British Military Music and the Legacy of the Napoleonic Wars

Abstract

Historians have increasingly stressed the impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on Britain and Ireland. Less attention, however, has been paid to the legacies of martial mobilization after 1815. Drawing on hitherto unused press and archival sources, this article assesses the implications of wartime military expansion for the music profession, and musical culture more generally, in the decades after Waterloo. It demonstrates that men and boys who honed their instrumental skills in uniform embarked on a variety of civilian musical careers, becoming instructors, wind performers, composers, and even opera singers. The article traces the post-war circulation of regimental instruments and reveals that a multitude of militia and volunteer bands remained active long after demobilization. The wartime proliferation of military bands, moreover, encouraged the subsequent spread of quasi-martial wind ensembles in wider society. Finally, the article proves that brass bands were first introduced to Britain and Ireland in a regimental guise. The influence of the military on musical culture after 1815, in short, was palpable and often profound, and manifested itself in numerous ways and settings.

Histories of Britain and Ireland in the long eighteenth century increasingly stress the significance of recurrent warfare. The climactic French Wars of 1793–1815, in particular, demanded unparalleled commitments of money, manpower, and material resources and exacted an appalling human toll. Their prosecution prompted the expansion of empire, commerce, and manufacturing as well as growth in the reach and cost of the state.¹ Although most of the fighting took place overseas, the domestic effects of the generational struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France are now understood as anything but remote. War was brought home through new taxes and food shortages, fear of invasion and conscription, fervent patriotic rhetoric, and the sight of soldiers in the streets: as many as one in five able-bodied men were serving in the armed forces in 1805.² Yet, if historians emphasize the impact of hostilities on wartime life, they tend to display less interest in tracing the legacies of militarization after 1815.³ While Linda Colley has cast the French Wars as crucial to the creation of a British national consciousness, other scholars characterize the consequences of large-scale mobilization as ephemeral rather than enduring.⁴ Indeed, the United Kingdom is often thought to have speedily abandoned the military posturing of a nation-in-arms, with the remarkable proliferation of volunteer corps, according to its latest historian, leaving ‘few obvious legacies’.⁵ Such conclusions may seem justified given the scale of disarmament, with spending on the armed forces falling by more than three-quarters between 1815 and 1820.⁶ But they sit uneasily alongside a burgeoning body of scholarship on the cultural memory of the French Wars, which has highlighted the ubiquity of Waterloo commemorations, buoyant interest in soldiers’ memoirs, and militaristic rhetoric among evangelical Christians in the decades after Napoleon’s defeat.⁷ The emulation of military drill by political demonstrators likewise suggests that the wartime experience could leave an indelible impression.⁸ Scott Hughes Myerly has even contended that post-war Britain fell under the spell of a ‘martial paradigm’, with the army’s customs and ‘servile values’ permeating manifold aspects of broader society from fashion to factory organization.⁹

Scholars of literature and song have productively explored the impact of warfare on late Georgian novels, poetry, ballads, and drama.¹⁰ Thus far, however, studies of the French Wars and their aftermath have paid little heed to military music. Crochets and clarinets may at first glance seem tangential to the brutal business of armed conflict, yet organized sound and state-orchestrated violence were in fact closely intertwined. A pre-eminent form of contemporary entertainment, music was a vital medium of wartime propaganda and a key interface between soldiers and civilians at all levels of society.¹¹ The drastic expansion of the land forces lent martial music-making a new prominence in wartime Britain and Ireland, reshaping the auditory landscapes of rural villages and garrison towns. By 1814, more than 20,000 instrumentalists were serving in uniform, not only in the regular army and the militia but in a host of part-time home defence formations including the yeomanry, local militia, and volunteers. These performers negotiated dual identities as soldiers and musicians: though most in full-time service were formally enlisted and subject to military discipline, they were set apart by their higher pay, distinctive uniforms, and specialized roles. The majority were fifers, drummers, trumpeters, and buglers, whose music conveyed commands while enhancing parade-ground pageantry and morale. Regiments also maintained sizeable bands, which mustered an increasingly elaborate array of wind instruments, including clarinets, horns, and bassoons, alongside percussion instruments inspired by Ottoman precedents. Maintained by a combination of state funding and officers’ subscriptions, these bands enlivened military ceremonies as well as sundry other public occasions, including balls, concerts, and civic processions. The wartime military met its prodigious demand for musical talent by recruiting seasoned professionals and church musicians while also training a mass of male novices through a cogent and effective instructional programme.¹² As the composer A. F. C. Kollmann assessed in 1812, the expansion of military bands had supplied England with ‘a great number of excellent performers on the different wind instruments’.¹³ The cultural ramifications of the French Wars were equally apparent to the editor of The Harmonicon, a leading music periodical. Writing in 1832, William Ayrton declared that the proliferation of martial ensembles had played a central role in making the English ‘a musical people’; their importance, he suggested, was rivalled only by the multiplication of choral societies following the 1784 Handel concerts in Westminster Abbey.¹⁴

