f46 Topic Of Eighty
By coincidence, in the year that Topic Records hits eighty, the great Norma Waterson, long associated with the label, reaches the same birthday. Colin Irwin sends the telegrams.
A
ll things considered, the year of our lord nineteen hundred and thirty nine wasn’t the best. There was the little mat- ter of Hitler invading Poland,
resulting in no peace in our time, of course, while IRA bombs were going off all over Britain, tensions were rising in Palestine, there was fall-out from the Spanish Civil War, and Ghandi was protesting about British rule in India. If all this wasn’t bad enough, England played a Test Match against South Africa which went on for ten days… and still ended in a draw.
Not too much to celebrate that year, then, except it heralded two significant birthdays. In the context of these pages, VERY significant birthdays. One occurred in Kingston Upon Hull, on the east coast of Yorkshire; the other was in London in the south east of England. The events were unrelated and the paths of their early lives were wildly different but, somewhere along the way their journey crossed to mutually beneficial effect… and eighty years later they remain intertwined.
It was actually on August 15th 1939 , a
Tuesday as it happens, that Hull in particu- lar – and the world in general – was blessed with the arrival of Norma Christine Waterson. Just a few weeks later – to the excitement of nobody but a small coterie
80 years of Topic, from here…
of devotees – a record was born. A 10-inch 78rpm vinyl record called The Man That Waters The Workers Beer, written and sung by someone called Paddy Ryan. It wasn’t even his real name. Paddy Ryan was actually a medical student called Fisher, who was also a part-time actor at the socialist Unity Theatre.
Neither he nor anyone else could pos- sibly have imagined we’d still be talking about his record – a protest song of sorts about the exploitation of workers, (“I am the man, the very fat man, that waters the workers’ beer/And what do I care if it makes them ill, if it makes them terribly queer…”) – eighty years later. In truth it was only heard by a few hundred people who’d subscribed to the newly formed Topic Record Club, an arm of the Workers’ Music Association, which had been set up three years earlier by Alan Bush, a London music professor, composer and radical, to promote political ideas and initiatives in theatre and music.
It quickly gained some influential champions – Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Brit- ten, H.G. Wells, Sybil Thorndike and Paul Robeson among them – as Britain became highly politicised and communism gained momentum in the wake of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism. Despite attracting the close attention of the securi- ty forces due to its left-wing agenda, the
…via here (enter, the Watersons!)…
Unity Theatre proved to be a productive outlet for the left wing of the arts. The second side of The Man That Waters The Workers’ Beer was a choir drawn from members of the Unity Theatre singing The Internationale, the great anthem of the socialist movement.
Leading the choir was Will Sahnow, a cellist and French horn player, who was general secretary of the Workers’ Music Association and effectively took on the running of the Topic Record Club, which had 900 members. War being war, though, the progress of the new label was slow and the portents not good. There was a shortage of shellac for one thing and releases through the war years were few and far between, mostly from Unity The- atre productions. One of the most interest- ing, though, was How Long Brethren, backed with Ah’s De Man, billed as “two songs of negro protest” by Martyn Lawrence and the Topic Male Singers, both written by Lawrence Gellert as a reaction to black prejudice in the American south.
The actor Michael Redgrave was also an early artist on Topic, singing A New World Will Be Born from a pantomime, Jack The Giant Killer, in 1941. Twenty- three years later his daughter Vanessa was also featured on a Topic release, Hanging From A Tree, backed with Pete Seeger’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone?
…to here
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