The Fringes of The Fleet - Elgar's Songs

Elgar's Songs

In January 1916 Lord Charles Beresford requested Elgar to make songs of some of the verses in Kipling's booklet: Elgar chose four of them, and appropriately set them for four men's voices.

Elgar gave different titles to three of the four poems

• The Lowestoft Boat used the words of the poem of the same name
• Fate's Discourtesy - the poem "A Song in Storm". The words "Fate's discourtesy" appear in the refrain to all three verses. Edward German set the same poem to music for voice and piano in 1916, giving it the title of the first phrase "Be well assured".
• Submarines - the poem "Tin Fish".
• The Sweepers, - the poem "Mine Sweepers".

The work was dedicated by the composer "...to my friend Admiral Lord Beresford". The first performance was, at Elgar's suggestion, part of a wartime variety show at the London Coliseum on 11 June 1917, and the singers were baritones Charles Mott (following his performance in "The Starlight Express"), Harry Barratt, Frederick Henry and Frederick Stewart. The show ran for four weeks with two performances a day and was a great success. In the production the curtain rose on a seaport scene, outside a public house, with the four singers in rough-and-ready merchant-seamen's clothes, seated around a table.

• "Inside the Bar"

The song Inside the Bar, with words by Sir Gilbert Parker, was subsequently added to the cycle and performed by the same singers at the same theatre exactly two weeks later. The songs were so popular that later that year Elgar conducted the songs around British provincial music-halls (Stoke, Manchester, Leicester, and Chiswick), with Charles Mott (who had been called up) replaced by George Parker.

For reasons which Elgar did not understand at the time, when they returned to the Coliseum at the end of that year, Kipling appeared and objected to his songs being performed at music-halls. Kipling was upset by the report that his son John was missing.

Elgar's singer, Charles Mott, was later killed in France in May 1918.