Just take my tip, boys, and tune her yourself.

So sang Harry Cox, the grand old Norfolk traditional singer, to Peter Kennedy in 1956,Published in Kennedys Folksongs of Britain & Ireland (Cassell, 1975, p. ) Kennedy also collected a similar piece of ribaldry, The German Clockmaker, from the singing of Charlie Wills, of Morcombelake, Dorset, in 1954. Seumas Ennis collected an unrelated song, with a similar story, The German Musicianer, from Thomas Moran of Co. Leitrim, Ireland, in 1957.(Published in Kennedy's Folksongs of Britain & Ireland (Cassell, 1975) Kennedy also collected a similar piece of ribaldry, The German Clockmaker, from the singing of Charlie Wills, of Morcombelake, Dorset, in 1954. Seumas Ennis collected an unrelated song, with a similar story, The German Musicianer, from Thomas Moran of Co. Leitrim, Ireland, in 1957.) more than half a century after German repairmen came touring the towns and villages of nineteenth century England, inspiring a number of ribald songs about what they got up to when repairing young women's pianos and other devices.

German instruments flooded the country. German piano exports had risen from £740,000 to £1,064,000 in ten years, and by 1912 stood at nearly ten times that figure (E.D. Mackerness: A Social History of English Music (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1964, p. 221)E.D. Mackerness: A Social History of English Music (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1964, p. 221) Many of the fiddles played in the countryside were of German manufacture (Ibid, p. 222 ).Ibid, p. 222 Though the concertina had been patented by Wheatstone in 1844, most of the instruments that came into the English countryside and influenced traditional music-making were made in Germany – so much so that the cheap diatonic instrument that sold in such huge numbers is known to this day as the Anglo-German concertina (Wheatstone's being the English). Before young men like Billy Kimber took up the concertina, the traditional accompaniment for the Morris had been “wattle and dub” (pipe and tabor), often home-made. This was the instrument played when William Kemp performed his famous “Nine Daies Wonder”, Morris-dancing from London to Norwich in 1600.

There were German bands, seemingly, playing on every street corner. Florrie Forde was singing:

Hear the little German band,
Ta-da-da-da-da-da-da.
Come let me hold your hand, dear.
Do, do, come and have a drink or two
Down at the old Bull and Bush,
Bush, Bush.

And she was also singing of the brass band going “tiddley-om-pom-pom” in I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside(though this was more likely to be inspired by the American, John Philip Sousa, than any countrymen of the Queen's cousin). An “oompah” bass (in the terminology of the composer's own programme notes) was still being featured in the finale of Vaughan Williams' F minor symphony in 1935.

An English street musician complained to Henry Mayhew in the mid-nineteenth century: “The German bands injure our trade much. They'll play for half what we ask. They are very mean, feed dirtily, and the best band of them, whom I met at Dover, I know slept three in a bed in a common lodging-house, one of the very lowest. They now block us out of all the country places to which we used to go in the summer.”

On the other hand, a German bandsman told him: “We play sheaper zan ze English, and we don't spent so much. Ze English players insult us, but we don't care about that. Zey abuse us for playing sheap. I don't know what zair terms for dances are. I have saved money in zis country, but very little of it. I want to save enough to take me back to Hanover. We all live togeder, ze seven of us. We have three rooms to sleep in, and one to eat in. We are all single men, but one; and his wife, a German woman, lives wis us, and cooks for us. She and her husband have a bedroom to themselves. Anysing does for us to eat. We all join in housekeeping and lodging, and pay alike.”Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1861 ed., vol. III, pp. 162-3(Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1861 ed., vol. III, pp. 162-3)

The rewards could be small when such performers penetrated into the smaller villages:

“Once every summer a German band passed through the hamlet and halted outside the inn to play. It was composed of an entire family, a father and his six sons, the latter graded in size like a set of jugs, from the tall young man who played the cornet to the chubby pink-faced little boy who beat the drum.

“Drawn up in the semicircle in their neat, green uniforms, they would blow away at their instruments until their chubby German cheeks seemed near to bursting point. Most of the music they played was above the heads of the hamlet folks, who said they liked something with a bit more 'chune' in it; but when, at the end of the performance, they gave God Save the Queen the standers-by joined with gusto in singing it.

