It's a Long Way to Tipperary - Nathan Lay

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It's a long way to Tipperary is een lied dat beroemd werd in de Eerste Wereldoorlog. Het werd in 1912 geschreven door de Engelsman Jack Judge, wiens grootouders uit county Tipperary in Ierland kwamen. Hijzelf was echter nog nooit in Ierland geweest.

Het lied symboliseerde voor iedere soldaat het verlangen naar huis. Het werd in de Eerste Wereldoorlog eerst vertolkt door Ierse soldaten, maar later werd het overgenomen door zowel de Russen als de Fransen. In het neutrale Nederland hadden de straatmuzikanten Willem Kila en Jopie Schouten in 1914 groot succes met hun plaatopname ervan.

Ook in de Tweede Wereldoorlog werd het lied vaak gezongen. In de film Das Boot (1981) wordt het door de Duitse onderzeebootbemanning gezongen.


"It's a Long Way to Tipperary" is a British music hall song first performed in 1912 by Jack Judge, and written by Judge and Harry Williams though authorship of the song has long been disputed.

The song was originally written as a lament from an Irish worker in London, missing his homeland, before it became a popular soldiers' marching song. One of the most popular hits of the time, the song is atypical in that it is not a warlike song that incites the soldiers to glorious deeds. Popular songs in previous wars (such as the Boer Wars) frequently did this. In the First World War, however, the most popular songs, like this one and "Keep the Home Fires Burning", concentrated on the longing for home.

The myth is that “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” was written solely by music hall entertainer Jack Judge in January 1912. Judge, a former fishmonger, liked to boast of how a fellow entertainer bet five shillings that he couldn’t compose and sing a new song in 24 hours. By the following night, Judge claimed to have knocked out the new song and incorporated it into his act.

But it now seems more likely that the Worcestershire-born Judge had simply tinkered with an older number (about a homesick Irish lad writing home to his sweetheart from London) called “It’s a Long Way to Connemara” that he had co-written in 1909 with Harry Williams, whose family ran a pub in Warwickshire. Described by his great niece, Meg Pybus, as “a sensitive and sickly man”, Williams was a poet and multi-instrumentalist, confined to a wheelchair after falling down the cellar stairs as a child.

Judge swapped Connemara for Tipperary because that was where his grandparents came from. By the end of the week the song had become the centrepiece of his act; he sold the publishing rights to Bert Feldman, who pepped it up with a brisk marching beat and credited both Judge and Williams as songwriters.

In August 1914, Daily Mail journalist George Curnock reported hearing a battalion of the Connaught Rangers (an Irish regiment based in Galway) singing the song to boost morale as they arrived in France. The paper printed its lyrics in full, ensuring that it became the biggest hit of the war.

By November 1914 it had been recorded by popular Irish tenor John McCormack and later by the Australian star Florrie Forde. “The song sold three million copies in the UK and six million worldwide after 1912,” Pybus told her local paper in 2014. “Both men earned £164,000 between them in 1915 from royalties — a fortune at the time.”

As part of a “simultaneous quodlibet” (songs whose complementary melodies mean you can sing them both at the same time), soldiers often combined it with 1915’s “Pack Up Your Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag”. Both melodies were taken up and translated by the Germans in the opposite trenches.
“Tipperary” became a symbolic “home” for frightened young men of all nationalities.


It's a Long Way to Tipperary

Up to mighty London
came an Irish lad one day.
All the streets were paved with gold
so everyone was gay;
singing songs of Piccadilly,
Strand and Leicester Square,
‘till Paddy got excited,
and he shouted to them there:

It's a long way to Tipperary,
it's a long way to go.
It's a long way to Tipperary,
to the sweetest girl I know!
Goodbye, Piccadilly,
Farewell, Leicester Square!
It's a long long way to Tipperary,
but my heart's right there.

Paddy wrote a letter
to his Irish Molly-O,
saying, "Should you not receive it,
write and let me know!"
"If I make mistakes in spelling,
Molly, dear," said he,
"Remember, it's the pen that's bad,
Don't lay the blame on me!"

Molly wrote a neat reply
to Irish Paddy-O,
saying "Mike Maloney
wants to marry me, and so
leave the Strand and Piccadilly
or you'll be to blame,
for love has fairly drove me silly:
Hoping you're the same!"