'Slate-Grey Rain and Polished Euphoniums': Southern Pennine Brass Bands, the Working Class and the North, C
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University of Huddersfield Repository Etheridge, Stephen 'Slate-Grey Rain and Polished Euphoniums': Southern Pennine Brass Bands, the Working Class and the North, c. 1840-1914 Original Citation Etheridge, Stephen (2014) 'Slate-Grey Rain and Polished Euphoniums': Southern Pennine Brass Bands, the Working Class and the North, c. 1840-1914. Doctoral thesis, University of Huddersfield. This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/24607/ The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. Users may access full items free of charge; copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided: • The authors, title and full bibliographic details is credited in any copy; • A hyperlink and/or URL is included for the original metadata page; and • The content is not changed in any way. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/ ‘Slate-Grey Rain and Polished Euphoniums’ Southern Pennine Brass Bands, the Working Class and the North c. 1840-1914 STEPHEN ETHERIDGE A thesis submitted to the University of Huddersfield in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Huddersfield July 2014 Copyright Statement: i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns any copyright in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Huddersfield the right to use such Copyright for any administrative, promotional, educational and/or teaching purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts, may be made only in accordance with the regulations of the University Library. Details of these regulations may be obtained from the Librarian. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of any patents, designs, trademarks and any and all other intellectual property rights except for the Copyright (the “Intellectual Property Rights”) and any reproductions of copyright works, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property Rights and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property Rights and/or Reproductions. Permissions: Written permissions have been obtained for all images that are not from the author’s collection. 1 Abstract: Brass Bands have become a clichéd representation of northern working-class culture. Hence, in 1974, Peter Hennessy described a band contest at the Albert Hall: A roll call of the bands is like an evocation of industrial history. From Wingates Temperance and Black Dyke Mills to more modern conglomerates [...]. Grown men, old bandsmen say, have been known to cry at the beauty of it all […]. Of all the manifestations of working-class culture, nothing is more certain than a brass band to bring on an attack of the George Orwells. Even the most hardened bourgeois cannot resist romanticizing the proletariat a little when faced with one.1 This stereotype, which emerged in the nineteenth century, generated the following research questions: What musical and social elements in the performance of brass band music strengthened working-class cultural identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did bands, which thrived in large numbers in the Southern Pennines, emerge as a musical and cultural metonym of the industrial landscape? This thesis therefore examines internal and external reporting of elements of brass musicianship in brass bands that constructed working class and northern identities. An outline of music-making in the north shows how the region supported bands’ development when they began to emerge from the 1830s. Brass musicianship and musical performance strengthened working-class cultural identity. Explorations of musical performances, leisure, rational recreation, social networks, gender and region, all combine to produce a fuller understanding of the northern working class between c.1840 and 1914. Such influences – of class, gender and region – contributed to brass bands producing primary examples of working-class identity. Not only have brass bands been under-explored in the history of leisure, but they also add to the understanding of the origins of stereotypes about working-class culture and northern identity that emerged, and came under scrutiny, in this period. 1 The Times (11 October, 1974). 2 Contents: Acknowledgements Page 4 List of Illustrations Page 5 List of Tables Page 6 Introduction Page 7 Chapter 1 Music-Making in the North of England: An Overview of the Creation of a Page 40 Musical Region Chapter 2 Working-Class Cultural Identity and Musical Performance: The Southern Page 65 Pennine Brass Band and the Invention of Musical Traditions Chapter 3 The Professionalisation of the Brass Band Movement, 1880 to 1914: The Page 116 influence of the Triumvirate of John Gladney (1839-1911), Alexander Owen (1851-1920) and Edwin Swift (1843-1904) Chapter 4 Brass Bands in the Southern Pennines, 1857-1914: Rational Recreation Page 161 and Perceptions of Working-Class Respectability Chapter 5 Music as a Lifelong Pursuit for Bandsmen in the Southern Pennines: Page 226 Brass Bands and Working-Class Masculinity Chapter 6 ‘Where the Brass Band is Beloved’: Representations of Brass Band Page 257 Contests, Bands and Bandsmen in the Press, 1859-1914 Chapter 7 The Brass Band and Perceptions of the North: Musical Constructions of Page 287 Space, Place and Region Conclusions Page 317 Tables Page 331 Bibliography Page 333 Word Count: 104,905 3 Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr Lisa Colton and Professor Paul Ward, for invaluable support throughout the course of the thesis. They both offered expert guidance and recommendations that helped me bring clarity to my ideas about brass bands as an expression of leisure, class and region. In addition, I would also like to thank Dr Paul Atkinson for his excellent input when Dr Colton was on extended leave. This research would not have been possible without the financial support of my employer, United Technologies Corporation, who provided a generous Employee Scholarship Programme, throughout my master’s degree and PhD, without expectation or demands. It was indeed a philanthropic gesture that has changed my life for the better. During the course of my research many archival staff went out of their way to find obscure material about brass bands for me. In particular, I would like to thank the staff of Rawtenstall Local Studies Library and Accrington Local Studies Library who helped me track down significant amounts of material. Brass bands are still very active in the Southern Pennines and I would like to thank all the members of Todmorden Community Brass Band for giving me a corner to sit in and examine their precious minute books and financial records on practice nights. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Ruth Seddon, for her unflagging support and encouragement throughout the course of this research, and her willingness to drive me to obscure graveyards in the search for just one more bandsman’s headstone. 4 List of Illustrations: Figure 1. Late eighteenth-century map of Southern Pennine Packhorse Trails: based on Yates’s Map of the County Palatine of Lancaster (1786) and Jeffery’s Map of the County of Yorkshire (1775). Source, <http://www.spptt.org.uk/about-us/ancient- highways-in-the-south-pennines/> accessed, 1 May, 2011. Permission Received from Sue Hogg, of the Southern Pennine Packhorse Trails’ Trust, 1984. Page 11. Figure 2. The Cornet Calendar, 1901. From the author’s own collection. Page 156. Figure 3. Advertisement for uniforms, and other brass band ephemera, British Bandsman (4 April, 1903), p. 88. From the author’s own collection. Page 238. 5 Tables 1) A List of Gladney, Swift and Owen’s arrangements, from brass band concert programmes, from the Greenhead Park Concerts in Huddersfield, 1903-1910. 6 Introduction The brass band has become a cliché in the representation of northern working- class culture. Dave Russell considers that, ‘the brass band represents one of the most remarkable working-class cultural achievements in European history.’1 This was a bold statement, yet it was the boldness of this statement that led to the research questions in this thesis. If the brass band does indeed represent one of the most remarkable working-class cultural achievements in European history, how was that achieved and what did it mean for the communities, such as the Southern Pennines, where brass bands thrived? The central questions this thesis addresses are: what musical and social elements in the performance of brass band music strengthened working-class cultural identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Within this working-class culture Southern Pennine brass bands emerged as a metonym of the northern industrial landscape, how did this happen? Inside the structure of these larger questions are more nuanced elements relating to working class and northern identity. How did bandsmen take musical performance and create their own identifiable culture? How did brass bands interact, negotiate and compromise with the industrialists and sponsoring communities who gave them finance, so that they could afford instruments to play, and how did this finance affect the cultural identity of brass bands? Finally, the bands relied on extended social networks for support, how did these networks influence the way bandsmen were perceived as working men? 1 Dave Russell, Popular Music in England 1840-1914: A Social History (Manchester, 1987, this edition 1991), p.