A Pilgrimage to Jerusalem (the song) - 1916-2016

To honour the 100 year anniversary of Jerusalem, Britain’s unofficial national anthem, in 2016 I created a 125 mile ‘Pilgrimage to Jerusalem (the song)’ from London to Sussex.

This was a journey on foot made with: Kitty Rice, James Keay, India Windor-Clive, Mathilda Wnek, Guy Hayward, Georgie Norfolk, Merlin Sheldrake, Cosmo Sheldrake (each in parts)…

Supported by:

The Blake Society (Honouring and Celebrating the work of William Blake)

Millican Backpacks (Making great backpacks in Britain)

Alastair Sawdays (Curators of accommodation in special places)

In the deepening dark of 2016, with a bunch of friends I made a pilgrimage from central London to coastal Sussex, to honour the 100 year anniversary of the song ‘Jerusalem’ – “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Times…”.

This song is the fruit of two people – William Blake, visionary poet and artist, and Hubert Parry, composer and director of the Royal College of Music. In 1804, Blake wrote the poem as part of his epic ‘Milton’. And in 1916, Parry set this poem to a rousing melody, designed to be sung by large groups of people.

What decided the route of this song pilgrimage is the fact that both Blake and Parry were lifetime Londoners. Blake only left once! But both men wrote their parts of this song in Sussex, only 7 miles apart from each other (and 112 years).

Today, the song Jerusalem has become a unifying anthem for all and any English cause – from cricket/rugby/football, to the Labour Party conference and Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, to anti-frackers and far-right nationalists, to the W.I., the Olympic games and the Royal Wedding, to churches and schools and mystics and comedians.

Jerusalem the song has become infused in the soul of England. It deserved a pilgrimage!

My Aims

The centenary of this song’s creation is a momentous occasion, but attention rather slipped during Brexitty wranglings. We were all so worried about whether we were British or European, everyone forgot to sing about being English.

So before the year was over, I vowed to honour this most English of songs in the best way I know – with a dedicated journey on foot.

To this end, I plotted a route through London, where Blake and Parry lived most of their lives, and are both buried, to coastal Sussex where Blake and Parry were drawn to create this song. What summoned these two Londoners to this same coastline to create this particular song? And what draws us there today? Toward this mystery I would walk and sing…

I wanted to discover how the song changed when sung in different places, and how it changes places it is sung. I considered this an act of re-wilding, of re-releasing the song into its native environment, the deep English interior.

My hope was to sing Jerusalem 100 times, until I was ‘OJed’ (Over-Jerusalemed).

This would be a songful expedition to the English interior, a delving into the back-garden of nation, land and self. And a search for the spirit of England, ancient and modern, within a song and a journey on foot.

Also – I aimed to support the Blake Society’s drive to fund William Blake’s memorial. His body in 2016 lay in an unmarked grave in Bunhill Fields. I am pleased to say this has now been remedied.

The Background Story

William Blake was a Londoner. During his life, he had the reputation of being an undesirable semi-madman. His radical outspoken views on politics, Christianity and art caused him a life of poverty and relative loneliness – except for a few extremely close allies and of course his wife Catherine, his greatest supporter.

Like most of Blake’s works, during his life very few people read the poem ‘Milton’ (in which the stanzas for Jerusalem appear). Blake’s work sold extremely poorly. The extravagance of Blake’s engraving and the perfectionism of his colouring, as well as his refusal to follow artistic fashion, meant that Catherine his wife literally served him empty plates for supper on many occasions. But for Blake, things of the vegetative world were secondary, mere reflections of the higher truth of the imaginative realms.

William Blake lived in London his entire life – except for three years when he borrowed a cottage in Felpham in coastal Sussex. It was here that Blake began to write ‘Milton’, whose prologue contained the well-loved lyric we so often sing today.

112 years after this, in 1916, Hubert Parry, director of the Royal College of Music and a high-Establishment personality, accepted a request to set this poem (with very minor alterations) to melody.

The request was from the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, on behalf of Britain’s new World War One Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House. 1916 was of course in the middle of World War One, and many literary figures were getting involved in the war-effort. Bridges was looking for a way to increase morale for a movement called ‘Fight for Right’, a semi-spiritual jingoistic subscription fund designed to encourage enlistment in the army at a time when recruitment numbers were dropping (in all senses).

