In the Days of Old Rameses
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 20/07/2020

Day 126 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

A strange little song, first published by Sandburg. In the rambunctious "Whitechapel Club" ("a group of thirsty intellectuals who were opposed to everything"), located in Chicago in the early 20th Century, everyone would break into this song when someone was telling a story that had been heard before. I would of loved to have been a fly on the wall to have heard the goings on.

Sandburg explains further: "In the years when Jack the Ripper was baffling the police of London with his murders of women,  leaving mutilated victims in the Whitechapel district, there flourished in Chicago an organization  of newspaper men known as the Whitechapel Club. Its rooms fronted on the alley at the rear of The Chicago Daily News office, between Fifth Avenue and La Salle Street.

"George Ade says of  the club, "It was a little group of thirsty intellectuals who were opposed to everything. The fact  that Jack the Ripper was their patron saint will give a dim idea of the hard-boiledness of the organization. They had kind words and excuses for many of the anarchists who had been hanged for the  bomb-throwing at the Haymarket riot. They were social revolutionists and single-taxers and haters of the rich. They scoffed at the conventional and orthodox and deplored the cheap futility of their own slavelike-tasks as contributors to the daily press. They were young men enjoying their first revolt."

"Ade, James Keeley, Finley Peter Dunne, Brand Whitlock, John T. McCutcheon, Ben King, Drury Underwood and others were members. It was about the time of the Chestnut Bell, an attachment for men's vests; when a story that had been told many times before was narrated, it was the custom  to give a ring or two on the bells, signifying that the hearers had heard the story once or twice. At  the Whitechapel Club, however, instead of ringing Chestnut Bells, they sang a song. The verses,  as given below, are jointly from James Keeley and George Ade while the melody is a Keeley reminiscence. Ade tells us that Rudyard Kipling remembered his evening at their club because, later on, he tried to recall and write the words of the club song."