If the scale and significance of military music-making was not lost on contemporaries, it has traditionally loomed small in modern histories of British and Irish musical life. Cyril Ehrlich identified a ‘huge increase’ in the size of the British music profession during the nineteenth century but did not consider the military’s role in expanding the pool of trained performers, at least prior to the foundation of an army school of music in 1857.¹⁵ Deborah Rohr subsequently argued that the military made only a marginal contribution to the music profession between 1750 and 1850, noting that a mere nine individuals in her database of nearly 6,600 musicians were known to have been trained in uniform. However, the representativeness of her sample is doubtful: heavily weighted towards London, it made no use of military records and partly relied on files of the Royal Society of Musicians, which formally excluded regular soldiers and militiamen from 1804. Trevor Herbert and Helen Barlow, authors of an important 2013 survey of British martial music, have questioned Rohr’s conclusions on these grounds. They provided examples of men who had joined the music profession through regimental service and posited that such career patterns were ‘probably commonplace’.¹⁶ In a different vein, historians of popular music-making have periodically proposed a causal connection between wartime military bands and the subsequent spread of amateur wind and brass ensembles in civil society. However, little concrete evidence has been adduced in support of this hypothesis.¹⁷ Indeed, more recent accounts tend to downplay the military’s influence on the earliest brass bands, despite acknowledging the later fillip provided by their integration into mid-Victorian volunteer corps. According to the prevailing view, brass ensembles were not formed in direct imitation of regimental ones but comprised a distinct musical species – a product of industrialization pioneered by some combination of working-class performers and middle-class sponsors.¹⁸

This article explores the impact of military mobilization on the music profession, and musical activity more generally, in the decades after Waterloo. In so doing, it not only makes an original contribution to music history but offers new perspectives on the history of war and late Georgian society. The article augments existing narratives of class formation and the commercialization of leisure by uncovering the influence of regimental music-making on popular culture.¹⁹ Tracing the careers of former drummers and regimental bandsmen also illuminates the experiences of military veterans, a once obscure demographic which has begun to receive scholarly attention.²⁰ What follows echoes research on army doctors and regimental tradesmen by interpreting soldiering as a career choice which, for all its risks and hardships, could facilitate social mobility and hone transferable skills.²¹ By documenting the experiences of foreign-born musical veterans, who were often headhunted on the continent or recruited from war prisons, this article emphasizes the British military’s multinational character. It reinforces arguments that warfare did not merely sever cross-border ties but also instigated migration and created new avenues of cultural exchange.²²

Rather than focusing on a handful of familiar musical figures and well-known brass bands, this article draws on an unprecedented array of primary sources, including press reports, memoirs, and regimental records. Yet the problems inherent in adjudicating the military’s influence must be acknowledged from the outset. Quantitative approaches like that adopted by Deborah Rohr appear superficially robust but can provide a misleading impression when based on incomplete data.²³ Newspaper obituaries and biographical dictionaries encapsulate individual careers but do not encompass all musicians, or even a typical sub-section, and frequently provide scant information on the backgrounds and training of specific performers. Even when evidence of this nature is available, it is not always easy to determine how formative military service may have been when compared to other musical activities an individual may have pursued. Indeed, the musical legacies of wartime mobilization can only be understood in the context of other currents in nineteenth-century musical life, including the expansion of earning opportunities for musicians and heightened appetite for music lessons, bands, and concerts in an era of rapid urbanization, economic development, and demographic change.²⁴ Assessing the relative importance of these intertwined factors is hardly straightforward, not least because the proliferation of regimental bands may have been partly responsible for the increased public interest in music, as a small army of contemporaries emphatically claimed.²⁵

While bearing such challenges in mind, this article assesses the military’s impact on wider musical culture through several complementary approaches. Employing the investigative technique of prosopography (collective biography), it begins by identifying common trends in the lives of musical veterans, many of whom continued to draw on the instrumental talents they had cultivated in uniform. Evidence of individual careers, impressionistic in nature though compelling in its cumulative weight, is reinforced by the observations of nineteenth-century commentators, who recognized the prominence of ex-servicemen in the musical lives of localities and the music profession more generally. But the military’s impact on the post-war musical world cannot simply be measured in terms of individuals. Not only did musicians of the regular army and yeomanry continue playing in peacetime civilian settings, but a multitude of militia and volunteer ensembles remained active long after the demobilization of their respective corps. The article also traces the post-war circulation of regimental instruments and identifies tunes originating in the military which remained popular with the broader public after the return of peace. It argues that the expansion of military bands provided an important stimulus to the music trade and facilitated the subsequent spread of civilian wind ensembles, which were in fact explicitly modelled on their regimental counterparts. Such quasi-martial troupes enjoyed cross-class appeal, becoming fixtures of seaside resorts, pitheads, and political demonstrations, and were by no means confined to northern English industrial towns. Moreover, the British brass band, far from being a civilian creation, was pioneered by the military in the immediate post-war era. The impact of martial mobilization on musical culture after 1815, in short, was palpable and often profound, and manifested itself in a variety of ways and settings.

