Keeping the Dresden fires burning Singalonga WarYears! By Max Bygraves Parkfield Music, on record, video, tape and CD Reviewed by David Grant There is something truly appalling about this musical compilation of popular songs from the early 1940s. No, its not just the sound of Max Bygraves' voice. Neither is it only the monotonous tempo blending the first verse and chorus of one song into the next, nor the lyrics - which are a redefinition of the word bland.
If this was wartime entertainment aimed at keeping morale high, its no wonder everyone hoped it would be over by Christmas. Style and delivery of the music aside, there is something genuinely disturbing about the content of this particular piece of fifty-years-on memorabilia.
In May 1945, JB Priestley wrote of Britain and the British during the previous six years:
«We had a glimpse then of what life might be if men and women freely dedicated themsel ves, not to their appetites and prejudices, their vanities and fears, but to some great communal task.'
The view, carefully nutured by the British ruling class, that the war had been a time of joint sacrifice, even egalitarianism, in the face of a common foe, remains the myth it always was. Despite changes brought about by the mass evacuation of inner cities and large scale recruitment of women into the wartime economy, the class structure of Britain, along with its pettyminded chauvinist ideology, remained firmly intact.
The testimony of many children who were evacuated to middle class families that treated them little better than drudges or the racism that greeted black US soldiers stands in sharp contrast Page 32
to the sentiments expressed in the White Cliffs of Dover.
Nonetheless, the myth of a classless Britain at war is a surprisingly enduring one. The unashamed TV * 30 Sings advertising of this compilation, the photo of Max Bygraves on the front cover - in which he seems to be saying 'It was great wasn't it?' - right down to the song with the chilling title, Let's Have Another One, reflect the unchallenged view of what the second world war meant to the British.
The fact that 55 million people died in the camage, that countless millions were uprooted, smashed physically or mentally is never even hinted at. Infact, it was all rather civilised, even fun. Sales, not protest, greeted the release of this tawdry little collection. Why is this?
The crisis of humanity being, in essence, a crisis of proletarian leadership, is a notion that supplies one answer to this question, although doubtless Max Bygraves could turn this into a mind-numbing concept album too.
The first world war, fought between 1914-18, was an inter-imperialist war in which the working classes clearly had no interest in participating. The left knew this because Lenin, with the authority of the Russian Revolution behind him, said so. A gun was a metal tube with a worker at each end. The first world war became known as the imperialist war.
But only Trotsky called the war of 1939-45 the second imperialist war. It became seen as the struggle against "fascist' Germany, or, according to Stalin,
MAX BYGRAVES SingaLonga waripars!
AR Antrari tonil N* * 11 TYL (after the end of the Stalin-Hitler Pact in 1941) the struggle to defend socialist Russia. There was no suggestion from the Communist Parties that this inter-imperialist war should be tumed into a civil war against the bourgeoisie.
The class struggle at home was suspended to fight the Nazi threat. Class collaboration gave the Communist Party its biggest ever membership in Britain and Labour swept to power in the 1945 General Election. With the ideological ground effectively unchallenged, it is not hard to see why sugar-coated, sanitised songs met with a success they have retained ever since.
But then perhaps it is unfair 1o heap yet another crime onto the head of Joseph Stalin, even though this is seemingly the most popular new board game in Moscow at the moment.
Max Bygraves may not be entirely Stalin's fault: he could, after all, be just another one of those aberrations peculiar to Britain's class structure and history of class struggle. Or maybe a phenomenon, like fascism, which the ruling classes only make use of when all other political options have been exhausted. It hardly needs to be added that our slogan for both should be 'Never Again'.
Days of