrots, France, 1917. The adjutant in the centre also sang; to his right, in uniform, is Fred Hiscocks – scenic artist for the troupe, and a well-known cartoonist in New Zealand. ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY, WELLINGTON, FMS-PAPERS-6286-01-FRONT

The tone of New Zealand’s patriotic songs was at first earnest (for example, ‘England’s Watching’) and proud (‘Our New Zealand Boys’). A 1915 song called simply ‘The Kaiser Hate!!!’ is actually fraternal: ‘Your hate, my friend, dear Kaiser Bill, will never do the British ill; / Far better be a cousin still, and pull together with good will.’⁷ Support for the soldiers and the Empire was often expressed with stiff upper lip, as in ‘Whose Boys? Our Boys!’, published in Dannevirke in 1915.⁸

But as the conflict progressed, and casualties mounted, increasingly the song titles reflect bittersweet sentiments towards the war. In 1917 came titles such as ‘The Sacrifice’ and ‘We’ll Never Forget Our Boys’, followed in the next year by ‘The Red Cross Nurse’, ‘When the Boys Come Home’ and ‘The Heroes Who Sleep Over There’.

The war also introduced New Zealand’s first official concert parties, which were formed in France to entertain the troops near the front lines. There were three entertainment troupes connected with the New Zealand Division: the Kiwis, the Tuis, and the New Zealand Pierrots. (Many ad hoc ensembles were called ‘pierrots’ but these three troupes were in effect professionals.) The most prominent was the Kiwis, which was formed after the battle of the Somme, when Major-General Sir Andrew Russell decided the troops needed entertainment when resting near the front.

Two actors share a ‘romantic moment’ in an open-air performance for New Zealand soldiers. Photograph taken 1918 by Henry Armytage Sanders.

ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY, WELLINGTON, 1/2-013184-G

Compared to the larger and more formal Kiwis concert party, the Tuis concert party was a small, freelance entertainment troupe of the 4th Brigade. The Tuis were known for their ability to perform spontaneous concerts in arduous conditions, and the troupe’s programmes mixed popular and light-classical songs with comedy items. The Kiwis’ shows often included scripted, costumed revues and pantomimes such as Achi Baba and the More or Less Forty Thieves and ’Y Go Crook?. The Kiwis also had the benefit of their own orchestra.

Most of the concert party shows featured a ‘femme’ – a male entertainer dressed as a woman. In a postcard home, the leader of the Tuis described to his mother how popular the female impersonators were with the troops: ‘George Proctor is the boy who does the girl… and does it well too. This item is always popular and takes well. I always have the job of making Proctor up as he is no good at the game himself.’⁹

Among the ranks of the Kiwis was the Dunedin tenor Ernest McKinlay, who enjoyed a prominent concert and recording career after the war (and was an early champion of Maori popular songs). The troupe’s musical director, Lieutenant Dave Kenny – well known in Wellington music circles before the war – wrote ‘New Zealand, the Land ’Neath the Southern Cross’. While Kenny did not survive the war, his colleague Theo Trezise became famous as a dancer, choreographer and impresario in Wellington; in the 1920s his pioneering Thorndon cabaret often featured live jazz. During the occupation of Germany after the armistice, comedian and cartoonist Pat Hanna formed the New Zealand Divisional Pierrots, later known as the Digger Pierrots. After the war they would tour for many years in Australia and New Zealand as Pat Hanna’s Famous Diggers.

The First World War was pivotal to New Zealand’s musical development. It enabled performers such as McKinlay and Hanna to establish international careers, and encouraged other musicians to find work in their chosen field, in vaudeville, cinema pit bands, dance bands and local orchestras. The war also inspired songwriters to create a body of work that touched on ‘Home’, Empire, distance, sacrifice, the fabled Maoriland. Yet none of the hundreds of original songs written by Pakeha New Zealanders found a lasting place in the nation’s repertoire: the fledgling local music industry could not take the tunes from pen to performer then to the wider public, especially when up against international hits such as ‘It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary’, ‘Keep the Home-Fires Burning’ and ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail’. Also, after the armistice, the songs’ messages seemed out of place whether mobilising the troops or mourning their loss.

