Emma-Gees Song, The

DESCRIPTION: "Oh, I do like to be beside our Maxims, Oh, I do like to be an Emma Gee, Oh, I do like to stroll along the parapet, Where the Vickers go rattity-tat-tat-tat." The singer truly likes his machine guns
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 2014 (Pegler-SoldiersSongsAndSlangoftheGreatWar)
KEYWORDS: soldier | machine gun
FOUND IN: Britain
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Pegler-SoldiersSongsAndSlangoftheGreatWar, p. 349, "The Emma-Gees Song" (1 text)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside" (tune)
NOTES [178 words]: An "Emma-Gee" is of course a machine gun. According to Stephen Pope and Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, Dictionary of the First World War, 1995 (I use the 2003 Pen & Sword paperback), p. 310 says that the Maxim Gun was "The world's first automatic machine gun, invented in the United States by Hiram Maxim in 1884. Water-cooled and belt-fed, it was gradually adopted by European armies and was the blueprint for most heavy machine gun design in the early 20th century."
One of its derivatives was the Vickers Gun, which, according to Pope/Wheal, p. 497, was adopted by the British Army in 1912. It used belts of 250 rounds. It was complex enough that maintenance was sometimes a problem, so it was gradually phased out starting in 1915 in favor of the Lewis Gun. Thus the implication is that this song is from early in the war.
Pegler-SoldiersSongsAndSlangoftheGreatWar claims to have this from a lieutenant colonel he calls "Julius Caesar," which is obviously a pseudonym, but I've assumed whoever-it-was was a British soldier and so listed the song as found in Britain. - RBW
Last updated in version 7.1
File: PSoS349A

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