I

Regimental performers were not spared from demobilization on the return of peace: one officer reckoned in 1814 that the reduction of the militia would make job-seeking musicians as plentiful as haymakers in a Staffordshire summer.²⁶ Although former drummers and bandsmen often pursued non-musical vocations, large numbers continued performing after discharge. James Wild, formerly of the Life Guards, retained a captured French trumpet and ‘often played upon it…making music wherever he went’, while an erstwhile militia flautist found work in a Coventry factory but spent his holidays hosting family music parties.²⁷ Others performed publicly when veterans paraded and dined together on special occasions. Richard Bentinck of Rochdale, for example, summoned the local Waterloo men every year on 18 June with the drumsticks he had carried during the great battle.²⁸

Retired military instrumentalists used their musical skills not only to relive past glories but to support themselves in civilian life. Regimental pipers found employment with Scottish aristocrats and Highland societies, capitalizing on the ‘cult of tartanry’ that Caledonian wartime service had done so much to cultivate.²⁹ Onetime military bandsmen also routinely joined concert, theatre, and music festival orchestras.³⁰ An American visitor criticized the wind performers of London’s Drury Lane Theatre in 1836, noting: ‘They play as if they were blasting in the streets as many of them do in military bands of which a large portion of them are members. Those that are not now have been almost to a man attached formerly to some military musical corps.’³¹

Most such performers laboured in obscurity, but several ex-regimental bandsmen became musical celebrities. The trumpeter Thomas Harper, for example, learned his craft in the band of the Royal East India Company Volunteers, while the clarinettist Thomas Willman began his career playing for the Royal Tyrone Militia alongside his German father and brother. Praised as the best musicians of the day on their respective instruments, Harper and Willman were principals in the King’s Theatre orchestra, professors at the Royal Academy of Music, and in perennial demand on the national festival circuit.³² Musicians with military experience not only excelled as wind instrumentalists but made their mark as violinists, cathedral singers, and religious composers.³³ John Sinclair, a tradesman’s son who cut his teeth in the Argyllshire Militia band, subsequently pursued a spectacular career as a vocalist on the London stage.³⁴ Another musician of the same regiment later gained renown by acting in theatrical adaptations of Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy, having developed his talents as a comic singer in the officers’ mess.³⁵

To be sure, military service was often merely one of several musical endeavours undertaken by budding performers and was not necessarily the first or most critical to their later success. Fourteen years in the Denbighshire Militia had made John Parry ‘thoroughly acquainted with every wind instrument’, not to mention an experienced singer, pianist, violinist, and harpist. Yet the stonemason’s son had previously taken clarinet lessons from a dancing master and accompanied a church choir. Moreover, Parry claimed he still had ‘almost every thing to learn’ about composition on leaving the military to pursue a metropolitan musical career.³⁶ Nonetheless, the salience of soldiering as a pathway into the music profession was plain enough to nineteenth-century commentators. A London reviewer writing in 1829, for example, assessed that ‘many of our present fine instrumental players’ had been schooled in volunteer bands raised in the wartime capital.³⁷ Thirteen years later, The Salisbury and Winchester Journal listed fourteen distinguished musicians who had served in the military during the French Wars, adding: ‘[n]umerous other vocalists, from the militia regiments, have risen owing to their superior singing’.³⁸ Although the Napoleonic generation began fading from the musical scene by the late 1840s, their influence as teachers and performers was sufficiently lasting for a contributor to The Musical World in 1876 to salute ‘that capital school of military musicians which was developed in the British army at the commencement of the present century’.³⁹

Indeed, any assessment of the place of former soldiers in the music profession must look beyond their own lifespans, for musicians trained in or employed by the military instructed their sons and sometimes also their daughters in their vocation, establishing noteworthy musical dynasties.⁴⁰ Charles Godfrey rose from militia drummer to bandmaster of the Coldstream Guards; his progeny led the bands of all three regiments of Foot Guards simultaneously, founded the influential Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra, and conducted the London Wireless Orchestra for the BBC.⁴¹ This story was by no means unique. The leading operatic composer William Vincent Wallace, the Scottish composer Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie, and prominent singers including John Sims Reeves, John Orlando Parry, and Edward Lloyd were all descended from regimental bandsmen.⁴² Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan, Victorian Britain’s foremost composer, was the son of another military bandmaster who had learned to play at the Royal Military Asylum from 1814 while his own father served as a private soldier overseas.⁴³ Even the promoter of Gilbert and Sullivan’s celebrated comic operas, a wealthy theatre impresario who founded the Savoy Hotel, was the offspring of a musician and notable flute-maker initially trained in the Royal Horse Guards.⁴⁴

Other ex-military instrumentalists, though never famous, became significant figures in the cultural lives of their localities. George Philip Klitz of the Royal Flintshire Militia settled in Lymington and was described by a visitor in 1827 as ‘the Clementi of the place’.⁴⁵ The German native organized assemblies, performed at concerts with his six sons, and opened a music shop which traded until 1981.⁴⁶ Further north, David Hillocks of Forfar joined a volunteer band as a child and led local militia fifers before becoming a flute teacher and training parish bands. According to his 1857 obituary: ‘The numbers of our young men that, from time to time, have availed themselves of Hillocks’ tuition, it would be difficult to enumerate…our town even now abounds with fluters in all classes of society, old and young, who have at some time or other got instruction from him.’⁴⁷

Ex-servicemen who established themselves as provincial music retailers and teachers could struggle to make ends meet through music alone: some faced insolvency or doubled as schoolmasters, stationers, and publicans to support themselves.⁴⁸ Yet growing middle-class demand for music lessons helped more than a few make a respectable living from their preferred profession. The German musician Christian William Klophel was recruited in Middelburg by the 1st Battalion, 50th Foot during the Walcheren expedition of 1809 and later settled in Omagh. By 1844, the retired bandmaster was the highest earner among 515 military pensioners in the district, making £1 5s weekly as a music teacher in addition to his 10d daily pension.⁴⁹

