Our ancestors lived to the background noise of horses’ hooves and waggon wheels, hammers and scythes, windmills and water mills. Then came steam trains, factory whistles, klaxons, deafening cloth mills, steel works. More melodic were the coaching post horns, town crier’s bells and Sunday church bells, funeral tolling, change ringing and wedding peals and the rapid ringing bells on fire engines and ambulances. Sailors’ shifts were marked by ships bells, town clocks had large striking bells for sounding the hours, for a time when clocks were too expensive for everyone. Modest wealth might add a grandfather clock to the household items, its gentle tick, whirring to strike the hour, the measuring of lives. Later sirens were invented for fire, ambulance, police or air raids, the internal combustion engine for automobiles and aircraft droning or roaring, drowning out the bird song. I miss the rasp of manual lawn mowers, evoking summer, and swishing brooms sweeping leaves. In fact,
I find the modern engines of lawn mowers and leaf hoovers menacing! Sounds have been the soundtrack of our ancestors’ lives, but this aspect is largely ignored when writing up family histories of births, marriages and deaths.
Music in everyday life
How much was music part of the lives of our ordinary working ancestors, not the gentry, who would have had access to music lessons, balls, opera and concerts? Churchgoers knew their hymns, with ‘To be a pilgrim’ and ‘We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land’ marking the seasons of rural life. Before church organs
