Song on Your Bugles

This novel, published in 1936, is largely set in Skirthorpe Green, an industrial village in Yorkshire. The central character, Herrie Champion, is a talented young artist with the opportunity to escape the poverty and economic dependence on the uncertain future of the village's worsted mill. He is, however, emotionally tied to the village through love for three women — his unmarried mother, who has a secret reliable source of income; his childhood sweetheart, Elsa Crawby; and the mysterious other, Daphne Calwenter, daughter of the mill owner.

The author, Eric Knight (born 10 April 1897), was the son of a diamond merchant, estranged from his family, who was killed during the Boer War. His mother went overseas to earn a living and left her sons in the care of relatives in Yorkshire. Like the central character of this novel, Eric began work aged 12, as a bobbin doffer in a mill, and over the next three years was employed in mills, an engine works, a saw mill and a glass factory. His mother married a German man in Philadelphia in 1907 and Eric moved there as an adolescent. In June 1917 he interrupted his study of art in New York to volunteer for active service with the Canadian Army. Having trained as a signaller, he joined Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in May 1918. His two surviving brothers, serving with the 110th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army, were killed in action in the Battle of Argonne Forest in July 1918. Having worked his way up as a newspaper journalist, his first novel was published in 1934. His most famous novel, Lassie Come-Home, was published in 1940. He was, however, killed in an air crash over Suriname in January 1943 (while serving with the Special Services Division of the United States Army) before the film was completed.

The fact that the novel has many autobiographical elements indicates that it is set in the same period as the author's childhood in Yorkshire. There are, therefore, no references to the First World War. The central character's friend, Joe Crawby, leaves behind the poverty of the village to join the army and returns home an invalid having lost an arm due to an accident. He had always had that ambition:
“Me? Eigh, Ah know what Ah'm off to dew. Fust thing Ah gates big enough Ah'm off to lie to t'recruiting sergeant for t'King's shilling. Then they'll tak' me off to Aldershot and put me in a bloody fine uniform and Ah'll drill and fill me belly full of army duff. Ivery day Ah'll go me out on all t'athletic exercise things and swing t'dumb-bells till Ah'm heavy and strong.”
As in the previous novel in this reading project, the major battles that are fought by the local people are industrial and the great casualty at the end of the novel comes when the workers at the mill, like soldiers possessed by the kill-or-be-killed traumatic mindset, “welded together into the one-thing that is a mob, that thinks and moves as one creature, like a flock of birds that has no differing thoughts but wheels and turns in answer to the mass will.”