“That was the sign for the landlord to come out in his shirtsleeves with three frothing beer mugs. one for the father, who poured the beer down his throat like water down a sink, and the other two to be passed politely from son to son. Unless a farmer's gig or a tradesman's trap happened to pull up at the inn during the performance, the beer was their only reward for the entertainment. They did not take their collecting bag round to the women and children who had gathered to listen, for they knew from experience there were no stray halfpence for German bands in a farm labourer's wife's pocket. So after shaking the saliva from their brass instruments, they bowed, clicked their heels, and marched off up the dusty road to the mother village. It was good beer and they were hot and thirsty, so perhaps the reward was sufficient.”Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, OUP, 1945

- Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, OUP, 1945

More exalted “German” performers were sometimes British musicians in foreign guise. Gustav Holst played trombone on Brighton Pier under Stanislaus Wurm, whose rhythm in conducting Strauss waltzes was said to be “electrifying”.

This popular ferment was but the trickle-down from what was happening throughout this “land without music”, as Sir Thomas Beecham termed it (adding “the English don't actually like music, only the noise it makes”). ( Quoted by the conductor Graham Buckland, in an online interview, http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Universitaet/RUZ/archiv/ruz-9507/buckland.htm.) The end of the Nineteenth Century had been inflamed in British musical circles by a search for a distinctly English voice. The land of Dowland and Purcell, where even King Henry VIII was an accomplished composer, had fallen to a situation where local composers had to assume a German or Italian accent if their music were to succeed.

“Singers were directed to study for years all the sounds save those which occur in the English language. It was drilled into them that Italian first and German second were languages suitable for singing; English, the sung language of the madrigalists, of Campian, Dowland, and Purcell, was like the Doric lay of the uncouth swain in Lycidas. The staple musical diet was equally exotic: the studies of Nava and Clementi and Sauer led on to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, Handel and Bellini, Schubert and Schumann, Wagner and Brahms and Verdi, with some Gounod added. . . Above all other objects, education was directed towards the acquiring of a 'gentleman's accent', which entailed the use of the language of the then accepted classics. Any other accent was regarded as impolite. The Covent Garden season won success only if the singers were aliens.”Hubert Foss: Ralph Vaughan Williams: a study (George G. Harrap, London, 1950, p. 46)
- (Hubert Foss: Ralph Vaughan Williams: a study (George G. Harrap, London, 1950,  p. 46)

Britain was on the itinerary of many foreign composers and musicians. Mendelsohn premièred Elijah in Birmingham in 1846. Wagner had visited London to public acclaim in 1843 and returned in 1877. The Hungarian, Hans Richter, who had conducted The Ring at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876, introduced Tristan and Die Meistersinger to London and left the Vienna Opera in 1899 to settle permanently in Manchester, where he conducted the Hallé orchestra. Sir Charles Hallé was himself German.

Bad feelings were often generated by the visitors' disparaging attitude to their British hosts. Hans von Bülow described the very popular Sterndale Bennett as a “miniature Mendelssohn” and the critic Eduard Hanslick (who once described Tchaikovsky as “music which stinks to the ear”)  complained in the  Neue Freie Presse of Vienna in 1879 of Sterndale Bennett's “slack and unenergetic conducting”, said that Arthur Sullivan was even worse orchestral leader, and Bennett's successor at the Philharmonic Society in London practically useless. Yet many of these had been trained in Germany, Sterndale Bennett and Sullivan in Leipzig, and other German critics compared Sterndale Bennett to Schumann.

Foss commented: “The Leipzig ideals and insistence upon a central style in music, based on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, had reduced many composers, not only English, to mere ciphers. Sterndale Bennett wilted in that admired conservatory to a pale Mendelssohnian sprig. Sullivan blossomed only in the Gilbertian Singspiel. Gade's talent was starved in the dominating town, and Grieg was only rescued from being a Kapellmeister-musician, a mere Nordic imitator – transformed into a true poet – by Richard Nordraak and Ole Bull.”Foss, p. 46(Foss, p. 46)

Constant Lambert later pointed out that even Sir Edward Elgar, that scion of Victorian and Edwardian patriotism, employed an idiom “that in type can be related back to the nineteenth-century German composers”.Constant Lambert: Music, Ho! (Faber, 1934, p. )- Constant Lambert: Music, Ho!  (Faber, 1934)

This affection for “Teutonism” persisted in Europe well into the next century. When Ralph Vaughan Williams went to Paris in 1908 to show his work to Maurice Ravel and, to a certain extent, to learn at the great master's feet, Ravel urged him to “écrire un petit menuet dans le style de Mozart” (write a little minuet in the style of Mozart). According to his brief “musical biography”, contributed to the study of his work by Hubert Foss, the English composer's response was forthright:

“I saw at once that it was time to act promptly, so I said in my best French, 'Look here, I have given up my time, my work, my friends, and my career to come here and learn from you, and I am not going to write a petit menuet dans le style de Mozart.' After that we became great friends and 1 learnt much from him. For example, that the heavy contrapuntal Teutonic manner was not necessary.”Foss, p. 35
- Foss, p. 35

British critics lavished adulation upon the Germans throughout the nineteenth century, particularly Sir George Grove, who was able to influence the programme policy of the Crystal Palace towards German composers: his programme notes on Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn were precursors of his famous eponymous dictionary of music and musicians, which consolidated the view that the Germans led the world.

