The Ballad of George R. Sims1

It’s an easy game, this reviewin’—the editor sends yer a book,

Yer puts it down on yer table and yer gives it a ’asty look,

An’ then, Sir, yer writes about it as though yer ’ad read it all through,

And if ye’re a pal o’ the author yer gives it a good review.

But if the author’s a wrong ’un—and some are, as I’ve ’eard tell—

Or if ’e’s a stranger to yer, why then yer can give him ’ell.

So what would yer ’ave me do, Sir, to humour an editor’s whims,

When I’m pally with Calder-Marshall, and never knew George R. Sims?

It is easy for you to deride me and brush me off with a laugh

And say ‘Well, the answer’s potty—yer review it just ’arf and ’arf’—

For I fear I must change my tune, Sir, and pump the bellows of praise

And say that both ’alves are good, Sir, in utterly different ways.

I’m forgettin’ my cockney lingo—for I lapse in my style now and then

As Sims used to do in his ballads when he wrote of the Upper Ten—

’Round in the sensuous galop the high-born maids are swung

Clasped in the arms of roués whose vice is on every tongue’.

‘It was Christmas Day in the workhouse’ is his best known line of all,

And this is his usual metre, which comes, as you may recall,

Through Tennyson, Gordon, Kipling and on to the Sergeants’ Mess,

A rhythm that’s made to recite in, be it mufti or evening dress.

Now Arthur shows in his intro that George R. Sims was a bloke

Who didn’t compose his ballads as a sort of caustic joke;

He cared about social justice but he didn’t aim very high

Though he knew how to lay on the sobstuff and make his audience cry.

The village church on the back-drop is painted over for good,

The village concerts are done for where the Young Reciter stood,

The magic-lantern is broken and we laugh at the mission hymns—

We laugh and we well might weep with the Ballads of George R. Sims.