A Home Chat about ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’

‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ is identified as the Tommies’ favourite in this September 1914 article from Home Chat

The first world war soldier’s song ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ has been much heard in the commemorations for the 1914-18 war. What’s a surprise to me is how quickly the song became established as the forces’ favourite.

This page is from the weekly women’s magazine Home Chat from September 19 – just weeks after the war had broken out. It’s already ‘The song our soldiers sing’.

Of course, the war changed the content and feel of magazines and the article here gives the music and words to the 1912 music hall song over three pages, with a credit to B Feldman & Co, of 2-3 Arthur Street, London WC.

The introduction contrasts the Tommies’ choice of marching song with the Germans’ choice of ‘Da Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles’ and the marching songs of the French ‘Piou-Piou’. The French ‘were mystified’ at the choice of a song that seemed ‘sad’ and held no reference to ‘flag or country, or war or military glory’. For ‘Tommy Atkins likes to swing along to a music-hall song with a good rousing chorus’ and ‘Tipperary’ comes out on top.

There’s no mention of Ivor Novello’s ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, which was written in 1914 and is referred to in several later Punch cartoons.

Home Chat cover from 19 September 1914 with a front cover story about supporting the Queen’s Guild, which had been set up as a way for women to back the war effort

Home Chat was printed and published by Northcliffe’s Amalgamated Press in Farringdon Street, which runs across the eastern end of Fleet Street, on which the Tipperary pub is located.  But the pub was not aways the Tipperary, or ‘the Tipp’ as regulars call it.

The building is on a site that was a monastery in 1300, on an island between the Thames and the Fleet rivers that fed into the Thames. The Fleet still runs under the pub. A place outside the pub describes how it was The Boar’s Head, built in 1605. It is supposed to have survived the Fire of London in 1666 because it was built of stone and brick. In  ‘about 1700’, the Dublin-based SG Mooney bought the Boar’s Head, making it the ‘first Irish pub outside Ireland’ and it was fitted out in an Irish style. It claims to be the first pub in England to stock bottled Guinness and later draught – and could also lay claim to being the narrowest in London. (London Remembers and Zythophile have debunked most of these claims, however!)

In 1918, the printers who came back from the war had the pub’s name changed to The Tipperary, after their marching song. Today, the Boar’s Head is kept as the name of the upstairs bar. The pub has been owned by Suffolk-based Abbott brewer Greene King since the 1960s.

Home Chat was founded in 1895 and was one of the magazines that made a fortune for Alfred Harmsworth and enabled him to become the newspaper baron Lord Northcliffe.

Tags: first world war, Fleet street, Home Chat, Irish pub, It's a Long Way to Tipperary, London, music hall, soldiers' song, The Tipp, Tipperary, Tommy Atkins