‘Lots of Little Soldiers’: How the ultimate anti-war song was born in Yorkshire
Harrogate, what with its historic Royal Baths, meticulously kept gardens, and posh Victorian tearooms, seems a rather unlikely place for the anti-war movement of the 1960s to take root. While the North Yorkshire town has never been a particularly rich breeding ground for revolutionaries, it did produce one of Britain’s finest folk songwriters, in the form of Barry Dransfield.
Folk music has, by its very definition, been around for centuries, but the British folk scene experienced something of a resurgence during the late 1960s and early 1970s, perhaps spurred on by the singer-songwriter boom occurring on the opposite side of the Atlantic.
Either way, the harbingers of this folk mastery were rarely afforded the kind of credit they so richly deserved – the likes of Vashti Bunyan, Nick Drake, and even Bridget St John, for instance, weren’t properly credited for their sonic innovations until decades after their recording careers had subsided or, in the case of Drake, after he had tragically passed away.
Dransfield is a similar figure, in that he was never afforded much attention from the musical mainstream of his day, but has since been heralded as an essential, cult figure within circles of folk obsessives. It isn’t overly difficult to see why, either. With his arsenal of multi-instrumentalist talent, the Harrogate-born songwriter managed to faithfully evoke the age-old sounds of Celtic folk music, all the while imbuing those sounds with lyrical content that was incredibly up-to-date.
Namely, Dransfield was able to capture the inherent message of the vast, ever-expanding anti-war movement on both sides of the Atlantic within his 1972 masterpiece ‘Lots of Little Soldiers’ – a song which remains one of the most important, impactful, and yet woefully underrated anthems for peace that has ever been put to tape.
Within the song, Dransfield plays the role of a narrator, recounting a childhood game of acting out grand battles with toy soldiers. “I put them up on a table, and I marched them all around,” the chorus begins, evoking a timeless image of a young boy battering various Airfix kits from the comfort of his dining room table. As the song continues, however, the game comes to a grim end when the boy is supplied with a bomb, “And he bombed up every soldier, all me neighbors, and meself.”
A grim allegory for the mechanics of war and how, to those in power, sending thousands of young men to their deaths – whether in the trenches of France, the jungles of Vietnam, or the terraces of the North of Ireland – is little more than a game.
The soldiers are never named, never given any hint of personality or individuality, and, within the context of the song, they exist only to provide the narrator with amusement and to make a profit for the shopkeeper. “If it wasn′t for your soldier game, I don′t know what I’d do,” he declares at one point.
During a time in which anti-war songs were aplenty, as artists across the musical spectrum turned their attention to the atrocities being committed by the US Government in Vietnam, ‘Lots of Little Soldiers’ seemed particularly pertinent, but even today it remains a stark reflection on the unchanging effects of war.
In recent years, in fact, the song has had something of a rebirth, owing to an incredible cover version performed by Dundalk-based folk outfit The Mary Wallopers, who notably did not change Dransfield’s original arrangement too drastically.
In over half a century since it was first written in the bosom of Harrogate’s leafy green springs, the song is just as impactful as it ever has been, even if it was never afforded quite the same attention as the anti-war efforts of folk contemporaries like Dylan or, going back a little further, Pete Seeger.
The albeit rather short discography of Barry Dransfield remains woefully underrated by the masses, but ‘Lots of Little Soldiers’ is a particularly affecting jewel within the output of one of the greatest folk musicians Britain has ever boasted.
