The Protest Song from Richard II to Donald Trump by Catherine Hokin

 BBC4

In line with our household's apparent 'let's only watch unremittingly depressing things on tv' policy, I've been immersed for the last couple of weeks in BBC4's excellent documentary series on the Vietnam War. It's so watchable because it feels like 'old-school' history - director Ken Burns uses archival footage, photographs and interviews rather than awkwardly mugging actors to capture the nuances of the conflict and its political, social and personal consequences. It's a style he perfected in his 1990 series on the American Civil War which was incredible in its detail, although very long - to the point where you can start to believe you're watching the war unfold in real time.

I've always been fascinated by Vietnam - it was one of my specialist areas at university, my Dad's first job as a rookie sailor was bringing the traumatised French soldiers home and the draft stopped 2 weeks before my American husband's 18th birthday. His bag for Canada was packed and ready. Due to the daughter's PhD edits which keep falling my way, I'm also becoming something of an aficionado of the protest song. The documentary's soundtrack is full of them - not great if Bob Dylan sets your teeth on edge (guilty) - and many people associate the genre with this particular war and the songs it gave rise to such as Eve of Destruction and Blowin' in the Wind. Protest songs however have much deeper roots and span every political creed known to man.

 Sheet Music Cover

Most of us are familiar with L'Internationale, the anthem sung with clenched fist and an awful lot of lip-syncing past the title. This was written in 1871 by Eugene Pottier, its title taken from a congress held by the recently-founded International Workingmen's Association in 1864. Its lyrics exhort the enslaved masses to rise up and take over (I'm paraphrasing) and it has become a rallying cry spanning groups as diverse as East German anti-Stalinists in 1953 to protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Rumours that Jeremy Corbyn still sings it in the shower are pure speculation. Going further back, the Diggers and Levellers movements, which followed the religious and political turmoil of the seventeenth century, gave rise to a number of ballads on a similar theme to L'Internationale, the most well known being The Diggers' Song with its world-order challenging refrain:

But the Gentry must come down,and the poor shall wear the crown.
Stand up now, Diggers all!

The Diggers Song likely dates from around 1649 although its lyrics weren't printed until 1894 but it has a challenger for the title of oldest known anti-oppression song in the shape of The Cutty Wren. This ditty comes from the tradition of English folk songs traditionally sung on St Stephen's Day (26th December) which was also known as Wren Day. These songs (whose origins now are very murky) may have an association with the symbolic slaughter of a wren just after the winter solstice, this replacing the human sacrifice once made to the old Year God. Or the eponymous wren may be King Richard II who the peasants intended to kill and feed to the poor in the 1381 rebellion. That was Marxist historian A.L. Lloyd's theory, published in 1944 and happily taught to me at university as 'fact' - ah Manchester, so dogmatically left wing in the 1980s. I think we may have sung it on a protest march or ten - how many levels of pretension there are in that defeats me.

 Statue of Thomas Davis Dublin

The move to industrialisation in the nineteenth century spawned workers' movements and a rise in topical protest songs as did the growing political struggles in countries such as Ireland where the rebel song is a huge musical sub-genre. According to my family legend, Thomas Davis, writer of one of the most famous Irish protest songs A Nation Once Again, was an uncle many times removed. Say that in any bar in Dublin and, trust me, you crawl out clutching your liver. Nineteenth century America also saw a huge rise in the angry or disillusioned voice as a political weapon, particularly in protest against slavery (Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child) and against the American Civil War (When Johnny Comes Marching Home). Groups such as the abolitionist Hutchinson Family Singers who appeared at the White House in the mid nineteenth century started off a musical legacy that can be seen running through the works of the big 1950s and 60s names such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Dylan. And war increasingly became a catalyst for protest - in 1915, the song I Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier sold 650,000 copies in the USA although not to Theodore Roosevelt who was deeply upset by its sentiments.

 Born in the USA 1984

The golden age was in many ways the 1960s and 1970s with Vietnam, the growing civil rights movement and struggles against apartheid finding mouthpieces in the music world from the UK and the States to South Africa, Israel and Latin America. There have been more recent examples although they haven't always had the desired effect. Poor old Springsteen must cringe every time he hears his anti-Reagan Born in the USA (an account of how badly the working man has suffered from American economic and military policies) turned into a jingoistic rallying cry. Groups such as Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine have continued the fight against racism and capitalism but audiences have changed and are perhaps less unified against causes than they once were. Artists such as M.I.A and Kendrick Lamar have created a stir with their anti-Trump songs but, with the change in the way we all access music nowadays, I imagine the heady days of an artist as big as Paul McCartney getting banned by the BBC and it mattering are long gone - it was in 1972, it was called Give Ireland Back to the Irish and it was one step away from including a frog chorus. You do not need to hear it no matter where your sympathies with the sentiment may lie.

Nowadays a lot of what we hear as protest songs are the old faithfuls, either in their original state or re-worked with topical inserts or non-political songs like We Are Family which have become politicised. My current favourite of the doctored variety is Mr Tangerine Man which featured in pretty much every anti-Trump Women's March this year - and is now lodged firmly in your head. Perhaps the History Girls' next competition should be for lyrics...

"The Family of Man" - Exhibition and Book - Joan Lennon

I went to the exhibition The Family of Man in the early 1960s, when it was on its travels around the world (37 countries on 6 continents, over 8 years), and it had a deep effect on me.  My dad bought the book and I re-discover it - tatty and well-thumbed - on my own shelves from time to time, and am moved all over again.

The book can't recreate the experience of the exhibition itself, which was like nothing I'd ever seen before.  "Enlarged, often mural scale images, angled, floated or curved, some even displayed on the ceiling, were grouped together according to diverse themes." (Wikipedia)  I remember being drawn hither and yon, desperate not to miss anything.

The poet Carl Sandburg wrote the introduction, including, in his unashamedly lush language, these words: 

"If the human face is "the masterpiece of God" it is here then in a thousand fateful registrations. Often the faces speak that words can never say. Some tell of eternity and others only the latest tattings. Child faces of blossom smiles or mouths of hunger are followed by homely faces of majesty carved and worn by love, prayer and hope, along with others light and carefree as thistledown in a late summer wing. Faces have land and sea on them, faces honest as the morning sun flooding a clean kitchen with light, faces crooked and lost and wondering where to go this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Faces in crowds, laughing and windblown leaf faces, profiles in an instant of agony, mouths in a dumbshow mockery lacking speech, faces of music in gay song or a twist of pain, a hate ready to kill, or calm and ready-for-death faces. Some of them are worth a long look now and deep contemplation later."

Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother (1936)

There's a certain oddness in taking photos of photos in a book of an exhibition, but if you're too young to have seen it back in the day, then maybe I can convince you with some of the images below to buy the book or, as I was delighted to discover, you can see the exhibition, displayed as it was originally designed, in Luxembourg, at Clervaux Castle.  Either way, you won't be disappointed.

(The photos I picked at random are by Elliott Erwitt, Eiju Oraki, Wayne Miller, Gitel Steed, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Al Chang, Jean Marquis, Musya S. Sheeler, Gjon Mili - just a few of the 273 photographers and 503 images that make up this amazing collective work of art.)

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin. 

A Teenager at Work in 1960 by Ann Turnbull

I had just turned seventeen when I started work in London in 1960.

I'd spent the past four years at technical school on a commercial course.  This involved shorthand and typing, general studies and O-Level GCEs.

My first job was at the headquarters of the National Union of Teachers.  For this change of lifestyle my mother provided me with two suits: an olive green one of hers, and a new navy-blue one.  There were many rules about dress in those days.  Your skirt should not show below the hem of your coat; your slip should not show below your skirt; bra straps must never show; necklines were high and cleavage unseen.  Hair was permed or put in rollers or pin curls at night to give it body.  To protect it from the weather we all wore printed nylon headscarves.

I loved being out at work.  By the beginning of 1961 I was earning £10 a week - a good wage at the time.  I paid my parents £3 a week, and probably paid about the same amount again in train fares from north Kent.  The morning train journey was crowded, and most people smoked, so a thick fug filled the carriage.  You usually had to stand, and men would open their newspapers and rest them on your head.  I soon began to think about moving to a bedsitter in London.

In 1962 I changed to a job in the litigation department of a firm of solicitors in Fleet Street.  Solicitors' offices demanded high standards and were always busy, and I enjoyed that.  The work was interesting, since it involved people and conflict.  Solicitors in those days did not advertise, and they certainly didn't chase accident victims.  Their headed notepaper was discreet and simply carried the name and address of the firm; the word "solicitors" did not appear.

All the solicitors working there were men, and from well-to-do families.  We girls each worked for one of them.  My boss, although quite a young man, always addressed me as "Miss Turnbull"; our relationship was friendly but formal.

In the secretaries' room we would chat about boyfriends, hairstyles, nights out, wedding plans.  Girls expected to be engaged by around eighteen or twenty, and married at about twenty-two.  Soon after, they would leave to have a family.

By now I was earning ten guineas a week, plus luncheon vouchers worth 2/6d each.  I flitted in and out of the shops in the Strand in my lunch hour, buying lipsticks and eye-liner and little straight knee-length dresses.  Fashions were changing, getting freer.  I abandoned my girdle and walked down the Strand feeling wobbly-bottomed.  I grew my hair long and wore it hanging loose - though I put it in a topknot for work.  In the evenings I'd go out with a boyfriend to pubs or folk clubs where everyone smoked and your eyes smarted and mascara ran.

Around this time I left home and, for the next few years, lived in a succession of bedsits and flats in central London.  A cheap bedsitter cost about £3.10s.0d., and would have a gas-ring - on which I attempted nothing more adventurous than Vesta curries.  I often ate out in Wimpy bars and cheap cafes.  Dalton's Weekly was the place to find accommodation.  Shared flats often had ads for a "third" or "fourth" girl, but many of these said "graduate preferred".  I had never met a graduate, and I developed an aversion to these elite people who couldn't face sharing with the likes of me.

Moving those few miles to live in London gave me the freedom of the city.  I loved London, and still do.  The Sixties - that fabulous decade - did not begin in 1960, but by 1963 it was on its way.  I moved into a mixed-sex flat.  I heard the voice of Joan Baez for the first time - a transforming experience.  I hung out in CND headquarters in Carthusian Street.  I went to Bunjie's folk club off Leicester Square.  I went on demos.  I went to student balls at UCL (yes, I finally got to know those graduates!)  I had some of my poems printed in small magazines, and in evenings and lunch-hours I sat and wrote my big historical novel and dreamed of publication.