Parry agreed to participate, though with reservations. He was a pro-European, and loved Wagner above all other composers. Like Blake, Parry believed that the future of England was in Europe, and that art and music were a cultural heritage that could and should bypass national political borders.

One of the propaganda bureau’s alterations made to the lyric was to change ‘these Satanic mills’ to ‘those Satanic mills’. With the modern mechanised death toll from poison gas, barbed wire, machine guns and heavy artillery, it would have been rather easy to assume that the Western Front war-effort was the Satanic mill in question, chewing the grist of common men into horrid pulp. And such a connection would likely not have helped recruitment numbers.

The song was written, and loved, but the Fight for Right movement was ended abruptly – not because of its failure, or the song’s inability to inspire morale - but because in March 1916 conscription was introduced for all single men aged 18-40. In May 1916, this was extended to all married men too. So the song was simply no longer required.

Parry withdrew it from the Propaganda Bureau, and granted its copyright to the NUWSS – the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. These were NOT the ‘Suffragettes’, who were led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her bodyguard of jiu-jitsu trained fighters – but their more peaceable sisters, who were working toward solutions based in legislation rather than militancy and disruption. Though of course, the entire effort was really a tag-team…

Parry himself died in 1919 of Spanish Influenza. In 1928, Jerusalem’s copyright was granted to the W.I., who inherited much of the Suffrage movement’s property when voting rights for women were finally achieved. This copyright expired in 1967, and the song has since then been used by almost everyone.

It is tempting to imagine that Blake and Parry were deeply disparate men, the one being a staunch hermit-like artist, and the other a high-society Baronet. But they shared much in common. Both were pro-European. As Blake wrote from Felpham:

“Now I hope to see the Great Works of Art, as they are so near to Felpham, Paris being scarce further off than London. But I hope that France & England will henceforth be as One Country and their Arts One, & that you will Ere long be erecting Monuments In Paris – Emblems of Peace.”

Parry and Blake were also both pro-feminists. Blake was a staunch admirer and defender of Mary Woolstencraft, even when details of her controversial personal life were revealed after her death. To Blake, following ones’ bodily impulse was righteous.

Also, both were anti-slavery – though this was less of a cause for Parry, as slavery had already been banned in England by the time of his birth. But for Blake, slavery – both of poor English chimney-sweeps as well as distant Caribbean Africans – was a real concern. His artwork was used for the abolition movement, and depicted in savage reality the punitive treatment of slaves who fought for freedom.

Also, both were Christians – though Blake was a radical version who hated the established Church of England, and whose version of Jesus would be very likely unrecognisable to anyone who currently considers themselves to share his religion.

Jesus “is the only God … and so am I and so are you” wrote Blake, in one of his simpler statements.

But against this, Hubert Parry was no simple conservative, born with silver spoon. As his daughter Dorothea wrote in 1956:

“This fantastic legend about my father … that he was conventional, a conservative squire, a sportsman, a churchman, and with no “strange friend” … My father was the most naturally unconventional man I have known. He was a Radical, with a very strong bias against Conservatism … He was a free-thinker and did not go to my christening. He never shot, not because he was against blood-sports, but felt out of touch and ill at ease in the company of those who enjoyed shooting parties. His friends, apart from his schoolfriends, were mostly in the artistic and literary world … He was an ascetic and spent nothing on himself. The puritanical vein in him is considered by some to spoil his music, as tending to lack of colour. Far from its being an advantage to be the son of a Gloucestershire squire, my father’s early life was a fight against prejudice. His father thought music unsuitable as a profession, and the critics of music in the mid-nineteenth century showed no mercy to anyone they considered privileged. My father was sensitive, and suffered from bouts of deep depression. The extraordinary misinterpretation of him that exists should not persist.”

I hoped my pilgrimage might do a part in undoing this misinterpretation.

Along the way, I created daily videos. It was an absurd amount of work. But here they are (all on a mobile phone, it was the only way I could get it done…):

A Playlist of all the Jerusalem Pilgrimage videos I made…

Back to Things I’ve Done

Back to Home