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Quote of the Day: John Philip Sousa on ‘HMS Pinafore’
In 1879, Mr. Sousa conducted an amateur theatrical production of the new comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, HMS Pinafore, in Philadelphia. He says in his memoirs (Marching Along, published in 1928, book report coming soon):
The immediate success of Pinafore was, to some extent, due to an admirable topical joke. Just before it was produced, Disraeli had appointed as First Lord of the Admiralty, W.H. Smith, head of a firm of publishers! Mr. Smith was a keen business man, a clean politician, and an excellent administrator but the connection between books and battleships was not apparent to the sea-dogs of the British Navy. Gilbert worked the joke for all it was worth in Sir Joseph Porter’s song, And Now I’m Ruler of the Queen’s Navee.
Published in Group WritingIts popularity in America was enhanced, not so much by the British joke, above referred to, as by an editorial in the Public Ledger–the very standard of Philadelphian respectability–known most descriptively as the “Philadelphia Bible”. Mr. Childs, its editor (a highly respected gentleman who presented all his callers with a cup and saucer as souvenirs of the happy occasion!), enthusiastically brought forth an editorial, pointing out the innocence, the cleanliness, and purity of Pinafore, in contrast to the tights and coarseness of the French pieces so often produced. The effect was electrical! People who had never been in a theatre in their lives came to see Pinafore. Here was emancipation for pent-up youth; all the myriads of Puritanical parents suddenly discovered that the theatre really gave innocent enjoyment, and was not such a den of the devil as they had been taught to believe.
Pity!
Almost every market town in England had a WHSmith shop when I was growing up, back in the days before bookstores became places where you went to hang out at the coffee bar and sip lattes or frappes with your effete friends and talk about books you hadn’t read and try to figure out ways to prevent people from reading other books (which you also hadn’t read). It started as a newsagents, and I remember–almost to the end of his life–Dad driving up to the Smiths in Droitwich every day to pick up his copy of the Telegraph. Like most shops with a storied, local, past, it’s very different today, and it’s emphasis isn’t really on England’s small towns and villages anymore.
My last WHSmith Experience occurred in 2007, when–on a sticky summer night presaging the awful and deadly floods soon to follow–I stood in line at that same Droitwich store to pick up my hot-off-the-presses copy of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows (written by She Who Must Not Be Named), which I thought would be a good read on my flight home the next day. (I was right.)
The old order changeth. Not always for the better.
Great post. I had no idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCM2nEBE0RY
The comments on the YouTube video are almost as good as the comedy sketch. Thanks, Doug.
I spent three weeks in Cambridge, UK, on a summer program, and well remember shopping at the Smiths in town. I bought some felt pens, brought them home, and they lasted for years (they had the WH Smith logo).
Now that I think about it, books and battleships do have a connection. They are both products of Western Civilization that improve the condition of humanity.
I remember shopping in Smith’s several times during UK business trips in the 80s and 90s. I had no idea there was a connection to Pinafore. Fun post!
I know this is a tangent, but I also think of the Bookshop Sketch when I hear the name “W.H. Smith.” Like so many commonplace Brit references, it’s something I first heard in the context of Python, and the association never goes away.
The Bookshop Sketch was actually not a Monty Python sketch, however. It’s one of many sketches the Pythons revived for their latter-day albums and stage shows, but originated from one of the several proto-Python projects that various subsets of the group were involved with.
This one came from At Last The 1948 Show, a sketch show that featured John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Marty Feldman, and Tim Brooke-Taylor. It’s really a very good show, and it’s about 90% of the way to being Monty Python. The show was long thought lost (thanks to the BBC’s policy of reusing videotapes), but almost all of it has been recovered and restored. If you have the BritBox streaming service, I recommend it, especially if you’re a Python fan.
I find many ‘topical’ themes in G & S. The Mikado (which probably can’t be put on now due to PC) has the great song about who you’d want to execute including those ‘who love all countries and times but their own.’ I saw The Mikado during the Watergate scandal and remember thinking it was quite timely. Cheers.