When I read of the women who were studying at the Royal Academy of Music around the turn of the nineteenth century, I am always struck by the breadth of musical activity that resulted from their years of study. Alongside the singers known for opera such as Isabel Jay and Margaret Hughes, there is the music hall star Denise Orme, the folk-oriented Jean Sterling MacKinlay, and the rather risqué Margaret Cooper, who wrote her own songs. The pianists of the Tobias Matthay school such as Myra Hess and Irene Scharrer sat alongside the famous ragtime pianist Winifred Atwell. And of course there was Lena Ashwell, who studied singing at the Academy before switching to acting, on the famous advice of Ellen Terry in 1890, who wrote:
“When she stood up to read the speech from Richard II she was nervous, but courageously stood her ground. She began slowly, and with a most ‘fetching’ voice, to think out the words. You saw her think them, heard her speak them. It was so different from the intelligent elocution the good recitation, but bad impersonation of the others! […] ‘She has to work,’ I wrote in my diary that day. ‘Her life must be given to it.’”
Lena Ashwell is a fascinating figure altogether, who went on, of course, to organise the concert parties that entertained troops and prisoners both at home and abroad during WWI. This book is her account of those years. It is a testament to Ashwell’s relationship with words; her ability to communicate, her love for threading words together into rhythm and description is evident everywhere. Ashwell is a storyteller. One can feel the passion, the chaos, the frustration and exhaustion, the stillness and wonder of men grasping this moment of true life that is being offered them. For Ashwell is also a passionate philosopher, one who believes, even in the midst of the horror she sees, that music matters, that is gives us a reason for living.
This seems to me incredibly important right now, in the current global climate. When students come and ask me why they continue to don a costume and sing a story from a hundred years ago, or why they should still care if their top note has spin, or why the rehearsal conversations with their pianist still matter, it is Ashwell’s writing that gives me faith that this more than matters:
“When sending over a new concert party to France, I implored the artists to remember and to note things of interest, and to write me descriptions of what was happening to them; and almost every time I was disappointed, because when they wrote or spoke they could only mention meals and journeys, what they had had to eat, and the number of concerts they had been able to give. The reason was not dulness of soul or greediness of body, but that the whole experience was so overwhelming, so moving, so terrible that one’s littleness was stunned and could not find expression. It is easier to describe a little tennis-party at a country vicarage than seeing a world in arms suffering, wounded, muddy, weary, smiling, and tortured; try to
express, try to give even a small impression that is beyond description.
[…]
But we could find no words or tongue to express the suffering of our hearts, the aching sympathy, to see great battalions moving up to the line, and welcome a few men back, to have a concert interrupted with the sudden roll- call of the men who were to join their regiments at once, to see the men respond to their names and go out and up the line, to hear a whole massed audience singing as their last experience before going up to the blood and horror, “Lead, kindly Light “; these are not experiences which can be described, they cut too deep into the soul. When in some chorus, “The long trail, the trail that leads to home,” thousands of voices would give some expression to the deep sentiment of the British for “roses,” for “flowers,” for “Home,” for “Flo,” one’s whole body shook and trembled in response, and one wondered if the music of the spheres, the great invisible choirs, were perhaps giving voice through these human hearts to the eternal desire for beauty and goodness. ”
Ashwell goes further in her manifesto. There were, or course, many rules and strictures on who could go where, and it was a constant and delicate balancing act to construct a permissible concert party. (For example, a wife was not permitted in France if her husband was serving there – “And sometimes when we had made satisfactory arrangements for a special delightful party, all plans would have to be rearranged by the discovery of a husband in France, or that a fine artist was not entirely British, that a forgotten or carefully concealed German ancestor might appear, and then farewell to any prospect of a permit.”). Even more important, though, was money, for Ashwell was determined that every performer should be paid commensurate to their contribution. Not only were these people skilled in their area, she felt, not only did they have the everyday bills and expenses that everyone did, but also many of them were having to pay out to keep their civilian career afloat. Ashwell herself was paying rent on a theatre she wasn’t using, partly because she was still under contract, but even more so that she would have a base to which she could return after the war. Ashwell worked tirelessly to raise enough to pay all her performers for their work; she wanted not a single unpaid member in the concert and theatre parties who went out. (Some supporting roles would be filled by volunteers from the places visited.)
I am also struck by her story of the attempted name takeover by the YMCA. Ashwell was glad to have the backing of this organisation, who helped her in the relentless negotiating and dealing she had to do with government organisations. She refused, however, to allow them to rename her venture the YMCA Concert Parties. Performers were overlooked far too much, she felt, and removing the name of a performer from the name just helped make them ever more invisible, and she stood her ground on this, despite her stance souring relations between the two sides of the project:
“I look back with regret that any difference of opinion should have altered the pleasant relationship of that early time. The difficulties which ended in somewhat strained
relations between us were based on the desire of Mr. McCowan and the Y.M.C.A. to make the entertainments Y.M.C.A. I am not usually very obstinate, because my natural instinct, when a disagreement arises, is to “clear out” as soon as possible ; but on this point I insisted, that all the entertainments should remain “Lena Ashwell.” The arguments were most reasonable from the Y.M.C.A. point of view, that an organisation was bigger than a name, that the Y.M.C.A. could include every method of helping
mankind, and so on. I had every sympathy with them, but my whole object from the beginning had been the demonstrating that the arts were essentially and vitally necessary to human beings, as necessary as the Red Cross, and I could not see why the professional musician or actor should be submerged in the Y.M.C.A. organisation; one would not expect surgeons or nurses or doctors to be called Y.M.C.A., and I always considered my name merely as a label to signify that all the people concerned in the work were professionals. Undoubtedly the entertainment work became extremely powerful, and to a non-professional it must have seemed very pig-headed to insist upon the professional standing, but then Christian organisations have not been treated with the indifference and contempt that the music and drama of this country have suffered under.”
The book continues through the years and the countries of the war, from France to Egypt and the Middle East, from 1940-1945. The parties started with concerts given in hospitals and barracks tucked well back from the action, advancing ever closer to the front until Ashwell was permitted to send (all-male) parties to the Front itself, performing to men that the musicians knew were being sent out the next day to die. It was emotionally and physically gruelling work and those taking part in these tours were given extra recovery time in between travels. Ashwell started theatre parties as well, learning as she went not to underestimate the ability of her audiences to appreciate the great literature of the English language. There are moments of humour that flash through the fairly sombre narrative. There is also, overall, a well-justified sense of pride in what Ashwell achieved. The tension between the official approval of and desire for the concert parties and their reluctance actually to put money into the venture is where Ashwell finishes the book. Her polemic on the low place of the arts in our social hierarchy, and the lack of funding for something that is so intrinsic to our experience, resounds still:
“We have lost our way in civilisation. The Churches would not use the artist or help him or support him. The State will not acknowledge anything of importance except the business man, the efficient worker in supplying industry. Intellect is the god of man, and it was a significant truth that the writer of Proverbs insisted on, when he pointed out that the demand of the Creator was for the heart of man. The heart is the place of life, emotion, feeling ; the intellect is to control and guide this living force. Without vision the people perish, and Art is the beginning of vision, the early steps, the little light appearing like the will-o’-the- wisp in the surrounding darkness.
Let us use the gifts we have been given, and together with the importance of the intellect show an equal encouragement for the expressions of the heart. For those whose
religious limitations make them turn from the theatre, let them consider the words of the great mystic, Jacob Behmen: “Art is really the tool and instrument of God, wherewith the Divine wisdom worketh and laboureth. Why should I despise it?””
Sometimes we take a long time to learn the lessons of the past.
