Art & Humanities

'We used to sing of Tipperary and Piccadilly. It’s a long way to Tipperary but thank God I’ve reached it.'
Private Gladstone, British West Indies Regiment, 26 February 1916.


If the First World War is often thought of as a military clash of empires, the war’s creation of fresh spaces for encounters as diverse groups – soldiers and civilians, men and women, white and non-white people – were thrown together, should also be recognised. Moments of interaction, some fleeting, some sustained, created sites of cross-cultural encounter and exchange in a constantly changing contact zone, dependent on the contingent circumstances of war.

This paper explores the place of music – specifically the music hall standard ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ – within and as part of the encounters experienced by troops of the British Empire during the war. The song’s colonial undertones, moving from metropolis to colony were subverted by the mobilisations of war, which brought colonial troops to their ‘Tipperary’ in Egypt, Palestine, the Western Front and even Blighty. The paper considers the multiple and overlapping meanings the song and its lyrics came to hold for the colonial troops, in singing and adopting its vocabulary of journeying far from home and loved ones that echoed their own experience. The co-option, translation and adaption of ‘Tipperary’ in retaining links to home and sharing in the popular cultures of wartime become apparent in the letters and diaries written by the colonial troops.

'After the meal, they would come over to us and stand on the other side of the barbed wire, and chat to our black boys as brother soldiers in a way that did us good.'

J. Ramson, Carry on: or Pages from a life of a West Indian Padre in the field [Kingston: 1918]

Focusing on the experience of non-white troops from the West Indies, the paper examines the representation of their encounters in France with combatants, non-combatants and civilians, ranging from moments of fleeting interaction in the frontlines to more sustained relationships behind the lines in a constantly changing contact-zone. As structures of imperialism and racial hierarchies were places under stress by the radically new spaces of war, the emotional repercussions of these within individual encounters are scrutinised, nuanced by factors of rank, class and gender.

The paper draws on the published accounts of two padres who served with the British West Indies Regiment, J. Ramson and A. E. Horner, whose white voices reflect on both the experiences of the men in their care and their own perceptions on the complexities of these encounters. These are placed in conversation with letters written by men from the BWIR, published in West Indian newspapers (Jamaica Times, The West Indian), one of the few entry points to accessing black West Indian experience in their own words. How did the West Indian troops perceive those whom they worked alongside? How were they received in turn? How did fears of miscegenation and imperial instability affect the spaces in which West Indian men encountered civilians, particularly women? How were these tensions negotiated in the language of those writing about these encounters?

For colonial troops from the British Empire, the military mobilizations of the First World War created the opportunity to visit the imperial metropolis – London – leaving the war behind. This article explores the experience and encounters of New Zealand's soldiers in London during the First World War and the ambiguity of their identity and belonging in a city that could be positioned as ‘home’. Using diaries, letters, newspapers and oral testimonies, the article builds on the work of Felicity Barnes to question the extent to which these colonial troops could feel at ‘home’ in the ‘Big City’, inside and outside the familiar space, to explore colonialism's tensions in a global war.

This study examines how socially-conscious Bengali filmmakers in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India used cinema as a means of political action and came to grips with urgent social and political issues in films made between 1970 and 2002. It focuses on alternative, non-commercial and off-beat feature films because Bengali films that appear to be strong indictments of social and political injustices are produced by directors working outside the commercial film industry. Bengali films produced outside the dominant film industry depart from the conventions and values associated with the entertainment-driven cinema. Bengali alternative filmmakers often employ innovative c1nemabc techniques to convey political criticisms. These Bengali films marked by formal experimentation and political commitment are recognised as politically critical in form and content.This study specifically asks the following questions: how do these serious Bengali filmmakers use cinema as a means of political action...