Bless ’Em All
  [also known as The Long And The Short And The Tall]

The original UK sheet music cover.	The Australian version, absent George Formby’s picture, possibly for copyright reasons.	The original Canadian and US sheet music covers, with credit to US lyricist Al Stillman.

James Lally, as “Jimmy Hughes”, Frank Kerslake, as “Frank Lake” & Fred Godfrey [British Library, Performing Right Society, ASCAP, SOCAN]; originally written by Fred Godfrey in 1917; EMI lists as Hughes, Godfrey, Al Stillman & Lake; PRS credits Terry Sullivan with additional lyrics; published UK sheet music credits Hughes & Lake only; new US lyrics by Al Stillman, 1941 — London: Keith Prowse Music, 1940; Sydney: W.H. Paling, 1940; Toronto: Gordon V. Thompson, 1941; New York?: Sam Fox Publishing, 1941.

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Listen to George Formby’s November 1940 recording

Fred Godfrey holds the distinction of having written two of the twentieth century’s most famous wartime singalong songs, both icons of their time for generations of English-speaking people: World War One’s Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty and World War Two’s Bless ’Em All.

Although a degree of controversy surrounds the writing of Bless ’Em All, Godfrey always claimed to have come up with the song during World War One while serving with the Royal Naval Air Service. In a letter published in the Daily Mirror on 2 April 1941, in response to a query about the song’s origins, he relates the following story:

I wrote “Bless ’Em All” while serving in the old R.N.A.S. at Dunkirk in 1916 [actually, his service record indicates that he joined in January 1917]. And, furthermore, it wasn’t “Bless.”

We had a concert party there and it was sung by Archie Glen, the famous bibulous comedian, and also by Billy Bottomley and Charlie Folcher.

It was sung as a sort of fed-up number and as I used to play the piano to hundreds of lads every evening, it was soon the “theme song” and everybody knew it and sang it.

Then, too, we used to shove a piano up on to an old lorry and go and do concerts for the troops up the line. As there were no ladies present “Bless ’Em All” became a sort of national anthem. Archie Glen also sang a new song of mine called “Down Texas Way” at one of our Dunkirk (1916, if you please) concerts [again, the actual year seems to have been 1917, as Down Texas Way was published that year]. I sent it to my publisher and it sold half a million copies.

But “Bless ’Em All” in its raw state did not occur to me as a publishing proposition, and it was left to the ingenuity of young Jimmy Hughes, Frank Lake and Mr. [S.] Vanlier, of Keith Prowse, to make it so respectable that it might have come straight from the vicar’s tea party!

In all fairness, however, one must relate the claim of Roy Palmer that “Lewis Winstock’s Chelsea Pensioners told him that the song was current in the army by the last decade of the nineteenth century....It seems...likely that Godfrey was merely writing down a song which was in circulation among servicemen in his day.”¹ Palmer’s assertion notwithstanding, there seems no good reason to doubt Godfrey’s story, for several reasons. In the first place — and one admits this is the subjective assessment of the musically untrained — the tune simply does not sound of nineteenth-century vintage; rather, it has all the hallmarks of a typical Music Hall number of its day. As well, it is generally acknowledged that the song became popular with airmen, not soldiers, after the end of World War One, which lends credence to its originating in that branch of the service. Moreover, Palmer’s dismissive reference to “one Fred Godfrey” — though perhaps understandable given the almost-complete anonymity of British songwriters of the era — hardly accords with Godfrey’s accomplishments in the songwriting line. The Tommies were already lustily singing several of Godfrey’s hits — Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty and Who Were You With Last Night? among them — by the time he found himself in uniform, and he must have been something of a minor celebrity among his fellow “erks,” who would have been familiar with many of his pre-war hits.

