This talk was given in January 2016 at a conference in
Glasgow
Working in Music: The Musicians’ Union, musical labour
and employment. Mitchell Library, Glasgow, 14 and 15 January 2016.
The abstract of the paper is below, and
you can listen to the MP3 recording here
Music
hall and trade unionism during world war one
Singers
and musicians in the union journal “The Performer” 1914-1918
John
Mullen, Université de Rouen
“The
Performer” was the union journal of the Variety Artistes Federation, which was
set up in 1906. The VAF represented many different types of performers, but
singers and musical performers were an important proportion: no doubt a third
of the members were singers. The singers and musicians in the VAF generally
travelled from town to town following their bookings, an individualist
lifestyle which distinguished them from the majority of musicians, who were
employed in house orchestras of music halls or cinemas.
My article using the union journal from the war years and in
particular its cartoons aims at analyzing union activity in these years. What
ideas were prioritized : patriotism, mutual help, union discipline,
respectability, strikes, workers’ solidarity ?
Dr
John Mullen is Professor at the University of Rouen in France. He has published
widely on the history of popular music. His full length study The Show Must Go On: Popular Song in
Britain during the First World War was published by Ashgate in
August 2015 as part of the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music series.
