About the lobbying. I found Harker's take on the early years of the FSS interesting. I haven't tracked down Hubert Parry's Inaugural Address yet but am intrigued by Harker's quotes. In searching for it I was amused to see that the first few issues of the Journal used close to a black-letter font on the title page but changed before long to something less Germanic. I wonder how the meeting about that went.

Harker makes his big political point, presaged in the quote from Marx and Engels at the start of the section, about the middle classes telling the common folk what was good for them. OK, yes, but they couldn't help being middle-class and as such had a chance of getting the ear of the other middle-class people who were setting up the curriculum. Promoting the music of the common folk over the 'commercial music-hall rubbish' is a bit like the current 'political elite' thinking salty and sugary foods pushed by commercial firms should be taxed so that we eat more fruit and vegatables. Or, better, the move from the 1960's on to get fiction into schools that wasn't all by middle-class writers about the things that middle-class kids do.

I for one am happy that what we sung at primary school in the 1950's was influenced by that movement rather than having justr posh songs aimed at posh kids. (plus Hymns Ancient & Modern ...)