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Chapter and verse: The surprising story of the song 'Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag' - Features, Music - The Independent
"Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag,
And smile, smile, smile,
While you've a lucifer to light your fag,
Smile, boys, that's the style.
What's the use of worrying?
It never was worthwhile, so
Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag,
And smile, smile, smile."
So runs the chorus line of one of the two great marching songs (along with It's a Long Way to Tipperary) of the First World War. And indeed able to afford a smile, or three, is Aubrey Powell, the grandson of Felix Powell, its composer. This Armistice Day at the Cenotaph, as the band strikes up Pack Up Your Troubles, more pennies will drop into Powell's bank account, thanks to his grandfather's foresight in retaining the rights to his tune.
In fact it has been a good year for Aubrey – what with the worldwide Dell computer adverts that samples his grandfather's ditty, as well as R&B singer Eliza Doolittle's hit single, Pack Up. "It pays for a few dinners", he says.
Pack Up Your Troubles is a culturally durable, as well as lucrative, song, transcending its Edwardian music-hall roots to live on in movie titles (including Laurel and Hardy's 1932 comedy of the same name), pop songs (by Richard Thompson and Eliza Doolittle among others), and even children's TV shows like Rugrats. One commentator has included it, along with Rock Around the Clock, My Way and Dancing Queen as one of the "songs that defined a century".
"What amazes me is that the song was written in 1915 and here we are, 95 years later, and it has become even more part of the English language than it was before", says Powell, who lives in London when he is not touring the world in his role as a film and rock concert director. "I remember watching TV at the time of the Wayne Rooney sex scandal. I was watching the news with Rooney going off to play Switzerland, and the newsreader saying, 'There's Wayne Rooney, packing up his troubles in his old kit bag.
Britain's first hospital discovered - Telegraph
The excavations have revealed a range of buildings and convincing evidence for a foundation in the 10th century Photo: PA
Radio carbon analysis at the former Leper Hospital at St Mary Magdalen in Winchester, Hampshire, has provided a date range of AD 960-1030 for a series of burials, many exhibiting evidence of leprosy, on the site.
A number of other artefacts, pits, and postholes also relate to the same time including what appears to be a large sunken structure underneath a medieval infirmary.
Before this new claim, most historians and archaeologists thought that hospitals in the Britain only dated from after the Norman conquest of 1066.
''This is an important archaeological development,'' said Dr Simon Roffey from the University of Winchester which conducted the dig.
''Historically, it has always been assumed that hospitals were a post-conquest phenomena, the majority founded from the late 11th century onwards.
''However, our excavations have revealed a range of buildings and, more significantly, convincing evidence for a foundation in the 10th century.
''Our excavations at St Mary Magdalen offer an intriguing insight into a little known aspect of the history of both Winchester and England. It is undoubtedly a site of national importance.''
Among the earliest known hospitals in the UK is Harbledown in Canterbury founded by Lanfranc in the 1070s, following the Norman Conquest.
Professor Nicholas Orme, a leading researcher on medieval hospitals, added: ''I have only studied the documentary evidence but I could not find any such evidence for a hospital before 1066 except perhaps as an activity within a monastery or minster.
''A late Anglo-Saxon hospital would surely be a first for archaeology and indeed for history.''
Winchester was the capital of England throughout a large part of the Anglo-Saxon period and after the Norman Conquest. The capital was moved to London from the Hampshire city in the 12th century.
South Asians making Britain: 1858-1950 | World news | guardian.co.uk
A new exhibition traces the impact of South Asians on British life from the Raj to the early years of Indian independence. Our timeline opens a window on a little-known aspect of Britain's history. click"next" for interactive timeline.
Remembering the blitz: was it an avoidable tragedy? Hitler unleashed the blitz on Britain on 7 September 1940. But could more have been done to lessen the destruction and bloodshed that followed?
Just after 4.30pm on Saturday, 7 September 1940, 364 German bombers and 515 fighters flew across the Channel and followed the Thames estuary to London, using the fires caused by their bombs as markers. They came for a further 75 consecutive nights (except for one that was too cloudy for the bombers to operate). The blitz would last until 16 May 1941 – when most of the Luftwaffe was reassigned to the invasion of Russia. In 1940, 13,000 people were killed in London alone. Attacks on other major cities throughout the UK began on 15 October 1940, with the centre of Coventry being destroyed on the night of 14/15 November.
The idea was to force Britain to seek peace: German bombs would destroy its industry, transport and communications links around major cities, and so terrify the civilian population that they would force their government to sue for peace. Hitler knew it would take time, but London's four million inhabitants, its packed and inflammable warehouses, its maze of narrow streets and teeming slums, were ripe for terror tactics.
And terror there certainly was. Men old enough to have fought in the first world war said the western front had offered nothing worse than they saw on the first night of the blitz. The next day, most of London's firefighters were convinced they would not live for more than another week.