During the interwar years, Bless ’Em All continued to enjoy a kind of “underground” popularity in the Royal Air Force, which had superseded both the RNAS and the Royal Flying Corps in 1918. Then, in 1940, as Godfrey relates, two staff writers at Keith Prowse Music, James Lally and Frank Kerslake (under their pseudonyms “Jimmy Hughes” and “Frank Lake”), were given the job of cleaning up the RAF’s popular but bawdy Bless ’Em All for general consumption. This they did, and the song was duly published. Strangely, however, although Godfrey is credited as co-author by Britain’s Performing Right Society, ASCAP, and SOCAN (the US and Canadian equivalents), and in the database of the song’s current publisher, EMI, his name does not appear on any versions of the published sheet music of the song and seldom in the composing credits listed on record labels (Vera Lynn’s best-selling 1963 Canadian LP “Hits of the Blitz” is a rare exception).

The first artist to put the song on disc was George Formby Jr., Britain’s top Variety and box office film star of the era. He had already recorded a couple of Fred Godfrey songs in 1939, and went into the studio with the newly published song in November 1940. Formby’s biographers Alan Randall and Ray Seaton relate:

George’s songwriters were on “special duty” in the early war years, writing comedy songs that boosted morale and lowered the tension among troops in the front line and civilians on the home front....[These songs] were more than homely propaganda. They reminded people that in spite of the Nazi war machine life had its funny side and there was a good chance that things would turn out nice again. When he sang these songs, George personified the indestructible spirit of the British people. Bless ’Em All, written by Fred Godfrey at Dunkirk in 1917, entered the Formby repertoire and the author, hearing him sing it on the air, sent him some more special couplets.²

The new couplets formed the basis of a second version, called Bless ’Em All No. 2, which Formby recorded in February 1941. As with the first version, however, Godfrey’s name again did not appear in the composing credits of Formby’s Regal Zonophone disc.

Subsequently, Bless ’Em All became a hit around the English-speaking world at war — including in the United States, where Americanized lyrics were supplied by Al Stillman (who would go on to write the words for such great hits as Juke Box Saturday Night, Moments to Remember, No, Not Much!, Chances Are, and Teacher, Teacher). Before long, Bless ’Em All began to be used in films whenever the script called for a group of people to gather around a piano for a singalong, especially if the setting was wartime London.

The first film to use the song seems to have been A Yank In The RAF (1941), starring Tyrone Power and Betty Grable, where it is heard as background music in the swank London nightclub where Power (the Yank in the RAF) goes looking for his former stateside girlfriend Grable.

In Captains Of The Clouds (1942), a Technicolour film about hardy Canadian bush pilots going off to war and partly shot on location in Canada, James Cagney and Alan Hale sing and dance a spirited version of Bless ’Em All. Also in 1942, a very young Robert Stack and the rest of his squadron of “Polish” flyers sing Bless ’Em All around a piano on their English airfield in Ernst Lubitch’s To Be Or Not To Be, starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard. Bless ’Em All also appears in the 1944 film version of the Oscar Wilde short story The Canterville Ghost, starring Charles Laughton as the Ghost, and Robert Young, Margaret O'Brien, and Reginald Owen.

Bless ’Em All was also used in two wartime films about the US Marines, who adopted the song as their unofficial anthem. In Guadalcanal Diary (1943), starring Lloyd Nolan, William Bendix, and Anthony Quinn, Bendix and other Marines sing it while digging a gun pit on that infamous island — unusually, they sing the British lyrics. And in Marine Raiders (1944), the song is used as a recurring theme in the scenes set in Australia — at one point, stars Pat O’Brien and Robert Ryan sing it in a Melbourne club. A wartime documentary entitled Tunisian Victory (1944), co-directed by Frank Capra and narrated by Burgess Meredith (among others), also interpolates Bless ’Em All in the soundtrack.

Numerous postwar films about the late conflict used Bless ’Em All to establish atmosphere or to quote the era. In The Captive Heart (1946), a British film set in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and starring Michael Redgrave, POWs sing Bless ’Em All in their compound. It is heard briefly in the US Army Air Force drama Twelve O’Clock High (1949), starring Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger, and in Chain Lightning (1950), Humphrey Bogart and Eleanor Parker are among the singers gathered around a piano in a wartime London nightclub. Also in 1950, in The Blue Lamp, the famous British police film starring Dirk Bogarde, a drunk serenades a police station with a snatch of the song.

