Sin,—During my Thirties childhood the song, 'Ain't it grand to
be bloomin' well dead?' was associated, for my brothers and me at least, with another, the harrowing tale of 'The Nancy Lee'—`The ship that got shipwrecked at sea.' To quote Mr. Fairlie: `. . . people were poor when it was not necessary, unemployed when they need not have been.'
Shipwrecked at sea? We were not truly 'on the rocks.' To drag the significance out of popular songs in this way may not necessarily reflect circumstances of society, but it should not be difficult to interpret the lines: 'All the crew were in despair; Some ran here and some ran there, But the Captain sat in the Captain's chair, And he played his ukulele as the ship went down!'
Captain Brown was no Nero; he didn't sink the ship, but he did nothing to save it. Between the wars the sins of omission had disastrous consequences.
Perhaps Shelley would not have acknow- ledged our popular lyric - writers as 'un- acknowledged legislators,' but we ought not to exclude them from his 'wretched men': 'Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong, They learn in suffering what they teach in song.'
—Yours faithfully,
ERIC SWAINSON
7 Huddleston Crescent, Merstham, Surrey
Previous page