Acts of bravery abounded among the terrible onslaught; yet, when postwar prime minister Clement Attlee would later demand sacrifice from his people, he appealed to "the Dunkirk spirit", not "the blitz spirit" – perhaps because, if you were at Dunkirk, you were part of a self-electing group doing brave things. Everyone was in on the blitz: the brave and the not-so-brave, the honest and the dishonest, and those, like most of us, who are a little of both. Maybe this explains why it has taken so long for Britain to mark properly the events of 70 years ago.
We think of it as a time when cheerful cockneys defied the Nazi menace; and that's not wrong, but it is a small part of the story. People knew someone had blundered. Britain had had plenty of time to prepare: the Home Office had been thinking about mass bombing since 1933, and in 1937 German bombers supporting Franco in the Spanish civil war destroyed the town of Guernica and killed 2,000 citizens. Deep shelters had been built in Barcelona, which proved very successful, and there was a move to build them in London, but it was never done. Families were given Anderson shelters (named after the home secretary, Sir John Anderson) instead. This, as the author Stephen Spender wrote in 1945 in Citizens in War, "overlooked the fact that in the majority of homes there was no room for an Anderson shelter". So Londoners forced the authorities to permit the use of tube stations as shelters.
Britain was ill-equipped to defend its cities. The underpowered searchlights were usually ineffective against aircraft at altitudes above 12,000ft. During the first raid, only 92 anti-aircraft guns were available to defend London, though within five days there were twice as many, with orders to fire at will. This boosted civilian morale and encouraged bomber crews to drop before they were over their target, though it had little physical effect.
The blitz did not provide a respite from human greed, bureaucratic idiocy and official meanness. "Don't talk to me about everyone pulling together," says David Clark, who was a little boy when his home in Ilford suffered a direct hit. The family was safe in its Anderson shelter, "but the neighbours and the ARP [Air Raid Precautions wardens] assumed we were dead and looted the house. They didn't get the fish knives or the port decanter and I still have those."
Such stories do not form part of our collective memory of the war. As Angus Calder writes in The Myth of the Blitz, "Successful after-raid looters have not written their memoirs. Cowardly people in local government have not advertised their shame." It is true that brave cockneys shouted to Winston Churchill, "We can take it!" – but the full story of that day, as told in Juliet Gardiner's fine new book The Blitz, is one of dreadful and avoidable tragedy. A bomb crashed through a ventilation shaft into a shelter containing more than 1,000 people. Churchill visited the scene while parents were still turning over their dead children: "It was good of you to come, Winnie. We thought you'd come. We can take it. Give it back." An old woman said: "You see, he really cares, he's crying."
About the only thing the government had got right was the creation in March 1938 of the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS), which saw 28,000 auxiliary full- and part-time firefighters recruited for the London Fire Brigade alone. But even the AFS might easily have failed. Professional firefighters resented it, while AFS people grumbled that they were paid less and their conditions of service were inferior. The situation was saved by an alliance between London Fire Brigade chief Major Frank Jackson and the leftwing leader of the Fire Brigades Union, John Horner, who collaborated in persuading regular firefighters to accept the AFS as equals. Horner later wrote of "the complete lack of preparedness which left men isolated for hours without food or drink, which condemned men who had been wet through for days to return to their stations and turn out again, still in wet clothes".
Tens of thousands of civilians were forced to sleep far from their homes – in parked cars, taxis and buses; in churches and barns; even out in the open, on Hampstead Heath or Greenwich Park – and walked, cycled or took buses into work every day (it was called "trekking"). But once again, the way some of these homeless casualties of the blitz were received punctures the idea of everyone being "in it together". Baldock in Hertfordshire, for example, was known to be unwelcoming, while Windsor would not accept "Jews or children". The prejudice of the burghers of Windsor was echoed both lower down and higher up in the social scale: the military engineered the dismissal of the Jewish secretary of state for war, Leslie Hore-Belisha, on thinly disguised antisemitic grounds.
In 1941, RAF Bomber Command asked the fire chiefs: "What change of tactics by the Luftwaffe would cause you most concern?" Firefighters said the concentration of a heavy attack into a very short space of time could swamp fire service resources. And so, when 1,000 RAF bombers attacked Cologne in May 1942, 1,500 tonnes of high explosive were dropped on the city in the space of an hour and a half, and fire services were overwhelmed. The allies won the war partly because we ran a more effective blitz than Hitler.