Betrayed (1954), a story set in the German-occupied Netherlands and starring Clark Gable, Lana Turner, and Victor Mature, uses Bless ’Em All to good effect, particularly over the closing credits. Battle Cry (1955), based on the novel by Leon Uris and starring Van Heflin, James Whitmore, Raymond Massey, and Tab Hunter, also uses Bless ’Em All. In The Young Lions (1958), starring Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Dean Martin, it is heard, as usual, being sung in a London club.

The Long And The Short And The Tall — a gritty 1961 film starring Richard Todd, Laurence Harvey, Richard Harris, and David McCallum about British soldiers fighting the Japanese in the Malayan jungle — borrows Bless ’Em All’s lyrics for its title and, appropriately, uses the song over its opening and closing credits.

The song is also heard in Bless ’Em All, a 1949 comedy starring Hal Monty and Max Bygraves; The Proud And The Profane (1956), starring William Holden and Deborah Kerr; The Colditz Story (1957), starring John Mills and Eric Portman; Desert Mice, a 1959 comedy starring Sidney James; The Victors (1963), with an all-star international cast that included George Peppard, Melina Mercouri, and Jeanne Moreau; and The Thin Red Line (1964), another film about US Marines on Guadalcanal, starring Keir Dullea and Jack Warden.

Bless ’Em All still surfaces in odd places: Paul McCartney, no less, sings a snatch of the song in his 1984 film Give My Regards To Broad Street, and Tommies sing it around a piano (what an original idea!) in the Academy-Award-nominated 2007 film Atonement, starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, and Vanessa Redgrave, whose father Michael appeared in a film that used the song more than half a century earlier.

Recordings

George Formby Jr. (Regal Zonophone MR-3394, 1940); reissued on LP “George Formby: The Man With The Ukelele” (World Record Club SH-126, ca. 1970s); reissued on LP “The Shadow Of Colditz” (Axis 6Z/73); reissued on 2-cassette set “Turned Out Nice Again” (EMI ECC 20, 1991); reissued on CD [various artists] “Remember When” (Lexicon 685233, 2004); reissued on CD “The Best Of George Formby” (Pid 611833, 2005); reissed on CD [various artists] “Wish Me Luck” (Pid 612223, 2005); reissued on CD [various artists] “The Great ANZACs” (Pid 631151, 2006); reissued on CD [various artists] “The Great War Songs” (Pid 631244, 2006); reissued on 5-CD set “George Formby, The War And Postwar Years, Volume 2 of the JSP Compilation” (JSP CD-1902, 2006); reissued on CD [various artists] “Songs That Won The War” (Demon 713457, 2007); reissued on 2-CD set “George Formby, 1932-1946: Leaning On A Lamp Post” (Living Era, 2007); reissued on CD “That Ukelele Man” (Hallmark 30028, 2008); reissued on CD “Turned Out Nice Again” (Castle Pulse 665629, 2008)

———, Bless ’Em All No. 2 (Regal Zonophone MR-3441 [& other numbers?], 1941); reissued on LP “George Formby And His Ukelele” (World Record Club SH-151); reissued on 5-CD set “George Formby, The War And Postwar Years, Volume 2 of the JSP Compilation” (JSP CD-1902, 2006)

———, recording for ENSA radio program “Let The People Sing” in Aldwych tube station, Nov. 27, 1940; issued on compact disc “Formby At War” (Grosvenor CDGRS 1224, ca. 1992)

New Mayfair Dance Orchestra (HMV BD-5646, 1940)

The Organ, The Dance Band & Me; Billy Thorburn at the Piano (Parlophone F-1796, 1940)

Jack White & His Band (HMV BD-5646, 1940)

Bertha Willmott (Decca F-7692, 1940); reissued on LP “The World At War” (Decca DVL-6,1973)

Arthur Askey (HMV BD-891, 1941)

Billy Cotton & His Band (Rex 9906, 1941)

Reginald Dixon, in “Dixontime, no. 6” (Regal Zonophone MR-3440, 1941)

