The Articles

Ali Ronan’s discussion of the wartime correspondence between Hope Squire and her husband Frank Merrick, both pianists and teachers at the Royal Manchester College of Music (RMCM), comes closest to the overarching theme of Everyday lives in war in focussing as much on the domestic background to their careers as musicians. Apart from one, brief overview from 2008, it is the first detailed study of the letters held in Bristol University Archives.Footnote ¹¹ The letters emanate from two very different environments: Merrick’s from Wormwood Scrubs and Wandsworth Prison, where he was imprisoned for part of the war as a conscientious objector, and Squire’s from the predominantly middle-class south Manchester address where the couple otherwise lived. Merrick’s moral stance as a conscientious objector also picks up a theme explored by other projects within the parent project.Footnote ¹² Their letters speak of their shared interest and values: socialism, pacifism, vegetarianism, Esperanto and women’s suffrage. Squire’s letters in particular tell us something of the circles in which they moved and the colleagues – not necessarily musical – who shared those values. These, and the unnamed members of the public she encountered, offer us a glimpse into their own everyday lives.

Squire also gives us an insight into her experiences as a member of staff at the RMCM during the war. The impact of the war on what was still a relatively new feature of Manchester’s musical landscape is taken up more fully in Barbara Kelly’s article on the college during wartime. Her approach is very much one of contextualization, placing the specific period 1914–18 within the broader field of its prewar existence (it opened in 1893) and more significantly, how the war nuanced the kind of college that was to emerge in the postwar period, including, as far as possible, tracing the subsequent careers of certain students. Her discussion thus takes in issues of gender balance within the student body and the way in which this was changed by the war, the range of instruments studied (which was itself nuanced by gender), the changing demographic background of the students and the repertoire taught and performed. Of particular interest is her discussion of the major changes in student intake occasioned by its being a beneficiary of the Government Scheme for the Higher Education of Ex-Servicemen, which brought a substantial number of such ex-servicemen – and women – into the RMCM. Kelly is also able to bring her expertise in French music of the period to broaden her contextualization to include a comparison of the experience of the RMCM and the Paris Conservatoire during the war.

By the time war was declared in 1914, several of an earlier generation of RMCM students had already begun their professional careers as players in the Hallé Orchestra. The orchestra’s Archivist Eleanor Roberts was able to draw on a large number of archival sources in her investigation of how the Hallé weathered the war years. Although the orchestra itself has spawned a number of published historical studies, most subsume study of the war years into the larger contextual discourse.Footnote ¹³ Roberts argues that the overriding concern for the Hallé Concerts Society was to maintain, as far as possible, business as usual. She outlines the many problems they faced in achieving this. Financial worries led to cuts in players’ salaries. The apparent disadvantage of players missing on active service proved advantageous, at least for the time being, to the women who were able to take their place. Solo artists were not always available, leading to programme changes. Above all there was the problem of Britain being at war with a country which had given the Hallé Orchestra its founder, provided a number of its players, and appointed as Charles Hallé’s successors conductors from the German and Austro-Hungarian empires who performed a largely Austro-German repertoire. Moreover, the orchestra was in Manchester, which had the largest German population in the UK and where many of its supporters and benefactors were drawn from the city’s well to do and culturally aware German citizens. Yet, as Roberts illustrates, even here the challenge could be turned to advantage, with visiting conductors bringing new French, Russian and British repertoire while maintaining a balance with existing German music.

As one letter writer complained to the Manchester Guardian some ten months before the outbreak of war ‘the support for music in Manchester is mainly from the large colony of Germans residing there. They … with but few exceptions, really care about the production of music.’Footnote ¹⁴ The notion that questions were being raised about the future of music in Manchester even before the challenge of the war emerges as one of the themes in Geoffrey Thomason’s article centred around chamber music and the establishment of the Tuesday Mid-day Concerts. The concerts were prompted by a number of things beyond a perceived decline in support for prewar models. They grew out of the wartime scheme of providing music in hospitals for convalescing servicemen, aimed to provide work for musicians whose careers were blighted by the war, and offered a series of short, lunchtime chamber concerts rather than the full-length evening ones which were otherwise the norm. They grew, above all, from the initiative of Manchester cathedral’s organist Sydney Nicholson. Nicholson is chiefly remembered as the founder of what is now the Royal School of Church Music (RSCM), but his earlier career, including his years in Manchester, has hitherto received no attention. Thomason’s article acknowledges Nicholson’s role not only in setting up the Tuesday Mid-day Concerts, but in providing a viable model for lunchtime chamber concerts which, as he hoped, survived the war and continues to this day.

Unlike the Second World War, the First was fought largely away from the everyday lives of those whom it affected. The abiding images, though, remain linked to the military conflict itself. Rachel Johnson turns to overtly military themes in her article in the role of Manchester’s military bands in propaganda and recruitment for war. Again, pace Hanna’s above-mentioned monograph, the role of bands as part of the recruitment process throughout the UK during this period has been but little discussed. Johnson also raises the importance of seeking out the lived experiences of those whose everyday lives are under discussion, and the need to set it against posthumous accounts or analyses. In the case of the lived experience, what accounts we have of military recruitment, training and active service music need themselves be filtered to eliminate the genuine experience from that synthesized by propaganda.

Reviewing several of the monographs cited here another scholar associated with Everyday lives in war, Michelle Meinhart, headed an article ‘Oh, what a musical war! A retrospective after the First World war centenary’.Footnote ¹⁵ Acknowledging a certain amount of “centenary fatigue” she spoke of “new voices” and “these authors [who] start to look at what a decolonized look at the war might be for musicology”. It is the wish of the authors represented in this themed issue to be seen as making a start for Manchester, highlighting both the immediate impact of the war on the city and the way the way its concert life met the challenge of maintaining continuity when faced with the need to adapt and embrace change. The articles here are but pieces in a much larger jigsaw – a jigsaw that is still in the making, but whose Manchester-shaped pieces have hitherto been missing. Many of them are indeed by ‘new voices’ who offer the research they embody as a contribution to an unfolding broader narrative of wartime musical life in the city. They hope, too, that, taken as a whole, the hitherto untold stories presented here can play their part in creating the larger national picture of Everyday lives in war – a picture which continues to grow, to fascinate us, and to encourage us towards further exploration.