Boris the Bulgar

[Ed ROBINSON]

Greetings one and all, I came across this passage recently whilst reading 20 years after. The fame of a panto song "Boris the Bulgar" spread even to the enemy who translated the verse and posted them outside the trenches of the 28th Div with a request for the music. Would anyone have a copy of the song? Cheers Ed

[centurion]

"I am Boris the Bulgar The man with the knife,

The pride of Sofia, The taker of life.

Good Gracious how spacious And deep are the cuts

Of Boris the Bulgar, The Knifer, the knut"

Apparently sung to the tune of Gilbert the filbert the colonel of the knuts

"Abdul the bulbul emir" was also popular (and in some rugby club circles still is with by now unprintable versions of the words )

[centurion]

The song Gilbert the Filbert was written by Arthur Wimperis & Herman Finck and first published in 1914 appearing in a review called The Passing Show. It was a hit in it's day.* The lines of Boris the Bulgar fit neatly in the place of the chorus so one can only think that some concert party or the like in the Balkan theatre adapted Wimperis'es lines keeping Finck's tune (Finck was in fact Hermann Van Der Vinck born in London but to a Dutch family and a very successful writer of popular music - one of his songs In The Shadows (known as Tonight) was probably the last tune played on the Titanic before Abide with Me and "I'll make a man of you" was a very popular music hall number - see the opening of Oh What a Lovely War)

*Making a star of Basil Hallam, who was really Captain B H Radford and was killed in a failure of his Spencer parachute harness when bailing out of an observation balloon.

[Ed ROBINSON]

Many thanks for the info. Another interesting paragraph in the articles was how the British were allowed to play sport in some fields in view of the enemies artillery but if they tried to do any "military" training they were shelled.

[centurion]

Many thanks for the info. Another interesting paragraph in the articles was how the British were allowed to play sport in some fields in view of the enemies artillery but if they tried to do any "military" training they were shelled.

It was football only - the Bulgarians liked watching a match and left a message saying they were happy to watch football but drill was boring.

There was a tree in no mans land that patrols from each side used to leave messages pinned up on - English was the "lingua franca" (if English can be a lingua franca!). After a while British patrols were finding their messages returned with the grammar corrected!