Boys' Brigade

DESCRIPTION: "Here comes the Boys' Brigade, All smothered in marmalade, A tuppeny ha'penny pillpot, And half a yard of braid."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1917 (Nettleingham-TommysTunes)
KEYWORDS: soldier clothes money
FOUND IN: Britain
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Nettleingham-TommysTunes, #95, "Boys' Brigade" (1 short text, tune referenced)
Roud #10800
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Bugle Call" (tune)
NOTES [245 words]: At the start of World War I, Great Britain was the only major European power that did not have a conscript army. Instead, it had a small force of highly-trained regulars. As a result, when the war came, Britain had to raise an army quickly. (Every other nation just called up their demobilized ex-soldiers.) At first, they went with volunteers -- "Kitchener's Army" -- but a volunteer army needs officers just as much as any other, and Britain didn't have them. So, in essence, they took the volunteers who were college students, gave them a few months' leadership training, and made them the officers, since they at least had an education. (J. R. R. Tolkien was one of these, though he didn't join until he finished his degree.) To the grizzled old regular officers who needed years to get a commission, and sometimes decades to get a promotion, those student officers must have looked like boys.
Not that the enlisted men under those junior officers were any older; nor were the young men confined to the British side. At the First Battle of Ypres in late 1914, a German student corps was badly cut up -- an event that came to be known as "Der Kindermord bei Ypern" -- "The Massacre of the Innocents at Ypres." British troops would suffer their own Kindermords over the next several years.
But the reference to braid makes me think of officers, not enlisted men, and hence those college lads. I don't know that that's what this song is about, but it seems likely. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.8
File: NeTT095

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