Isn’t it odd how snippets of song lyrics lurk in our memories decades after we learned them? I may not be able to remember where I parked my car at Yate Shopping Centre, but I’m still word perfect on songs I learned at primary school.
So, when my author friend Stefania Hartley told me about Ride Like a Gaucho, Tetbury young farmer Sophia Ashe’s memoir of her gap year in Argentina, I was transported not to South America, but to my Year 3 classroom in a Terrapin hut of Days Lane Primary School, Sidcup, and our weekly Singing Together lesson. In my head I immediately started singing:
“See the gaucho, ride the pampas, Ride the pampas, green and wide…”
Singing Together was a weekly BBC radio programme for schools, broadcast nationwide from 1939 until 2004. In the days before audio streaming and BBC Sounds, all the schools taking part had to tune in to the live broadcast. We sang along with the show’s hosts and their backing choir, and sometimes we played our recorders too.
There was something very exciting about knowing we were singing the same songs at the same time as thousands of children all over the country.
Each term we learned a mix of folk songs from around the world, set down in printed booklets, which the schools had to buy. The songs ranged from lilting melodies to rousing calypsos to nonsense songs. We thought it great fun, not realising the many educational benefits we were absorbing in the process: learning to read music, improving our literacy skills, working as a team, and building our awareness of other cultures. Gaucho! Pampas! Such exotic words!
Singing Together was also very levelling. We weren’t marked or judged on their performance, and the subject didn’t feature in our school report. We simply enjoyed ourselves.
In those days we sat in neat rows at old-fashioned single wooden desks with lift-up lids. For Singing Together, we had to move our desks together in pairs, because there were only enough booklets for one between two. At the end of term, we were allowed to buy the booklets for sixpence each, on a first-come, first-served basis. Throughout primary school, I went to my grandma’s for school dinners. I remember cadging sixpence off her at the end of each term and running back to school as soon as we’d finished eating to secure my copy. The songs we learned are still very special to me.
Sadly, I don’t still have my copies of those booklets – but you can click here to see the BBC’s gallery of Singing Together booklet covers.
It’s unfortunate that few of the live radio programmes were recorded, and almost all have been lost. Whether or not you remember taking part in Singing Together, you might enjoy listening to a wonderful radio documentary by Jarvis Cocker, which you can catch on BBC Sounds here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04stc6c
I bet you can’t listen without joining in at some point! If the programme makes you hanker after a grown-up equivalent of Singing Together, try joining your local choir (Hawkesbury Choir, in my case) – it ticks all the same boxes for me!
This article first appeared in the May 2024 edition of the Hawkesbury Parish News
