Whistling in the wind
There’s a Stephen Sondheim musical, long neglected, running in London, called Anyone Can Whistle. I dispute the truth of this statement. Just as some, because of the shapes of their mouths, have rhotic defects, others for the same reason can’t whistle. Also, it needs updating. Almost anyone can whistle; but nowadays, few people do.
This development, I suggest, deserves at least a trim little footnote in a history of social change in this country during the 20th century. Once it was commonplace to hear whistling in the street. Nowadays, even those who are not engaged in yattering into their mobiles tend to abstain. Whistling, one might say – even indoors, I suspect – has gone out of fashion. Not that it was ever an entirely popular fashion. Many middle-class parents detested it, rating it not much above picking your nose. “Errand boys whistle,” they used to rebuke their whistling children. “I see we have a butcher’s boy in the house,” the father of a friend of mine used to observe if he caught his daughter whistling. The attitude was much the same as it was when Dickens caught it in the Pickwick Papers: “To the great horror of Mr John Smauker, Sam Weller began to whistle. ‘I beg your pardon, Mr Weller,’ said Mr John Smauker, agonised at the exceedingly ungenteel sound.”
And yet in other contexts, whistling, however ungenteel, was encouraged. The song in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Whistle While You Work, became in wartime almost an official instruction. Keeping cheerful on the munitions line or the route march was a patriotic obligation, and if whistling didn’t make people feel cheerful, it at least made them sound cheerful, which was reassuring to the authorities. Perhaps the huge numbers of troops now called up for Iraq will be urged to whistle too.
As always when change is being disparaged, some who regret the decline of whistling will blame the BBC. The BBC used to put whistlers on the air and now doesn’t. Generations are growing up who have never heard Ronnie Ronalde, who whistled and sang and occasionally yodelled, and entertained not just royalty but Marilyn Monroe. He also, I see from a website, wore burgundy suits, which is perhaps where Tony Blair got the idea. Ronnie Ronalde, it seems, though now retired and living in New Zealand, is whistling still. Even he, though, hardly enjoyed the cultural status of some previous whistlers. Some even took the stage in the early days of the Wigmore Hall, though they appeared on the programme as siffleurs or siffleuses rather than whistlers.
The most famous siffleuse of all was a society woman called Alice Shaw, whose reputation spread from Chickering Hall in New York across the US and into Europe. “La belle siffleuse,” she was dubbed. The New York paper Newsday recently disinterred this tribute to Alice Shaw in the Des Moines Mail Times after one of her concerts in 1889: “All beholders held their breaths as the broad expanse of snowy decolleted bosom heaved gently, the handsome head and face uplifted, the rich ruby lips puckered kissably, and a soft, sweet, silvery trill shot forth, at once electrifying the audience and suggesting the presence of an impossibly cultured canary.”
She’s remembered still where whistlers meet, as they do at the International Whistlers Convention held every year at the end of April in Louisburg, North Carolina. It’s the practice of the governor of North Carolina to designate the week of this competition as Happy Whistler Week. Here you can hear the cream of whistling in all its many varieties – its puckerers and its pursed lip practitioners being but two. The top male whistler of 2001 was Mike Cooney (“incredible trills from Edmonton, Canada”); in 2002, the palm was taken by Steve Herbst’s rendition of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody number 2.
Now that every small town in Britain feels driven to stage a festival of some kind, there might seem an opportunity here for some minor municipality to put itself on the map by staging a British convention, to which stars like Cooney and Herbst and George “Whistler” Jagemen (“best in Texas”) might come to appear alongside the best of British pursed lippers and puckerers and even finger whistlers (Al Jolson was one.) It would help in terms of publicity if, as happened on one recent US occasion, a performer could be rescued by a fellow performer while under attack from a 10ft long albino python. I would like to see John Prescott attending – and perhaps taking part. And if whistling makes you more cheerful, the sooner the better. We certainly need some cheering up at the moment.
