Last year we looked at a piece of sheet music for a song called ‘When the Guards are on Parade by Leslie Sarony. Tonight we are looking at a second piece of music by the same composer with a military theme, this time called ‘When a Soldier’s on Parade’:

Clearly the composer liked this theme! Leslie Sarony was a lyricist who specialised in nonsense songs and humorous ditties. Between 1926 and 1939 he published over 400 songs includng numbers for artists such as George Formby and Gracie Fields. This particular number was published in 1934, as seen at the foot of the first page of the score:

Leslie Legge Sarony Fyre was born in Suburbiton in 1897 and his sister Mabel encouraged him enter emateur talent competitions at the local music halls as a child. By his mid teens he was a full time performer but he tried to enlist inthe First World War and after several failed attempts was accepted into the London Scottish. Once in the army he discovered, “it was in the army that I found I could write songs. I’d always thought how marvelous it would be to write your own songs and right from the start I always tried to create songs with a silly idea behind them.”

The words for this particular song go: