The Whiffenpoof Song
Posted in Popular Song, Farewells on Jul 23rd, 2009 No Comments »
My grandfather, Will, would have been 110 years old today. He fought in the First World War, lying about his age, was captured by the Germans in 1917, and spent the rest of the war working on a farm in Germany. He told me that though he was hungry all the time, this was one of the happiest times of his life - working with animals in the open air - and even though they were the enemy, he, like so many Tommies, never really hated the Germans.
When he got back to England, his open air days were over. He went down the pit. Later, when he was thirty three, married with two young daughters, the roof of the tunnel where he was working fell in on him, breaking his spine. He was crippled for the rest of his life.
As a child I remember him, sitting in the corner of the front room, hands clasped behind his head, one withered leg crossed over the other, rocking himself backwards and forwards, whistling and singing this song.
‘We’re three little lambs who have lost their way. Baa, baa, baa. We’re little black sheep who have gone astray. Baa, baa, baa. Gentlemen songsters off on a spree, doomed from here to eternity. Lord, have mercy on such as we. Baa, baa, baa.’
Here, in memory of my grandfather, is this most melancholy of songs, of lost youth and mortality. It is sung, in this, its most famous recording, by Bing Crosby, with Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians.
