It meant a lot, some of those early Jam albums we used to listen to. Its dripping sarcasm was, as is often the case with such songs, lost on some.įormer British prime minister David Cameron, who was in the Eton Rifles when he was at school, told the British Broadcasting Corporation in 2008 that his favourite song was “ The Eton Rifles, inevitably. Like all the best political and protest songs, The Eton Rifles has remained relevant over the decades. In the song, Weller takes the piss out of the Eton boys, mocking their posh language: “Hello-hurrah, what a nice day, for the Eton Rifles”, and their elitist sport of cricket often being rained out, “Hello-hurrah, I hope rain stops play, with the Eton Rifles”. “They gave me a broadly socialist viewpoint and made me reappraise everything.” “Coming from such an uneducated background, I suppose I’d had quite a blinkered upbringing, and reading books like George Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia and Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist had opened up my mind, seeing how the system works and how people are kept down,” Weller told Uncut. He grew up as a working-class kid in the area. Weller used the incident as a metaphor for the economic oppression that came with Thatcherism. The song isn’t only about the left-wing protesters of the day versus the Eton toffs.
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Now the Combined Cadet Force, schoolboys receive elementary military training and are taught how to fire guns.
The actual Eton Rifles, founded in 1860, were Eton College’s cadet corps. A number of new policies led to a swift rise in unemployment and the class divide became even more pronounced. A few months earlier, on 4 May, the Conservatives had come into power with right-winger Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. It was released on 26 October 1979 and shot to number three on the hit parade. It prompted Weller to write his famous song about class warfare and inequality, The Eton Rifles. “I just thought what a great fucking image it was.”
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“I was watching the news on TV and I saw this footage of a Right To Work march going past Eton, where all the kids from the school came outside and started jeering at the marchers,” he recalled to Uncut music magazine in 2016. Paul Weller, leader of new wave band The Jam, saw coverage of the march on television. There the protesters handed over a giant, fake silver spoon to the school’s head boy.Īs the 17 June 1978 edition of the Socialist Worker newspaper reported, the head boy patronisingly told the marchers: “I hope your jolly campaign gets you somewhere.” This Right To Work march, in protest against rising unemployment, stopped at the gates of the elite school for boys, Eton College, a symbol of English privilege, entitlement and power. Socialist Workers Party members followed the truck and were later joined by Rock Against Racism punks. On the back, like punk incarnations of the Pied Piper, the band Crisis was playing loud music. At the front of the march snaking through the streets of Eton in southeast England was a lorry. Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window).Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window).Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window).Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window).
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