All this prompted The Musician to pose the question in 1897: “Is Germany the Leading Musical Nation?”, pointing out that there was no English Mendelssohn (presumably, Sterndale Bennett didn't qualify), Beethoven, or Wagner. Even the great Handel was not British.

The leading English composers of the day were Arthur Sullivan, whose “serious” music like The Enchanted Island, Kenilworth, The Prodigal Son, and The Golden Legend, was less well received than his comic operas, written with W. S. Gilbert;  Charles Hubert Parry, whose F sharp minor piano concerto had been conducted by Richter at Crystal Palace in 1880, and whose setting of Blake's Jerusalem has been adopted by the Women's Institute to this day; and Charles Villiers Stanford, whose operas were first produced in Germany. Edward Elgar (born 1857) was still working in his father's music shop in Worcester and Frederick Delius (born 1862) was having difficulty persuading his father that he had a viable career in music. Their times were yet to come on to the English scene, Elgar with his Enigma variations in 1899 and Delius with his opera, A Village Romeo & Juliet in 1900.

According to Michael Kennedy,

“The most depressing feature of the musical scene at this period was the gap between musician and man-in-the-street. In the schools musical instruction was rudimentary. In the home the drawing-room ballad was a flaccid debaucher of taste. In the church the favoured hymn tunes were of a quite appallingly sentimental or insipid type. The enlightened minority existed then, of course, as in every other generation, but, as far as the general public was concerned, in an age when to hear music demanded some real effort, not merely the turn of a switch, the most virile and honest music which it encountered was in the music-hall.”
-  Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (OUP, 1964, p. 4)Michael Kennedy, p. 4

Later, Vaughan Williams was to endorse this view:

“The people who originally sang folk songs now sing music hall songs instead. I do not like music-hall songs very much, but with all their blatant vulgarity they are infinitely superior to the inane rubbish which is sung in the modern drawing-room.”
- Michael Kennedy, p. 35

Ironically, the debate about what constituted English music had been sparked off by Carl Engel, a Hanoverian, whose monumental Catalogue of the Musical Instruments in the South Kensington Museum (1874) had laid the basis for subsequent historical analyses of the technology of music. In his Literature of National Music (1879), he pointed to a lack of precision about what, exactly, constituted a “national” song as an underlying cause of the confusion:

“It seems rather singular that England should not possess any printed collection of its national songs with the airs as they are sung at the present day; while almost every other European nation possesses several comprehensive works of this kind . . . Some musical enquirers have expressed the opinion that the country people in England are not in the habit of singing while at their work in the fields. . . However, this opinion would probably be found to be only partially correct if search were made in the proper places. . . There are, in some of the shires, rather isolated districts in which the exertions of a really musical collector would not be entirely resultless. . .”Quoted by Michael Kennedy, p. 26
- Quoted by Michael Kennedy, p. 26

This was written at the very time when, according to Cecil Sharp writing four decades later, “every country village in England was a nest of singing-birds”.

Engel also anticipated a great debate which was to engage Sharp in debates with education authorities about what, exactly, was a folk song:

“The great majority of the airs printed in Ritson's English Songs (1783) can evidently not be regarded as national airs in a strict sense of the term, although the tunes may have been for some time in popular favour. The same remark applies to the airs in almost all the English collections of old songs. The difference between a national song (German, Volkslied) and a merely popular song (German, Volksthümliches Lied) is not always distinctly observed by the English musicians.”Ibid, p. 27- Ibid, p. 27

Despite Engel's criticism of Joseph Ritson, and the fact that he failed to distinguish between effusions like The Vicar of Bray and the traditional tune of which it was a corruption, Country Garden (which Sharp heard Billy Kimber play in the Headington garden in 1899), Ritson's “select collection of English Songs, with their original airs: and a historical essay on the origin and progress of national song” was an important step forward in folksong scholarship. For a start, the third of its three volumes was devoted to music: previous antiquarians had concentrated entirely on the verse.