But they had served their purpose, which was not to become perennial favourites like those overseas hits. As a Pacific market for Tin Pan Alley, those hits were also New Zealand’s hits. The local songwriters were writing topical songs, and when their time and purpose passed, so too did the songs disappear. The New Zealand wartime songs that lasted were the songs that emerged from Maori, especially from the pens of politician Apirana Ngata and the Hawke’s Bay songwriter Paraire Tomoana. Although written for the war, songs such as ‘Karangatia Ra’, ‘E Pari Ra’, ‘Hoea Ra Te Waka Nei’ and ‘Hoki Hoki Tonu Mai’ became almost folk songs; they were sung by 28 Maori Battalion in the Second World War, and are still sung today.

The sheer amount of music-making that took place – at every level, and in every corner of New Zealand’s war – indicates the importance of music to the cause, and to the community. The soldiers and their families were fighting for the King, the Empire and ‘Home’, but the music and performances that emerged were not from a diaspora but a newly founded dominion.

Although few New Zealanders wrote art music in the pre-war period – Alfred Hill, composer of symphonies, operas and ‘Waiata Poi’, had returned to his birthplace, Australia, in 1912 – it did exist, from the pens of composers such as Alice Forrester and Jane Morison. In the international brass band repertoire, Alex Lithgow’s ‘Invercargill March’ – premiered in 1909 – quickly became a standard, and was recorded by the New York Military Band a year before the war.

Yet some saw New Zealand as a country devoid of musical culture, whether at the vernacular level – that ‘Silent Division’ accusation – or in more exclusive circles. In 1895, nearly 20 years before the start of the First World War, the Anglican Dean of Dunedin, Alfred Fitchett, provocatively declared: ‘There is no music in New Zealand.’ A man never short of an opinion, Fitchett disparaged the ‘low’ tastes of the public and the poor knowledge of music, saying that in only a couple of centres could the local population even produce music of quality – or understand it. While Fitchett admitted that there was a ‘piano in every other house, and a teacher for it in every street’, it was the ‘higher forms’ of music – such as oratorio and grand opera – that he thought were lacking.

Colonial New Zealand’s ability to produce top-shelf talent, and the audiences to appreciate it, was of course limited by its small population and isolation. Already, before the war, many of the most talented musicians ventured overseas to further their careers. Fitchett’s dismissal of musical life in New Zealand came from an elitist viewpoint, yet it was immediately disputed by the more informed – if equally elitist – musical identity Charles Baeyertz, the iconoclastic music critic and editor of the Triad culture magazine.¹⁰ Music in New Zealand was burgeoning, and assured of a ‘brilliant future’, wrote Baeyertz, and the community’s response to Fitchett should be ‘grave censure for an article which is neither more nor less than a slander upon our nation’. In 1901, a chastened Fitchett recanted, saying the article had been ‘written in ignorance’.¹¹

James Brown composed the ‘Tarakoi Waltz’ in 1894; he also used the pseudonyms Raymond Hope and Adrian Hope. It was dedicated to the Otago Amateur Rowing Club, whose membership was devastated by the war.

HOCKEN SHEET MUSIC COLLECTION; ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY, WELLINGTON

Yet there were elements of truth in Fitchett’s comments. Amateurism was inevitably the driving force of music in the young country, but that was positive. It meant that music-making was an inclusive activity, and it played a key role in New Zealand’s rituals, events and socialising: it was essential to its sense of community and its means of expressing itself. When the First World War began, the musical community was ready to contribute to – and comment on – the dominion’s war effort.

The music, sardonic humour and the songs of the First World War have been described as ‘a protest of life against death’, the British war song collector Max Arthur notes. ‘Perhaps they merely represent the ascendancy of the human spirit over the cruel inhumanity of the war itself.’ A century later, many of the British, American and Maori songs are still being sung; the war is still remembered. That, says Arthur, is surely ‘a kind of immortality and, in a sense, a fitting memorial to those who marched to war in a forgotten world.’¹²

‘Airing the camp after raw’: soldiers at Trentham Military Camp, Upper Hutt, Wellington; photographed by CJA, 1914. ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY, WELLINGTON, 1/1-017536-G

PREPARING FOR WAR

During the balmy pre-war period, music was at the core of most social activities in New Zealand life. Each town hummed with musical activity from pipe bands, dance bands, orchestras, operatic societies and countless choirs. In the cinemas, the silent movies were accompanied by soloists or pit orchestras. For a decade, boutique music stores in larger towns had expanded to sell recorded cylinders and discs alongside traditional instruments. In the home, parlour sing-songs were a regular part of socialising.