Besides catering to London theatregoers and amateur pianists, musical veterans took part in the thriving and boisterous world of popular leisure.⁵⁰ The local militia drum-major Billy Purvis, to give just one example, borrowed the regimental bass drum in 1816 and thundered away for an equestrian show at a Northumberland fair; he went on to enjoy a storied career as an itinerant entertainer.⁵¹ Several former fifers subsisted precariously as ballad-singers and buskers, including William Simons, a black man from South Carolina who became ‘well known in the streets [of London] by playing the clarionet’.⁵² Homecoming military performers struck up for traditional parish festivities such as Lancashire rushbearings but also accompanied a growing array of commercial amusements from travelling circuses to leisure cruises.⁵³ The wars provided ample fodder for popular exhibitions and entertainments, including the long-running Waterloo-themed equestrian melodrama which debuted at Astley’s Amphitheatre in London in 1824, and the presence of veterans at such spectacles was especially valued as a hallmark of authenticity. Proprietors of a Waterloo panorama displayed at Norwich in 1821 trumpeted that their offering was enlivened by ‘experienced musicians’ who had previously served as ‘masters of military bands in the army’.⁵⁴

Ex-regimental performers benefited from wider social and economic developments in the post-war decades, not least the transport improvements that facilitated musical touring and the expansion of domestic music-making and concerts.⁵⁵ Yet they also displayed an entrepreneurial ability to create new markets and opportunities for themselves. Consider the case of Joseph Greenhill, a former militia bugle-major. He persuaded coach guards to exchange their unsophisticated post horns for keyed bugles, enabling them to entertain travellers with lively melodies on tedious journeys and so secure greater gratuities.⁵⁶ Greenhill carried on a roaring trade as a keyed bugle manufacturer until his death in 1836 while many guards achieved considerable renown as soloists along their cross-country routes, including a former Grenadier Guards musician who ‘always attracted much attention’ on arriving with his coach in Manchester.⁵⁷ The best-known and most controversial ex-military entrepreneur was surely the German-born band trainer Johann Bernhard Logier, who developed a system of class teaching for the piano and a device for positioning a beginner’s hands on the keyboard. More than eighty ‘Logerian’ piano schools were operating across Ireland and Britain by 1820, each paying an initial franchise fee of 100 guineas. Logier’s music theory textbooks remained internationally influential long after the decline of his academies, reportedly selling more than 50,000 copies by 1824.⁵⁸

II

Just as individual ex-servicemen remained prominent in the musical scene, tunes originating in or inspired by the military retained popularity long after the return of peace. A comic song about Hartlepool ‘fisher lasses’, composed by a visiting bassoonist of the Stockton Volunteers, was crooned by sailors for decades in the County Durham port, while London theatre critics in the 1820s decried ‘the national adoption of the congregation of noises, called Battle Sinfonias’ alongside ‘the modern mania for introducing military bands on the stage’.⁵⁹ ‘The downfall of Paris’, a favourite regimental quick march, became a mainstay of buskers in post-war London alongside other much-requested ‘war tunes’.⁶⁰ Even those less enamoured with the melody’s ‘tormenting strum, strum, strum’ could not deny that it was ‘known to every-body’.⁶¹ A music critic writing in 1827 lamented the neglect of the piano music of Bach and Mozart in favour of the allegedly undeserving ‘Fall of Paris’, which every instructor ‘young or old, good or bad, metropolitan or provincial must be able to play, and moreover to teach’.⁶² The dissemination of this martial melody, which ironically had been composed by a French musician in British military service, illustrates the fluidity of contemporary repertoires: tunes were readily borrowed for performance in new contexts and traversed the social spectrum with relative ease.⁶³

The post-war salience of military music-making can be traced not only in terms of individual tunes and careers but through the numerous regimental bands which remained active long after demobilization. Militia colonels managed to preserve ensembles of as many as nineteen musicians as part of the permanent cadres retained to facilitate occasional peacetime training exercises.⁶⁴ These bands performed widely in their home counties, enlivening both aristocratic parties (Figure 1) and popular festivities: in 1819, one veteran accused Irish militia bandsmen of behaving more like ‘strolling vagrants’ than soldiers by hiring themselves out to ‘mountibanks, puppet show-men and such like’ at fairs around Dublin.⁶⁵ Recalling his youth in Richmond, North Yorkshire, in the 1820s and 1830s, Matthew Bell described the expert militia band as a ‘very popular’ source of free entertainment for poorer townspeople and claimed it aroused ‘a slumbering talent for music in some of those who heard its martial and inspiring strains’.⁶⁶ The continued audibility of militia musicians also had political implications: their performances encouraged crowd participation in local royal ceremonial and lent an appealing aura to the established order, though bands in Ireland could also spark indignation among Catholic listeners by playing tunes with sectarian connotations.⁶⁷

Figure 1. Military bandsmen, probably from the Glamorgan Militia, perform at a dance in the New Hall of Tredegar House in Newport, Wales, c. 1830. Artist unknown. ©National Trust Images/Andreas von Einsiedel.