Engel's distinction between “a national song . . . and a merely popular song” was borne out by the almost complete disappearance from the popular repertoire of the songs of Charles Dibdin (1745-1814), the renowned composer, author, actor, and theatrical manager whose sea songs and operas made him one of the most popular English composers of the late eighteenth century. Despite Dibdin's immense popularity throughout the land when the Admiralty commissioned him to write upwards of 1,300 “sea songs for the people” in the course of a few years, Cecil Sharp found only one being sung in an English village, and Baring-Gould heard only two. “I have no doubt that many of these were freely sung by the peasant singers of a previous generation, but they have evidently failed to survive the wear and tear of time and usage,” wrote Sharp (English Folk Song: some conclusions, p. 139).English Folk Song: some conclusions, p. 139

Meanwhile, however, true folksongs, unaltered and unedited, had begun to appear in print, starting with a collection of sixteen Sussex songs noted down by the vicar of Worthing, the Rev. John Broadwood, the full subtitle of which is well worth quoting:

OLD ENGLISH SONGS,

as now Sung by the Peasantry of the

WEALD OF SURREY AND SUSSEX,

and collected by one who has learnt them

by hearing them Sung every Christmas from early Childhood

by

The Country People,

who go about to the Neighbouring Houses Singing

or

'WASSAILING', AS IT IS CALLED, AT THAT SEASON.

The Airs are set to Music exactly as they are now Sung

to rescue them from oblivion and to afford a specimen of genuine Old English Melody

And

THE WORDS ARE GIVEN IN THEIR ORIGINAL ROUGH STATE

with an occasional slight alteration to render the sense intelligible.

Harmonized

For the Collector in 1843

BY

G.A. Dusart,

ORGANIST TO THE CHAPEL OF EASE AT WORTHING

It was followed by nine other collections in the last quarter-century, rescuing a total of 640 such songs from oblivion, all of them noted down from the singing of the song-carriers and, mostly, unadulterated. (The exception was the Rev Sabine Baring-Gould, whose Songs and Ballads of the West came out in four parts between 1888 and 1901, in which he was likely to change both words and music “because they were 'outway rude' or fragmentary”, and, said a friend, “he was apt to forget that his alterations were not part of the real song” (Cecil Sharp: his life and work, p. 51).Cecil Sharp: his life and work, p. 51 Yet Baring-Gould was not a prude: his collections of limericks inspired later collectors, like Gershon Legman, in their search for the indelicate air.)

On the backs of all this activity, the Folk-Song Society was formed in 1898, and from the outset it was clear that the object was not so much folksong as such, but the way folk music could be fed into the drive towards a recognisably English style in art music. At its inaugural address Hubert Parry had declared:

“True style comes not from the individual but from the products of crowds of fellow-workers who sift and try and try again till they have found the thing that suits their native taste; and the purest product of such efforts is folk-song, which, when it is found, outlasts the greatest works of art, and becomes an heritage to generations. And in that heritage may lie the ultimate solution of the problems of characteristic national art.  .  . Style is ultimately national.”
- Quoted in a note, Cecil Sharp: his life and work, p. 28

Surprisingly, perhaps, in view of his later association with folksong collecting, and the influence of folk melodies on such works as the first of the Three Norfolk Rhapsodies (composed three years after he had heard his first folk song in the flesh), at the outset of his association with traditional music Vaughan Williams was not yet certain that it would be possible for English composers to draw inspiration from a music as foreign to them as the call to prayer of an Islamic muezzin:

“English composers do not spring from the peasantry. Indeed, in England there are no true peasantry for them to spring from. Why, then, should an English composer attempt to found his style on the music of a class to which he does not belong, and which itself no longer exists? . . . In former times, musical England came to grief by trying to be foreign; no less surely shall we now fail through trying to be English.”
- Article in The Vocalist, April 1902, p.8Article in The Vocalist, April 1902, p.8

Yet in autumn of that same year, when lecturing to a large audience in Bournemouth, he put forward quite a different view:

“Great composers in all times in the history of music have not disdained to use folk tunes as a means of inspiration. We must not accuse them of stealing, for those great popular tunes are the common property of anybody who by nationality, friendship or analogous feeling finds himself in sympathy with them. . . It is extraordinarily interesting to see the national temperament running through every form of a nation's art – the national life and the national art growing together. . .

“Why did the singers and the inventors of folk songs sing them and invent them? It was not because they wanted to produce a novelty; it was not because they wanted to get up an entertainment to pay off the debt on the organ; and neither was it because there was going to be a festival and everybody was going to be there. The reason why those early musicians sang, played, invented and composed was simply and solely because they wanted to; and I think the lesson we can learn from them is that of sincerity. When English musicians learn to do that – to write and play for the sake of the music and for the sake of nothing else, then I think that the music which is latent amongst us will come to the front.”
- Quoted by Michael Kennedy, p. 32Quoted in Michael Kennedy: The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (OUP, 1964, p. 32)

What had changed? Vaughan Williams, like Sharp, had heard his first traditional song. And, like Sharp, it had been at a vicarage.