Brass bands offered weekly concerts in rotundas, railway stations and at racetracks, official municipal organists presented recitals in town halls: all were well attended and received by the public. Daily newspapers covered these events, and a school of informed critics such as Charles Baeyertz and ‘Maestro’ pontificated about their quality and repertoire.

New Zealand was part of the international music circuit: the latest popular song releases came from Britain and America by fast steamers, as sheet music or recordings. Ragtime had been enjoyed in New Zealand since 1900, and the country shared an enthusiasm for the songs of Irving Berlin with the rest of the Western world. Throughout the war, the country continued to be visited by touring artists.

When the war began, national anthems and jingoistic songs were heard in the streets at spontaneous gatherings and formal public events. Band musicians offered themselves to the Expeditionary Force, and songwriters launched a production line of patriotic songs to raise funds for the war effort and boost morale.

At the military training camps, troops found that music was part of the landscape. Bugle calls ruled their lives, but relief was offered at church services and spontaneous camp sing-songs. Route marches developed fitness and a disciplined camaraderie, accompanied by a military band or the troops’ own singing. Fledgling concert parties entertained the trainees, and talent emerged from among their ranks in the camps and on the voyages to the war zone.

In this phoney war atmosphere, sentimental and patriotic songs reveal an innocence about what the troops and public were about to experience.

Summer idyll: an audience enjoys a brass band performing at the Auckland Domain rotunda, 8 December 1913. ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY, WELLINGTON, 1/2-001135-G

CHAPTER ONE

SAY AU REVOIR AND NOT GOOD-BYE

On a balmy Sunday afternoon in late summer 1914, six months before the First World War, an audience gathered in Linwood Park, Christchurch. The entertainment was the Linwood Band, a brass ensemble of 22 local players. A march was the opening piece, and the reviewer for the Christchurch Sun was disdainful: the band’s performance was rough, its phrasing was non-existent and each set of instruments seemed to play in different pitches. ‘No two of them were in tune.’ A solo from the euphonium player sounded as if it was being played by a baritone; the soprano player cautiously felt his way through a cadenza. Only the cornet player showed competence. A selection from Verdi’s Macbeth was tragic, but not in the way the composer intended – ‘this was tragic enough to make one’s blood curdle’. The reviewer – whose pseudonym was ‘Maestro’ – offered some advice: ‘Try and get someone to help you tune the band up. Have scale practices. That is the only way to effectually cure the bad faults mentioned above, and then select easier pieces for programme work.’¹

While Maestro was scathing, his review of an inconsequential concert by a lamentable band shows that musical life in New Zealand was vibrant during the antebellum period. All genres of music were available to the young society, whose population stood at 1.1 million as the war began. Most weeks in the main centres – and almost as frequently in the provinces – audiences could enjoy classical concerts and recitals, opera, vaudeville, civic functions, tours by international artists, pit orchestras at silent films, as well as amateur performances or recordings in the comfort of their living rooms. In Christchurch alone, there was enough brass band activity that the Sun provided Maestro the space to write a weekly column. Similarly, the Auckland Star ran lengthy reviews of the weekly recitals by the city’s official organist, J. Maughan Barnett.

Previews of vaudeville shows were also a regular feature of the newspapers in all the main centres. These shows usually featured visiting performers on the international circuit, brought here by entertainment impresarios such as Benjamin Fuller and J. C. Williamson. Singers of international renown made nationwide tours of New Zealand, among them John McCormack and Nellie Melba. A tour by a classical ensemble such as the young Cherniavsky Trio was eagerly covered by the press, especially the energetic, confrontational arts and music magazine, the Triad. Founded in Dunedin in 1893 the monthly managed to cover musical events throughout New Zealand – even after its head office moved to Sydney in 1913. The Triad was launched just as New Zealand was about to experience a ‘golden age of visiting opera companies and international music stars’.²

Larger towns boasted orchestral and operatic societies, choirs, brass bands, pipe bands and dance bands. Specialist retailers such as the Begg’s chain were on most main streets, selling instruments and sheet music, and acted as the heart of the music community. In gatherings public and private, music was vital. From the brass band at a civic reception to the ad hoc ensembles playing in living rooms, performance and melody helped bond the society.

Music-making at home revolved around the piano, and the proliferation of the instrument grew quickly in the years prior to the First World War. The peak came in 1916, when 40 per cent of households contained