Brazilian World War II workers fight for recognition By Louise Sherwood Porto Velho, Rondonia
In the Brazilian Amazon, long-forgotten workers drafted in to help the Allies in World War II are dreaming of a home they left when they were still in their teens. Now in their mid-80s, they are awaiting the outcome of legal moves that may finally bring them the recognition and compensation they were promised 67 years ago. We thought we had arrived in paradise but instead of glory we found hell” In 1943, while the US, Britain and their allies were fighting on the battlefields of Europe, North Africa and the Far East, thousands of impoverished Brazilians were being urged to do their own patriotic duty. Manuel Pereira de Araujo remembers the day that would change his life forever as he joined the ranks of the "rubber soldiers". "An army official came to my town and told us we could join the fight on the front line in Italy or go to the Amazon. He said we would become heroes in the rubber battle and get rich tapping rubber," he said. The recruitment drive was part of an agreement signed by Brazil and the US. With the main rubber-producing country at the time, Malaysia, under Japanese occupation, and synthetic rubber not available on the scale needed to supply the war effort, the US needed a reliable source of rubber. The Washington Accords required Brazil to supply all the latex it could in exchange for $2m (which would be some $25m today) from the US. The Brazilian government targeted its recruitment campaign at the North East where most of the population was poor, eking out a living as subsistence farmers in arid scrubland. "It was a life of poverty. There was no money or work for us there. We ate only beans and manioc and the harvests were poor so we often went hungry," said Claudionor Ferreira Lima, president of the Rubber Soldiers Union in Porto Velho. "I left my fiancee behind... thinking I would get rich and be back in a couple of years to start a family. For all I know she's still waiting." Some 55,000 people, mostly young single men, signed up but many of them would never see their families or homes again. After a journey of several months by truck and boat, Mr Ferreira Lima remembers the moment he disembarked in the lush, green rainforest of the Amazon. "We thought we had arrived in paradise but instead of glory we found hell," he said. "It was slavery," said Antonio Barbosa da Silva, another rubber soldier. "There was no salary and if you didn't produce you didn't eat. We collected the rubber and traded it for food and other goods at the plantation shop." The government's promises of healthcare, accommodation and food came to nothing. "They gave us just two pairs of trousers, when one was dirty I wore the other. There was nowhere to sleep so we had to build a hut out of wood and palm leaves," said Mr Pereira de Araujo. With no doctors or hospitals, thousands of rubber soldiers died from malaria, hepatitis and yellow fever. Others were attacked by jaguars and alligators or perished from snake bites. "Those who tried to leave were given their pay and told they were free to go. But down the road hired guns were waiting to shoot them and take their money back to the boss," recalled Mr Peirera de Araujo. Looking for a better life, many families also decided to board the government ships bound for the Amazon. Vicenza da Costa was just 14 when her father decided the family would leave the drought-stricken state of Ceara. "He said to my mother 'Candida let's go. I planted my last seed and with no rain for eight days it has already died'. But it was my home and I wanted to stay. I cried every day," she said. "We were really homesick but our mother said 'Why are you so sad? At least here we can eat', so we used to make up songs and sing to keep our spirits up." Jose Duarte de Sigueira was just a boy when the rubber soldiers came to live near his town in the state of Acre. "There was only one bar with a radio. We used to listen to translations of BBC news coming from London and we passed on updates about the conflict to those living in the plantations," he said. It was through the radio that Mr Pereira Araujo found out the war was over. "It was 8 May 1945 when we heard the news and we were so happy because we thought now we will receive our payment and we can go home." But the promised compensation never arrived and, with no money to return, most of the men stayed on in the rubber plantations. After some years the government began to pay them a small pension. Today around 8,300 surviving rubber soldiers and 6,500 of their widows receive 1020 reais ($576, £370) a month but this is much less than they were led to believe they would earn. In the dilapidated office of the Rubber Soldiers Union, Mr Ferreira Lima is optimistic about a pension increase. "I became union president to fight for justice because the rubber soldiers deserve better," he said. Sympathetic politicians from the states of Acre, Rondonia and Amazonas are pushing for the pension increase to be agreed soon. In May this year, a renewed request was made for urgency in the matter. A legal team is also working to secure compensation. "My grandfather was a rubber soldier and I grew up with their stories. The contribution they made and the injustice against them are part of the memory of the people of the Amazon region," said lawyer Irlan Rogerio Erasmo da Silva. "We are asking for 763,800 reais ($431,280; £273,920) for each rubber soldier. It's not just about the money that was sent by the US; we are seeking damages for the human rights violations they suffered. " As the legal battle grinds on, many of the rubber soldiers still dream of "home". "I have been waiting all these years to receive my money," says Mr Pereira Araujo. "When it arrives I will go back to the North East. My parents have already died but I will stay with my brothers and sisters." But time is running out and for many of the rubber soldiers it is already too late.
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Claudionor Ferreira LimaRubber tapper
The town that made Margaret Thatcher | Politics | The Observer
It was 30 years ago next month that a grocer's daughter from Grantham walked into 10 Downing Street and shook Britain to its core. Now 83, and long gone from power, Britons remain fiercely divided over the reign of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. As the free-market economy she championed comes unstuck, we returned to Grantham to seek clues to her roots and her legacy
