If we could transport ourselves back in time to Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre on the evening of 29th August 1964 we might have been surprised to hear a Greek children’s song performed in the Greek language as part of a comedy musical evening by two well-known British musicians before a packed audience.
This was the opening night of the Australian season of a by the British comedy musical duo – Michael Flanders and Donald Swann – bringing their satirical and comic musical show At the Drop of a Hat to Melbourne. The Melbourne season would be followed by shows in Brisbane and Sydney.
Michael and Donald had met and developed their interest in music and comedy reviews from their high school days, their Oxford University studies interrupted by their war service. After the war they would be reunited and form what would become a successful satirical duo, Flanders providing the words and Donald the music. They would perform on stage, interspersing their songs with comic monologues. Their concerts would be recorded and result in a series of bestselling albums.
Their Melbourne concert was a success, one reviewer describing the audience as responding to the “satirical … hilarious …superb, sparkling entertainment” with “tremendous enthusiasm and hoots of mirth.” Another described their performance as “a triumph”.
What struck me was that one of the key songs in their performance was a Greek children’s song called To Kokoraki (The Cockerel in English) that was performed by Donald in the Greek language. One concert reviewer wrote that Donald Swann’s rendition of the song in Melbourne had been “a knockout performance” in which Donald came fully into his own. This might well have been the first major performance of a song in the Greek language to the wider Australian community.
The song had been part of their repertoire from some time and featured on their first album, a live recording of one of their early At the Drop of a Hat performances (the album produced by none other than George Martin the future producer of The Beatles).
It was well known throughout Greece and has been described as a Greek version of Old McDonald has a farm, with verses including animal noises. One Greek musician – Dionysis Savvopoulos –recorded the song with different artists performing the sounds of each animal. The sheet music for the song published in 1954 attributes the song to Josef Korinthos and Filippo Petri.
How did this Greek children’s song enter the repertoire of this famous musical duo? The answer takes us back to the trauma and disruption caused by the Axis invasion of Greece in 1941, a disruption that brought together Greek refugees and their British helpers, sparking a lifelong interest in Hellenic culture amongst one of the latter.
Donald Swann volunteered for war service with the Friends Ambulance Units, a creation of the Quaker Society of Friends. Opposed to the fascism but also a committed pacifist, Donald sought to help the war effort through service in this ancillary medical unit. Over 1,300 volunteers served in these ambulance units operating across various war fronts, a number being killed.
One of the units served in Greece during the Greek campaign, from northern Greece to the evacuation beaches of the south, all the while subject to enemy attack. At Kalamata they would serve in the temporary field hospital that was set up at the Town Hall providing medical care to the thousands of Allied troops waiting to be evacuated before being captured and spending the rest of the war in German POW camps.
Donald’s war brought him to the Middle East in 1943 where he was part of the Allied effort to provide care to the thousands of refugees that fled the Axis occupation of Europe. The flood of these desperate civilians saw the British establish a series of refugee camps across the region. Amongst these were tens of thousands of Greek citizens, seeking shelter in these camps and beyond.
Donald was sent to the El Nuseirat refugee camp set up in British mandate-era Palestine. Most of the refugees at the camp were Greeks who had fled the German occupation of the Dodecanese Islands, fleeing first to Turkey, and then travelling across Syria to Palestine. Donald describes the camp as an enormous tented facility housing some 3,000 refugees. While the British Army was responsible for administration and security, Donald’s unit were responsible for registration, food, medical care, and camp welfare.
Prior to his embarkation for the Middle East Donald had chosen to learn Greek as part of his training for overseas service, his tutor being the Greek poet Demetrios Kapetanakis. Soon he was acting as a camp interpreter and able to interact warmly with his charges. He found it “”a thrilling …wonderful thing” to be able to converse with them in their own language. Yet while the refugees improved Donald’s Greek language skills, they also introduced him to the beauty of Greek music.
He listened to the refugee’s sing of their former lives in Greece, organising musical concerts and entertainments, one including a performance of a one-legged shadow-puppeteer revealing the joys of famed Greek art of Karagiosis. Listening to “their rhapsodic melodies” he was able to leave behind the musical constraints of classical music and “let the music well up inside”. As he says it was here that he fell in love with their music and it soon would become part of his repertoire – “I began to know it, sing it, play it on my guitar, and it fertilised my whole experience.” He began to dream of visiting the island homes of these refugees, of Kos and Karpathos. By sharing their language and music, Donald felt that the Greek refugees had helped him more than he could have helped them, giving him “a new life”, changing him completely. And he was barely 21 years old.
His linguistic and musical education continued as he followed the refugees on their return home as the war drew to an end, Donald and his unit assisting them in re-establishing their lives after the years of war. He would serve on Kasos, Karpathos and Rhodes, before transferring to Igoumenitsa in Epirus. Throughout these communities Donald was exposed to more Greek traditional songs – songs of “of great interest and depth” as he would write.
Donald’s exposure to Greek music and culture had been a formative experience in his life. Firstly he “learnt that music comes from within.” While his mother had given him an appreciation of folk song and a desire to compose his own music, it was his experience of the Greeks that allowed him to find his “inner well” as he wrote. He felt that one of the distinctive aspects of Greek song was the way that the words seemed to float above the music, never being subsumed by the playing of the instruments. Donald felt that his exposure to Greek song had given him “the key” to his own musical awakening.
He returned to Britain at war’s end excited by his newly acquired appreciation of Greek folk song (supported by a treasured printed volume of Greek songs) and a desire to compose. At university he studied the Greek language and the evolution of Greek song, one of his teachers being the Oxford Professor of Greek John Mavrogordato.
It was from this source that Melbourne’s first public performance of To Kokoraki emerged. As Michael Flanders stated in an interview with The Bulletin during their Australian tour, Donald had introduced this Greek song to their repertoire due to his fondness for Greece which arose from his service during the war. When he began his musical collaboration with Michael Flanders after the war, he originally proposed five Greek songs for inclusion in their early musical reviews. He would put Greek poems to music, including “Miranda” by Constantine Palamas, which he performed every night for 700 nights. He would collaborate with the Cretan-born soprano Lili Malandraki in two shows celebrating Crete, the performance later issued as a record. Even as late as 1994 Donald put together a celebration of his experience of Greece and its culture called Swann among the Sirens.
It is a testimony to Donald’s love of Greek music that he not only chose To Kokoraki as the sole addition to their program of otherwise original songs but also that he sang it in Greek. No doubt if it hadn’t been for Donald’s warm reception by the Greek refugees in the Middle East, this beautiful little folk song would not have been spread around the world – in the records and performances of Flanders and Swann. It would remain part of their repertoire until their last performance together in 1967.
So if you’d like to appreciate the day Greek song came to Melbourne’s wider community have a listen to Donald Swann and his rendition of To Kokoraki, another evocation of the depth and influence of Greek music and culture on the wider world!
Jim Claven is a historian, freelance writer, published author and lover of Greek folk music. For information on Donald Swann and the Greek refugees readers are referred to Donald’s memoir Swann’s Way and the website donaldswann.co.uk. His latest publication – From Imbros over the Sea: Imbros & Gallipoli Revealed – is published by the Imvrians’ Society of Melbourne. He can be contacted at jimclaven@yahoo.com.au