Title: Songs of the Empire for Little Folks
Publisher: Printed in England for J & J Colman Limited
Binding: Soft cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Edition: 1st
16 unnumbered pages. Endpapers of proprietary advertising in colour. Small paper booklet, stapled at spine, printed in colour lithograph with seven lithographic illustrations. 11 x 14 cm. Front cover illustrated with an image of an old soldier (Chelsea Pensioner) seated, singing songs to two rosy cheeked children. The back cover is illustrated with a colour picture of a man playing a tuba and a small boy looking on. There is a tin of Colman's mustard propping up the sheet music. Small book of songs titled 'Songs of the Empire for Little Folks'. An advertising publication for Colman's and Robinson's produced by JJ Colman's Ltd containing songs and illustrations from the British Empire. Included are national songs from Wales 'Hen Wlad fy Nhadau' (The Land of my Fathers), Ireland 'The Dear Little Shamrock', Scotland 'Highland Sword Dance' and 'Auld Lang Syne', England 'Rule, Britannia!', Canada 'The Maple Leaf for Ever', Australia 'Sons of the Southern Sea' (originally penned in response to Australia's involvement in the Boer War), New Zealand 'God girt her about with the Surges', and South Africa 'The Sunny Hills of Africa'. Each song is accompanied by illustrations which are similarly nationalistic in style. Chi-chi Nwanoku, founder of majority BAME orchestra Chineke!, said in The Guardian that she would be appalled if the BBC failed to remove 'Rule, Britannia!' from the 2020 Proms. "The lyrics are just so offensive, talking about the haughty tyrants -people that we are invading on their land- and Britons shall never be slaves, which implies that it is OK for others to be slaves but not us. If the BBC are talking about Black Lives Matter and their support for the movement, how could you possibly have Rule Britannia as the last concert in any concert? It is so irrelevant to today's society. It's been irrelevant for generations, and we seem to keep perpetuating it". Last month, classical music critic Richard Morrison said that to "roar out these hypocritical 18th-century words, with or without irony" would "surely be insensitive, bordering on the incendiary.There will never be a better moment to drop that toe-curling, embarrassing, anachronistic farrago of nationalistic songs that concludes the Last Night of the Proms". With regards to 2020, the Last Night of the Proms will still have Jerusalem , the National Anthem and new orchestral versions of Rule, Britannia! and Land Of Hope And Glory, the BBC controversially decided under pressure from Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. The two-page Australian song depicts a sing-a-long with gold miners and a vignette of Parliament House, Melbourne, while the New Zealand National Song is illustrated with a depiction of a Maori chief, a scene of Wellington and a sheep farm. Worldcat locates four copies found in New Zealand & Australia. Additional copy located at Museums Victoria Collections, Australia Item HT 33762. Bookseller Inventory # 4338