Description:This photograph shows an outdoor performance presented by the Birmingham Athletic Club (BAC) in an open-air ward at the 1st Southern General Hospital at Edgbaston. The Club was directed principally as a troupe of variety acts by Lawrence Levy, who had been a teacher, Olympic weightlifter, newspaper reporter and leading theatrical impresario.
During the First World War the BAC entertained wounded soldiers in the region’s suburban military hospitals. Levy recounts some pleasant occasions, such as the ‘Bishops fete providing strawberry tea’, but more often grim ones, such as their performance on 8 July 1916 to an audience at Rubery, which at the height of the Battle of the Somme ‘included a large proportion of soldiers who had been in the big “push” of the previous few days, and who had been rushed through from Southampton, transported as quickly as possible to the great hospitals of the city’.<small><sup>1</sup></small> At another event at Kings Heath later that same month on 16 July ‘proceedings were interrupted by a bugle call followed by the arrival of a train of ambulances with the wounded therein’ and 30-40 stretcher cases were brought in, while at Rubery on 2 September ‘men on their couches filled one half of the room’.
After their first hospital appearance at Hollymoor in February 1916 the BAC put on over 100 wartime shows, presenting a wide ranging programme, which could last as long as five hours. Acts included: music on dulcimer, bagpipes, banjo, mandolin or concertina; chorus and dance; boxing, including ‘Cragg’s Midgets’ (child fighters: ‘two capital little “pugs”, sons of Private “Sol” Adams’); stand-up comedy; humorous sketches; Indian Club solo (juggling); poetry recitation (for example, Kipling’s Gunga Din); a clown act; conjuring; quarter-staff combat (‘which the Australians present, and there were many, had never seen’); bayonet fighting; ventriloquism; weightlifting; siffleuse (whistling) by Miss Proverbs; and sword dancing. Popular sentimental songs, such as 'A broken doll' and 'If you were the only girl in the world' were rewritten to be topical; some were given local colour, so that for instance the refrain of 'Take me back to Blighty' became:
'Now you’re back in dear old Blighty
Left the front and in an English town,
Brought you right down here,
Good as anywhere,
Birmingham town is good enough, so you don’t care'
The troupe disbanded shortly after peace was restored; however, the rare copy of <a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1855">Bucking up “the Boys”</a> in Birmingham Archives & Heritage tells the tale of ‘those delightful times of those entertainments’, which would have endured ‘in the memories of all who took part in them, and not least in the minds and hearts of the wounded soldiers who enjoyed them’, all of whom have themselves now passed away.
<small>[Edward Lawrence Levy, Bucking up “the boys” by the “B.A.C.”, (Birmingham: Hammond, 1921)]</small>
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> Edward Lawrence Levy, Bucking up “the boys” by the “B.A.C.”, (Birmingham: Hammond, 1921)</small></font>