And when did it go out of fashion?
The other day, I was listening to Otis Redding’s ‘The Dock of the Bay’ when it hit me: no one whistles any more! The sound of someone whistling while they work or just walk down a street is one of those – like the rattle of a milk float – that have all but disappeared from British life.
Sometimes I wonder if there really was a Britain of whistling postmen, factory workers and dustmen. Did dads whistle while washing the family car on a Sunday – or is this just my nostalgia for a time that never was?
Cultural historians will tell you that, yes, we were once a whistling nation. In A Brief History of Whistling, authors Allan Chatburn and John Lucas evoke a Britain where whistling was a common practice among coal miners, factory workers, errand boys and hotel doormen. They argue it was mostly a part of working-class culture, practised by men more than women.
Before and after the Second World War, whistling was a popular form of entertainment, heard in music halls and vaudeville, where popular professional whistlers – such as Ronnie Ronalde and Fred Lowery – would imitate birds and wildlife calls.
In the 1960s and ’70s, whistling superstar Roger Whittaker took whistling to the pop charts with such hits as ‘Mexican Whistler’, ‘Finnish Whistler’ and ‘Scottish Whistler’. That’s a lot of whistle from one man!
For many of us, the whistle is what made films memorable. In David Lean’s 1957 classic The Bridge on the River Kwai, British prisoners of war defy their Japanese tormentors by whistling the ‘Colonel Bogey March’. Even today, people who don’t whistle will whistle along to ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
Whistling was an uplifting tonic for troubled times, or just to relieve the tedium of the working day. Disney’s seven dwarfs advised us to whistle while we work. Today’s remaining whistling advocates claim it’s a great stress-buster and mood-enhancer. I know of no better way to dispel a gloomy mood than to whistle along to that 1967 pop classic ‘I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman’ by Whistling Jack Smith. Just try it and you’ll be amazed.
For every fan of whistling – humorist Alan Coren planned to whistle a merry tune when he met his maker – it had its detractors. Winston Churchill hated the sound so much he had it banned from the War Office. In 2013, a Leicestershire milkman was banned from whistling by irate residents.
So why and when did whistling die out? It was the appearance in 2002 of the first generation of iPods – and later the rise of the smartphone – that marked the death of the whistle. Why bother to whistle when any song you wanted to hear was at your fingertips?
And we don’t live in a whistling kind of world any more. A lot of factory jobs have gone and so have variety shows. And in the age of Uber, nobody needs to know how to whistle to summon a cab. Whistling now has largely negative associations – the wolf whistle, the dog whistle and the whistle-blower.
But I miss the sound of the whistle. It had a kind of cheerful defiance to life’s problems and setbacks – a just-get-on-with-it nonchalance we need today more than ever.
Cosmo Landesman, who founded Modern Review magazine in 1991 with his then wife, Julie Burchill, and Toby Young
