Val O’Donnell misses the sound of spontaneous whistling from his daily routine and wonders where have all the whistlers gone?

 

I heard a sound the other day that stopped me in my tracks. A man approaching me in a publc park was whistling. I didn’t recognise his tune. That didn’t matter. But his music voluntary transported me back to a time when the sound of human whistling was common: as common in the daily soundscape as the sound of birdsong. And I wondered why whistling has declined so much in the intervening years.

I think the first time I heard whistling my father was coaxing me to sleep with his version of Brahm’s lullaby. For many years growing up it was a daily experience to encounter a whistling tradesman, postman, schoolboy, bus conductor or messenger boy. Whistling was ubiquitous in the street, in the shops on beaches and in queues.

The first film I can remember watching was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It’s popular hit ‘Whistle While You Work, was already familiar to me. Later, whistling featured in many songs and entertainments on radio programmes.

Joe Lynch’s ‘Whistling Gipsey Rover’ made regular appearances on the long-running Walton’s Programme on Radió Éireann, whistling a seductive melody to win the heart of his lady. A favourite on the weekly Hospitals’ Requests programme was the very tuneful ‘Pedro the Fisherman’, who was always whistling in his various pursuits.

In the late 1950s, whisting ‘Col. Bogey’ became an expression of indifferent defiance after the popular war-time film ‘The Bridge Over the River Kwai’ In more recent times I enjoyed listening to the tongue trills of long-time Irish resident and singer Roger Whittaker.

Also in the 1950s, the English actor and siffleur Ronnie Ronalde raised the artistic standard of whistling to virtuoso levels. He enchanted audiences with beautiful bird impressions that decorated renditions of Albert Ketelby classics like ‘In a Monestery Garden’ and ‘Bells Across The Meadow’.

Ronalde became the most eminent siffleur in a long tradition of popular whistlers that emerged in the British Music Halls. Billed as ‘The Voice of Variety’ he toured the United States and filled New York’s Radio City for ten weeks in 1949.

Such virtuoso performances are a reminder of how whistling reached the threshold of an art form in the 19th century. Celebrated whistlers who appeared in the concert halls included the famous whistler Mrs Alice Shaw, known as ‘La Belle Sffleuse’. Reporting on her in 1931, the New York Musical Courier recorded that, “No jazz or cheap crooning stuff had a place in her repertoire and her performances were equally sensational in the drawing-rooms of kings, czars, emperors and mahadarajahs and the in homes of the intelligentsia of the world’s capitals.”

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