Furthermore, at least twenty ensembles associated with part-time auxiliary formations continued performing after the dissolution of their corps.⁶⁸ Although several volunteer and local militia bands benefited from the continued sponsorship of former officers, others capitalized on connections and reputations established in wartime to become self-sustaining, commercial musical troupes. ‘[H]aving for so many years been the master and leader of the Local Militia band’, advertised Thomas Foster, a Sheffield inkstand manufacturer, in 1827, he could ‘furnish a quadrille band for the ball room, as well as a military field band, upon the shortest notice, and on reasonable terms’.⁶⁹ The Sheffield Local Militia band-for-hire was still performing at the town’s botanical gardens in 1851, thirty-six years after Waterloo.⁷⁰ Further north, the Bolton Local Militia musicians continued playing together for some years after the death of their former colonel in 1832, being much in demand at ‘public processions, club feasts’ and ‘country concerts’. The Bolton ensemble’s ‘good influence’ on the local musical scene, according to a historian writing in 1884, was ‘felt even unto the present time’.⁷¹

When assessing the legacies of military music-making, instruments provide another trail to follow. The survival of auxiliary ensembles depended not only on the perseverance of practised performers but on continued access to instruments purchased in wartime. Although drums and bugles issued by the Board of Ordnance were supposed to be returned to public stores on demobilization and band instruments generally belonged to regimental officers, drummers and bandsmen were often manifestly unwilling to surrender the tools of their trade. Seven Herefordshire local militia musicians petitioned their colonel in 1816 ‘to make us a present’ of the regimental instruments, noting that performers in other disbanded units had been permitted to ‘keep their instruments as a perquisite’. The men promised to continue their weekly practices if the request was granted, pledging that ‘a band will be always ready in the town of Leominster for any occasion’.⁷² Some corps repossessed musical materiel solely with the objective of stewarding a peacetime ensemble. Subscribers of the Doncaster Volunteers, for example, presented the instruments to the town corporation in 1814, depositing them in the Mansion House ‘as an encouragement for the continuance of a military band’.⁷³ The availability of old regimental instruments also facilitated the revival of long dormant auxiliary ensembles and the formation of new bands in the post-war years by reducing the need for prohibitive capital outlays. Describing the ‘resurrection’ of a Devon volunteer troupe for Queen Victoria’s coronation celebrations, The Western Times reported that the ‘resuscitated veterans’, having dusted off their instruments and rebranded themselves as the Powderham band, would henceforth be giving weekly open-air concerts.⁷⁴

Even when martial musicians did not continue performing together, their instruments were frequently audible long after demobilization. William Jackson of Masham, a miller’s son who grew up to become a leading Yorkshire choirmaster, reportedly ‘commenced his musical career’ by learning to play his father’s old volunteer fife.⁷⁵ Erstwhile regimental instruments were pressed into service at local feasts and public celebrations, including an antique Sea Fencibles drum beat by Gloucestershire villagers for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.⁷⁶ Bass drums likely sourced from the military, many still sporting the Royal Arms (Figure 2), were widely adopted by street musicians and twinned with pan pipes, enabling Punch and Judy performers ‘to call the people together’ before beginning their puppet shows.⁷⁷ Other ex-regimental instruments were played in church.⁷⁸ Moreover, the determination of some officers to auction off the instruments of their disbanded corps made large volumes of musical hardware available at reduced prices.⁷⁹ The regular army remained an important source of second-hand instruments for amateur players and civilian bands in the post-war decades, as the memoirs of a Dover shoemaker strikingly demonstrate. Having purchased the old instruments of a Rifle Brigade battalion for the bargain price of £3 7s 6d in the 1830s, George Herbert bartered or sold parts of the assemblage to other working-class performers and took lessons on the trombone from a regimental musician, playing it at nightly musical parties and joining a Conservative election band.⁸⁰

Figure 2. A study of musicians featuring a keyed bugle and a bass drum sporting the Royal Arms, c. 1815–40, circle of William Henry Pyne. Courtesy of Woolley and Wallis Salerooms Ltd.

Wartime investment in martial music placed enormous demands on instrument makers, flooding them with orders during periods of military expansion and generating an ongoing need for instrument replacements and repairs.⁸¹ The resulting opportunities nurtured the commercial infrastructure of the music business nationwide, encouraging instrument manufacturing in Edinburgh and drawing provincial booksellers and metalworkers into the trade.⁸² The pewterer James Power, for example, began repairing regimental bugles and trumpets in his native Galway, then became a military instrument maker in Dublin, and ultimately established a lucrative music publishing house on the Strand, releasing Thomas Moore’s hugely popular collections of Irish drawing-room songs.⁸³ Military demand also spurred innovations in instrument design, with manufacturers promoting the newly invented bass horn as an improvement on the serpent and developing more durable clarinets for regimental service.⁸⁴ Instrument makers and martial musicians experimented with adding slides, holes, and keys to trumpets and bugles to increase the number of playable notes, culminating in the patenting of the keyed bugle by the master of the Cavan Militia band in 1810.⁸⁵ Even in peacetime, the Guards regiments remained primary ports of call for inventors and dealers anxious to popularize novel brass instrument designs because of their deep pockets and national prestige.⁸⁶

III

Military mobilization directly encouraged the formalization of amateur wind bands. Outdoor ceremonies and cavalcades in the later eighteenth century had frequently featured non-military accompaniment, sometimes provided by chapel performers, civic musicians known as waits, or a smattering of poorly documented village ensembles.⁸⁷ But secular civilian wind bands became far more widespread and better organized in the decades after 1815. Often formally governed by bandmasters, committees, and written regulations, they were primarily comprised of skilled and semi-skilled working men and considered permanent enough to justify substantial investments in instruments and uniforms (Figure 3).⁸⁸ The Newcastle historian Eneas Mackenzie, writing in 1827, was unequivocal about the link between the expansion of civilian wind ensembles and the recent conflict:

The bands attached to the numerous military corps embodied during the late war have tended greatly to extend the knowledge of music. At present, there is a band belonging to almost every extensive colliery upon the Tyne and the Wear, all of which are encouraged by the owners on account of the moral influence of music. In Newcastle, it has become, as in other parts, an essential part of education.⁸⁹

Figure 3. ‘Band in front of the King’s Statue, Weymouth, Dorset’, by A. Beattie, 1844. Weymouth Museum.

