Read on to find out why the allied tanks of World War II advanced to the sound of the accordion...
VE Day... a personal tale of heroism and sadness
I cannot think about the 80th anniversary of VE Day without remembering my late mother and father. On 8 May 1945 they were 19 and 21 years old. My mother was training to be a teacher. My father was in a tank, part of the British Army’s 11th Armoured Division that had grimly fought its way across Belgium and Germany.
By May 1945 each had lost a brother in the war. Other brothers were still involved in the conflict in the Far East, where the war continued until August. One, captured by the Japanese, never returned. The joy on the streets of British cities on VE Day, chronicled in so many newsreels and photographs, was not fake – but it masked a terrible sadness.
Music continued despite the war... particularly the accordion
Despite the war, music-making had continued. When my father was conscripted, at 18, he had to defer his place at music college (little did he realise he would be in his mid-20s before he could take it up). However, he was a bit of a teenage prodigy on any number of brass instruments (he came from a Salvation Army brass band family) and, more usefully in wartime, the piano accordion – an instrument that could be hiked around army canteens and camps.
He also had the ability to play any popular tune by ear, fully harmonised, after one or two hearings. Consequently, he was much in demand for singsongs, dances and other improvised entertainments.
The war tanks advanced to my father's accordion playing
His finest hour, however, came on the eve of what everyone knew would be a brutal battle against an entrenched SS Panzer Division somewhere in Belgium. He was suddenly summoned by his commanding officer, a fierce Scotsman. ‘Sadly, Morrison, you don’t play the bagpipes,’ the officer barked. ‘So, you will take your accordion into your tank, we will all switch our radios to your frequency, and you will play as we advance.’ And that’s how the British Army rolled into battle the next day – to the stirring refrain of the ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ played on an old squeeze-box.
Liberating Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
My father used to recount that tale with a wry smile. The experience he almost never talked about happened a few months later, on 16 April 1945. As the 11th Armoured Division advanced into Germany, they came across a horrific place. It was Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp between Hamburg and Hanover. By chance, my father was among the first group of soldiers to enter. The memory of what he encountered there – the dead bodies and the barely living – stayed with him for the rest of his life, undoubtedly affecting him as a human being and, I believe, as a musician too.
I think it made him determined to use his one big talent – musical ability – to enrich the lives of those around him. He became a wonderful music teacher, working in very challenging schools with few resources yet putting on concerts and shows that kids remembered for decades afterwards.
The premiere of a new opera... a disappointment to a wartime lass
Soon after VE Day he came back to London for a few days’ leave. He had promised to take my mother, his future wife, out to a West End show – not least to celebrate them both surviving the war. But popular hits such as Ivor Novello’s Perchance to Dream and Noel Gay’s Me and My Girl were totally sold out, and my father didn’t have the money to buy from the touts. The only thing he could get his hands on was a pair of tickets for an unknown new opera being done at Sadler’s Wells Theatre – which wasn’t even in the West End.
My mother, expecting to be entertained by a nice light comedy, hated every minute of it. A headstrong Yorkshire lass who didn’t suffer fools (or soft southerners) gladly, she almost dumped my father on the spot for making her sit through what she would always subsequently refer to as ‘that incomprehensible racket’.
My father appreciated the music more, though his abiding memory (an accurate one, it seems from other reports) was that ‘it could have fallen apart at any minute – nobody seemed too sure of what they were doing’. The new opera, of course, was Peter Grimes by the rising young English composer Benjamin Britten.
Today we tend to think that its premiere was a seismic moment, ushering in the post-war renaissance of British music. Perhaps it was. But it’s sobering to recall that, for people in the audience such as my mother and father, it was actually one of the least startling or life-changing experiences they went through in 1945. Context is everything.
