Dear Old Blighty

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White, Peter (24 June 2013). "Blighty closes as Drama opens for UKTV". www.broadcastnow.co.uk. Media Business Insight Limited . Retrieved 20 March 2014. Blighty, Christmas 1917". Digital.nls.uk. The War Office, The Admiralty, The Red Cross . Retrieved 13 February 2014.

Coward favoured Blighty once again, having returning Tommies sing it as the camera pans over the London streets of 1919 from high above in the film’s opening sequence. was a favourite of the British Tommies on the Western Front and wherever they found themselves, in both tragedy and triumph. Reporting on the torpedoing of the troopship Aragon in the Mediterranean in December 1917, in which 610 men died, a newspaper quoted one survivor as saying, The Aragon: Last scene on torpedoed troopship — every man for himself,” Western Gazette, 15 February 1918, p. 1.The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress. War songs and their writers,” Sunday Times (Perth, Australia), 15 October 1933, p. 11; reprinted from the London Sunday Times. Blighty is commonly used as a term of endearment by the expatriate British community or those on holiday to refer to home. In Hobson-Jobson, an 1886 historical dictionary of Anglo-Indian words, Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell explained that the word came to be used in British India for several things the British had brought into the country, such as the tomato and soda water. it was effervescent Dorothy Ward, wife of Music Hall star and songwriter Shaun Glenville, who introduced it. In a newspaper article, Miss Ward The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.

song’s association with the First World War is almost iconic. Noël Coward borrowed Blighty for his sprawling 1931 stage production Cavalcade, about British life in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the Academy Award–winning 1933 film version, however, Coward dropped Blighty in favour of another Godfrey song, Take Fred Godfrey wrote the song with Bennett Scott and A.J. Mills after passing a music hall in Oxford where a show called Blighty was showing. He recounts: "One of us suddenly said “What an idea for a song!” Four hours later it was all finished, and the whole country was singing it soon afterwards. I got — not very much." [1] [2] The word derives from the Urdu word Viletī, (older sources mention a regional Hindustani language but the use of b replacing v is found in Bengali) meaning 'foreign', [4] which more specifically came to mean 'European', and 'British; English' during the time of the British Raj. [5] The Bengali word is a loan of Indian Persian vilāyatī ( ولایاتی), from vilāyat ( ولایت) meaning 'Iran' and later 'Europe' or 'Britain', [6] ultimately from Arabic wilāyah ولاية‎ meaning 'state, province'. Blighty" is a British English slang term for Great Britain, or often specifically England. [1] [2] [3] Though it was used throughout the 1800s in the Indian subcontinent to mean an English or British visitor, it was first used during the Boer War in the specific meaning of homeland for the English or British, [4] [1] and it was not until World War I that use of the term became widespread. [4] Etymology [ edit ] Think of all those songs of the war sung in ritual once a year on November 11. Who wrote them?....It is odd, this anonymity about the authorship of the songs we all sang in those war years....What do their composers think when they hear those songs of the war every Armistice Day? And do the singers ever wonder who wrote the words and music of the songs with such poignant memories?Recordings by Florrie Forde [3] and Ella Retford are the most commonly heard versions, though Dorothy Ward first sang it. The term subsequently gained an ironic connotation in its closeness to the English word “blight” meaning epidemic. It’s an example of typical post imperial British self effacement. Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛd(ə)l/ but /ˈpɛdl̩i/. Vowels The length of the list of known Blighty recordings attests to the song’s popularity over the 100 years since it first captured the public’s ear. One of the more unusual, and moving, versions is that of British blues singer Kevin Coyne, on his 1978 LP Dynamite Daze. Another unexpected tribute came in 1986 from the influential British Noël Coward used the song for his 1931 stage production Cavalcade, about British life in the first two decades of the twentieth century and in the 1944 film This Happy Breed. [ citation needed] It was also used in the 1954 Errol Flynn film Lilacs in the Spring. [ citation needed]

British singer Kevin Coyne also released a version on his 1978 album Dynamite Daze, with piano accompaniment by Tim Rice. [4] [5] Use in other media [ edit ] During the First World War, "Dear Old Blighty" was a common sentimental reference, suggesting a longing for home by soldiers in the trenches. The term was particularly used by World War I poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. During that war, a " Blighty wound" – a wound serious enough to require recuperation away from the trenches, but not serious enough to kill or maim the victim – was hoped for by many, and sometimes self-inflicted. [7] Examples [ edit ] British soldiers reading copies of Blighty magazine outside their dugout in France, December 1939. Repatriated prisoners,” Scotsman, 24 April 1943. The newspaper also reported, for good measure, that the soldiers had been heard In an undated interview, Godfrey had a more modest recollection of how the song came about: “At the old Oxford Music Hall there was a show called ‘Blighty.’ Bennett Scott, A.J. Mills and I were going by, and one of us suddenly

British in Turkey: Battalion of our men landed at Constantinople,” Birmingham Gazette, 25 November 1918, p. 3. Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛtl/ but /ˈpɛtl̩i/. Vowels This article is about the slang term for Britain. For other uses, see Blighty (disambiguation). A World War I example of trench art: a shell case engraved with a picture of two wounded Tommies nearing the White Cliffs of Dover with the inscription "Blighty!" a b "Why Do the Brits Call the U.K. 'Blighty'?", on Anglophenia, BBC America. Accessed 30 December 2020. piano.” 5 Indeed, Godfrey sat in for a time as Dorothy Ward’s pianist on the stage (“Melodyland,” The Era, 20September 1916, p. 14), so he evidently was quite comfortable playing in public.