The military facilitated the spread of civilian ensembles by cultivating a geographically dispersed supply of trained instrumentalists capable of tutoring amateur players. An ‘old regimental bandsman’ in Crieff in Perthshire, for example, took charge of the town’s band on its foundation in 1825.⁹⁰ Eleven years later in Ireland, young men of the Carrick-on-Suir amateur ensemble clubbed together to engage the instructional services of the Tipperary Militia’s bandmaster.⁹¹ Ex-soldiers even established themselves as serial band-trainers, including William Shaw of Lincoln, an erstwhile ‘trumpeter and bugleman’ of the 33rd Foot who reportedly taught forty-nine ensembles by 1844.⁹² Onetime regimental bandsmen also provided important professional stiffening as rank-and-file performers. A Dutch musician captured at the battle of Camperdown served with the 73rd Foot at Waterloo and subsequently became a well-known member of Great Yarmouth’s town band.⁹³

Not all amateur ensembles incorporated former soldiers; church and chapel musicians were also prominent as leaders or participants.⁹⁴ Yet regimental bands constituted the primary model for civilian wind ensembles and set the standard against which they were judged.⁹⁵ Instead of adopting the mixed woodwind and string instrumentation common among English church musicians, secular civilian bands formed in the 1820s and 1830s employed the wind and percussion instruments associated with their military counterparts. A band of tradesmen in Graiguenamanagh in County Kilkenny, for example, featured six clarinets, one piccolo, two flutes, one French horn, two bassoons, one bass horn, cymbals, and a bass drum in 1829. Others incorporated keyed bugles, trombones, triangles, and tambourines.⁹⁶ Moreover, civilian bands procured eye-catching and often palpably military attire: an eighteen-strong Salford ensemble turned out in 1831 ‘wearing military dresses of the hussar cut’.⁹⁷ Amateur ensembles also mirrored regimental repertoires, performing marches or ‘martial’ pieces and purchasing manuscript music books directly from military bands.⁹⁸ Some civilian musicians even emulated military drill: a band raised by an experimental socialist community in Lanarkshire in 1827 was ‘taught in the military form’ and practised ‘marching, counter marching, [and] wheeling’.⁹⁹ Finally, the involvement of ex-servicemen could infuse civilian bands with an ethos of military rigour. Roderick Innes, a sprightly pensioner in Stonehaven who had served in India as a drummer, was well-liked as the leader of a temperance society band but ‘never forgot that he was the soldier, and was strict in the enforcement of discipline’ over his musicians.¹⁰⁰

The multiplication of quasi-military bands following the French Wars, though partly explained by the participation of discharged regimental instrumentalists, was also driven by audience expectations. The ubiquity of martial musicians in wartime appears to have fostered a perception that public events and processions were incomplete without their performances.¹⁰¹ The ‘military band’ became a commodified product independent of the armed forces, supplied by civilians or retired soldiers to clients who hoped to replicate familiar sounds and spectacles.¹⁰² Indeed, a sizeable number of post-war civilian bands billed themselves as ‘military’ ensembles to reflect their pseudo-martial character. The Saffron Walden Military Band, for instance, celebrated their second anniversary in 1832 by ‘march[ing] into the town en militaire’ and sharing a convivial meal with ‘several veterans’ of the town’s former volunteer ensemble. Whether these ex-military instrumentalists played a role in the formation of the post-war band is unclear, but their invitation to dinner suggests that its members saw themselves as heirs to a civic tradition of martial music-making initiated in wartime.¹⁰³

Just as regimental bands played for socially diverse audiences, their civilian imitations enjoyed remarkably broad appeal, finding favour in a variety of settings. At one end of the social scale, aristocrats organized wind ensembles for their stately homes. The uniformed band of the marquesses of Breadalbane, composed of apprentices and estate workers, was strictly governed by a succession of ex-army musicians, including a Sicilian who had served with the 40th Foot at Waterloo.¹⁰⁴ Meanwhile, industrialists and mine owners, intent on providing their employees with ‘rational recreations’, sponsored wind bands as ordered and morally uplifting alternatives to customary leisure pursuits such as drinking, cock-fighting, and gambling.¹⁰⁵ The social reformer Robert Owen believed that music and military discipline promoted happiness and obedience; he formed an amateur band from his mill workers at New Lanark and hired a retired soldier to teach their children to march with fife and drum.¹⁰⁶ Further south, a Belper manufacturer financed a workers’ band and choir under the direction of William Gover, who like his father before him had led the Derbyshire Militia band.¹⁰⁷ Even when ex-soldiers were not directly involved, exposure to military music shaped the sound and appearance of workplace ensembles. John Mackinnon, the son of a fencible sergeant who grew up in wartime Glasgow, compared the sound of fifes and drums to ‘the voice of an old acquaintance’; he taught both instruments to boys under his supervision at Carnbroe Ironworks in 1859 and formed them into a band with uniforms modelled on military dress.¹⁰⁸