The Jesters (Decca 3932-A, 1941)

Lew Stone & His Band (Decca F-7728, 1941)

Barry Wood & The King Sisters; orch. cond. by Leonard Joy (Victor 27407, 1941); reissued on 2-LP set “The Greatest Hits Of The War Yearrs” (Tele House CD-2035, 1974)

Guy Lombardo & His Royal Canadians; Kenny Gardner & The Lombardo Trio, chorus (Decca 4278-B, 1942)

Royal Air Force Community Singing, in “R.A.F. Choruses” (RAF 9, charity recording for theRAF Benevolent Fund, 1942)

Bing Crosby, from “Kraft Music Hall” radio broadcast, on LP “Der Bingle, Vol. 3” (Spokane 20, 1981); recorded at the NBC studios, Los Angeles, June 1, 1944 or June 15, 1944 (the song was performed on two different shows)

The Henry Hall Dance Orch.; The Coronets, vocal (Columbia 33SX 1067, postwar)

Oscar Brand, with the Roger Wilco Four, on LP “The Wild Blue Yonder” (Elektra EKL-168, 1956); updated Korean War lyrics by anonymous author

———, on LP “Tell It To The Marines” (Elektra EKL-174, 1960)

The Four Sergeants, under the dir. of Frank Raye, on LP “Bawdy Barracks Ballads” (ABC-Paramount ABC-245, 1958)

Ewen MacColl, on LP “Bless ’Em All” (Riverside RLP 12-642, 1958?)

Big Ben Banjo Band, on LP “More Minstrel Melodies” (World Record Club T-604, 1960s?)

Eddie “Piano” Miller, on LP “Honky Tonkin’” (Masterseal MS-34, 1957); reissued on LP ldquo;Honky Tonk Piano” (Palace M-663, early 1960s?); reissued on LP ldquo;Echoes Of Bar-Room” (Plymouth P-12-157, early 1960s?)

Laurence Harvey & The Long & The Short & The Tall Chorus, with Johnny Williams & His Orch. (Columbia 4-42017, 1961)

The Pearly Kings, on LP “Sing Along — With The Pearly Kings At The Skyline Pub” (Arc 601, ca. 1962–63)

Jane Morgan, with orch. arr. and cond. by Charles Albertine, on LP “Jane Morgan Serenades The Victors” (Colpix CP/SCP 460, 1963); also issued as a 45 rpm single (Colpix CP 713, 1963)

Vera Lynn, on LP “Hits Of The Blitz” (Capitol T6041, 1963); reissued in 2-LP set “Vera Lynn 50 Golden Greats” (Capitol Special Products TVLP 9053/4, 1979); reissued on LP “This Is Vera Lynn” (EMI THIS-22, 1980)

———, on LP “Vera Lynn Remembers” (Silver Eagle Records SIV-1120, 1988); reissued on CD “White Cliffs Of Dover” (Elite 513 158-2, 1992)

Carl Tapscott Singers, on LP “Pack Up Your Troubles” (RCA Camden CASX-2527, 1964)

The NAAFI Singers, with Janet Webb, on LP “Songs That Won The War” (Music For PleasureMFP-1170, 1967); reissued on compact disc & cassette tape “Songs Of Britain” (Evergreen Melodies C84 [disc], E84 [tape], 2002/03 catalogue)

Joe Henderson, on LP “Around The Piano With Joe Henderson And His Friends” (Fontana SFL-13180, 1969)

Crazy Otto, on LP “In A London Pub” (Polydor MIM-1-8309 [2418-027 in UK], 1969)

Tiny Tim, with Harry Roy & His Band (Reprise-aphone RS-2700, 1969, distributed by Pye; as recorded on the David Frost TV Show, and released as a 78 rpm specialty record)

Acker Bilk & The Leon Young String Chorale, on LP “Bless ’Em All…Those Wonderful Songs of World War II” (EMI/Columbia Studio 2 TWO289, 1970)

The Copper Room Orchestra (Mary, Charlie, Les & Tom), on LP “Till We Meet Again At The Harrison” ([private? Canadian pressing] RXS 7204, 1970s?)