Belief in the moral benefits of music also prompted the formation of military-style ensembles in schools and children’s homes. By 1825, students at Hazelwood School near Birmingham woke to the sound of the reveille on a keyed bugle and marched to classes in ‘military step’ behind a wind ensemble composed of fellow pupils.¹⁰⁹ This experimental academy was unusual in its emphatic emulation of regimental discipline, but an increasing number of educational institutions, including the Blue Coat Hospital in Liverpool (Figure 4), organized similar musical initiatives for working-class boys from the 1840s. Intended to inculcate obedience, promote good character, and provide children with marketable skills, these mid-century bands and fife and drum corps were instructed by men such as David Byford and Richard Porteous, who had begun their own musical careers as military band-boys in the Napoleonic conflict.¹¹⁰

Figure 4. ‘Recollections of the Blue-Coat Hospital, Liverpool, St George’s Day, 1843’, lithograph by Thomas Picken after Henry Travis, 1850. Courtesy of Bluecoat, Liverpool.

Towns and villages across Britain and Ireland, driven by a desire to enhance civic spectacle and promote edifying recreational amenities, raised funds for quasi-military bands in the 1820s and 1830s. In the Yorkshire market town of Great Driffield, for example, gentlemen, professional men, merchants, and skilled workers subscribed for the purchase of instruments and sets of marches for use ‘on all public occasions’.¹¹¹ Other community bands receiving patronage from propertied townsmen played publicly on summer evenings in the manner of regimental musicians in garrison towns.¹¹² Enthusiasm for civic bands was particularly apparent in English seaside and spa resorts, which had benefited from the inaccessibility of continental alternatives in wartime.¹¹³ Having grown accustomed to military ensembles playing for visitors on the promenade, Hastings formed a new town band to perform in the same spot from 1818.¹¹⁴ Another town band in Southampton, led by a former militia bugle-major, played three evenings weekly on the Royal Pier in July 1834.¹¹⁵ Quasi-military ensembles became equally indispensable leisure amenities in spa communities. Conscious of the need to compete against Cheltenham’s Montpellier Spa musicians with their ‘imposing foreign military costumes’, leading citizens in Leamington Spa fundraised for their own ‘military town band’ in 1834.¹¹⁶ The Leamington ensemble, which played operatic excerpts at ‘promenades, archery fetes, and other public amusements’ during the summer tourist season, was likewise clothed in ‘military costume’ and led by former regimental musicians.¹¹⁷

Although encouraged by sponsorship from above, the spread of pseudo-military bands, as with the early Victorian zeitgeist for singing classes, was also a product of working-class initiative.¹¹⁸ Rapid population growth, urbanization, and industrialization expanded potential audiences and therefore earning opportunities for amateur ensembles, as did the comparative frequency of elections and political demonstrations.¹¹⁹ Enterprising working men responded to demand by organizing wind bands with their friends: they composed marches and pooled spare shillings to obtain instruction and procure instruments, often through hire purchase agreements.¹²⁰ The multiplication of friendly societies, temperance associations, and party political clubs by the 1830s further encouraged the formalization of amateur bands, as fraternities hired existing ensembles for processions and excursions and created new ones from their own membership.¹²¹ Many such bands, not least those renowned for public carousing, were animated by the priorities of their working-class participants and audiences more than middle-class social anxieties.¹²² For the radical printer Henry Heavisides, who spent ten years as a military musician before leading an amateur band and a workhouse fife and drum corps in Stockton-on-Tees, music was inextricably linked not to the taming of the unruly masses but the self-empowerment of working men.¹²³

One of the foremost emblems of working-class life in nineteenth-century Britain was the muscular sound of an exclusively brass ensemble.¹²⁴ The identity of the first band to dispense with woodwind instruments has been fiercely debated, but historians have hitherto accepted that brass bands originated in the 1830s at the initiative of civilian musicians.¹²⁵ In fact, military bands began employing the format earlier, taking advantage of advances in chromatic brass technology developed at home and on the continent. An 1818 musical dictionary reported that the 15th Foot had organized a band ‘formed of bugles only’, while the Paisley Volunteer Rifle Corps, mobilized to counter insurrectionary radicalism in 1819–20, mustered a band composed of keyed bugles and a single drum.¹²⁶ The ‘brass band’ of the 14th Light Dragoons, equipped with keyed trumpets, elicited accolades at an 1822 review.¹²⁷ The 2nd Life Guards, which by 1827 had received valved trumpets from the tsar, fielded a ‘famous Russian chromatic trumpet-band’, as did the 8th Hussars. Numerous other regular cavalry, infantry, and yeomanry regiments boasted brass ensembles by 1830, sometimes alongside a ‘full’ or ‘general’ band configuration that retained woodwind instruments (Table 1 and Figure 5).¹²⁸ Moreover, early brass bands organized outside the military were often spearheaded by retired soldiers. The Waterloo veteran James Sanderson, a former trumpet-major, publicized his ‘military brass band’ in February 1829 and led the troupe at festivities in and around Leamington Spa and Warwick.¹²⁹ Another ‘disbanded military man’ instructed the Chester Amateur Brass Band which played for Trafalgar anniversary celebrations in the same year.¹³⁰ The all-brass format rapidly gained purchase with civilian ensembles: although initially reliant on keyed bugles, horns, trumpets, and trombones, these bands embraced new instrument designs adopted by their military counterparts or introduced by (ex-)regimental performers. The popularization of affordable and uncomplicated saxhorns by the Distin family, whose patriarch had begun his musical career in the wartime militia, appears to have been particularly important in fuelling the continued spread of amateur brass bands from the 1840s.¹³¹

Table 1. Instrumentation of the 4th Dragoon Guards band, c. 1828

Source: Roll book of the 4th Dragoon Guards, c. 1828, National Army Museum, 1968-07-206-1, p. 106. The tenor horn and basso instruments mentioned are probably those invented by the Rev. Joseph Cotter and manufactured by the London instrument maker Thomas Key. See Key’s 1824 advertisement to the 72nd Foot, National Records of Scotland, Airlie papers, GD16/52/36, no. 35.

Figure 5. The brass band of the Worcestershire Yeomanry performs at an 1838 review. ‘The Review of the Queen’s Own Regiment of Yeomanry Cavalry, on Kempsey Ham’, engraving by H. Papprill after W. J. Pringle, 1839. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

IV

Military mobilization palpably shaped patterns of musical activity in Britain and Ireland after 1815. Regimental instrumentalists, as with their French equivalents, commonly continued playing after discharge to earn income and commemorate their wartime service.¹³² Performers with military backgrounds found work in all branches of the wider music profession and became linchpins of cultural life in provincial towns. Music could be a precarious vocation, yet ex-servicemen benefited from the growing middle-class appetite for concerts and lessons and a buoyant market for popular leisure. Onetime regimental bandsmen often did not conform to the received image of ex-soldiers as despised and alienated figures. Instead, they successfully settled back into civilian life, as the historian John Cookson has argued in the case of Scottish army pensioners, and achieved ‘a measure of social respect’.¹³³ The military not only produced practised performers but underpinned the expansion of popular music-making by promoting new instrument designs, fostering the music trade’s commercial infrastructure, and generating substantial stocks of second-hand instruments. Wartime mobilization also facilitated the spread of civilian bands after 1815, many of which were in fact regimental ensembles which soldiered on after the demise of their corps.

The military was an integral element of the wider musical ecosystem.¹³⁴ Instruments, individuals, and tunes moved readily between regimental contexts and civilian strands of musical activity centred on churches, orchestra pits, drawing rooms, and streets. Military service was a common collective experience among late Georgian musicians, and a springboard into the music profession for some. By emphasizing the role of regimental performers in shaping and stimulating musical taste, this article underscores Holger Hoock’s contention that war and the British state were more significant cultural catalysts than has typically been appreciated.¹³⁵ Indeed, the propensity to view brass bands primarily through the prism of class and the Victorian drive for ‘rational recreation’ has tended to obscure their specifically military precedents.¹³⁶ This article provides an important corrective, not least by revealing that all-brass ensembles first appeared in Britain and Ireland in a regimental guise. Besides producing a large cohort of band trainers, the military provided a familiar and attractive template for amateur players and audiences just as growing commercial opportunities and belief in the moralizing power of music encouraged the formation of instrumental ensembles in wider society.

Close scrutiny of press reports and archival sources, moreover, suggests that the established chronology of popular music-making requires revision. While Trevor Herbert has portrayed the British brass bands of the 1850s as a novel musical movement which owed relatively little to prior developments, many ostensibly mid-Victorian innovations can in fact be identified at an earlier date.¹³⁷ If brass band journals and large-scale contests still lay in the future, secular instrumental ensembles of labouring men, often sponsored by employers or public subscriptions, were already widely dispersed in the 1820s and 1830s, prior to the general adoption of Adolphe Sax’s valved brass designs. The late Georgian period thus emerges not as a fairly unpromising prelude to the Victorian efflorescence of bands and choirs but as a crucial part of a longer story.

Finally, investigating the reach and impact of military music affords fresh insight into the legacy of the French Wars. Despite growing scholarly interest in the societal effects of armed conflict, the nineteenth-century military is still often cast as a peripheral institution, with soldiers themselves relegated to ‘historiographical outer space’.¹³⁸ The penchant for writing histories that begin and end with Waterloo, moreover, has tended to occlude the ways in which the wartime experience shaped the post-1815 period.¹³⁹ The spread of quasi-martial bands testifies to continued connections between the military and society and the cultural currency of regimental musical traditions after demobilization. Yet it does not necessarily demonstrate the ascendance of militarism, in the sense of a sweeping imposition of military values on civilian life and the veneration of the army by wider society.¹⁴⁰ If ultimate victory over Napoleon buttressed the army’s reputation, public attitudes towards professional soldiers remained ambivalent and dependent on the context of the encounter.¹⁴¹ What Scott Hughes Myerly envisions as the triumph of a ‘military paradigm’ can also be interpreted as the co-option of martial shibboleths to serve civilian priorities, be it seaside tourism or moral reform.¹⁴² The versatility of regimental display is underscored by its subversive emulation by political demonstrators, often with the assistance of musically trained ex-servicemen, in the decades after 1815. By marching in step to the sound of drums, bugles, and uniformed bands, parliamentary reformers and O’Connellite Repealers organized themselves in an orderly and eye-catching fashion while obliquely threatening insurrectionary violence.¹⁴³ Skills and rituals which underpinned the war effort thus also strengthened the mass political movements which challenged the British state following the return of peace.