Bob Braun, on LP “Lonely, Lonely Town” (WrayCo WLSP-216, 1972); also on 7” single (WrayCo W214, 1972)

Air Transport Command Band and The Pipes & Drums of CFB Ottawa, on LP “RCAF 50” (World Records C-126, 1974)

The Concert Band & Chorus Of The R.A.A.F., directed by Sqd. Ldr. R.A.Y. Mitchell, on LP “30 Smash Hits Of The War Years” (Crest WAR-39/45, 1974)

Alan Randall, on LP “Alan Randall Sings Great Comedy War Songs” (Contour 2870 402, 1974)

Tony Selby (Pye 7N45553, 1975)

“Grandad’s Army”, on LP “Bawdy Barrack-Room Ballads, Volume 2” (Hallmark SHM-886, 1975)

Original London Cast recording of Happy As A Sandbag, on LP (Decca SKL-5217, 1975)

Morriston Orpheus Choir & The Band of H.M. Royal Marines, on LP “A Grand Night For Singing” (Studio 2 Stereo TWOX-1049, 1976)

Max Bygraves, on LP “Max-A-Million: Great Hits Of The Forties” (Pye NSPL-18527, early1980s?); re-issued in 4-LP set “Come Sing Along With Me” (World Artists WA-1540S-3, 1984)

———, on LP “SingaLongaMax” (Music For Pleasure MFP-5581, 1981)

———, on LP “80 All Time Party Favourites” (Polytel 829-739-1, 1986)

———, on LP “SingaLongaWarYears!” (Parkfield PMLP-5001, 1989)

The Goderich Harbouraires, on LP “Precious Men” (World Records WRC1-1307, 1979)

Queen Anne & The Pearly Kings, on LP “At The Pub” (British Records BR-3103, late 1970s?)

The Diamond Accordion Band, on LP “Your Favourite Singalongs, Vol. 2” (Emerald Gem GES-1229, 1980s)

The Massed Military Bands, on LP “The Edinburgh Military Tattoo 1981” (EMI Waverley Records GLN-1026, 1981)

Barbershopper’s Chorus, on LP “The Nova Scotia Tattoo 1982” (World Records WRC1-2358, 1982)

The Central Band Of The Royal Air Force; cond. by Wing Commander J.L. Wallace; with choir, on cassette “Cavalry Of The Clouds” (EMI/HMV Greensleeve TC-ESD 1078004, 1983)

The Combined Band of the Maritime Command, on LP “Royal Canadian Navy - Maritime Command 75th Anniversary, 1910-1985” (World Records WRC1-3973, 1985)

[massed and combined bands], on LP “Canadian Forces Tattoo” (Total TRC 8001, 1985)

The Massed Bands of the Royal Air Force, on LP “Festival of Music ‘86” (Polyphonic PRM-110D, 1986)

The Fredericton Singing War Brides, on compact disc “The Fredericton Singing War Brides” (OPCD3906, 2006)

Film Interpolations

A Yank In The RAF (1941); Captains Of The Clouds (1942); To Be Or NotTo Be (1942); Guadalcanal Diary (1943); The Canterville Ghost (1944); Marine Raiders (1944);Tunisian Victory (1944); Bless ’Em All (1949); The Blue Lamp (1950); Chain Lightning (1950); Twelve O’Clock High (1950); Betrayed (1954); Battle Cry (1955); The Proud And The Profane (1956); The Colditz Story (1957); The Young Lions (1958); Desert Mice (1959); The Long, The Short And The Tall [also known as Jungle Fighters] (1960); The Victors (1963); The Thin Red Line (1964); Give My Regards To Broad Street (1984); Atonement (2007)

__________________

Notes

1  Roy Palmer, “What A Lovely War!”: British Soldiers’ Songs from the Boer War to the Present Day (London:
     Michael Joseph, 1990), p. 142.
2  Alan Randall and Ray Seaton, George Formby: A Biography (London: W.H. Allen, 1974), pp. 87–88.