How much I loved this song when a pupil in 3rd year of secondary education in 1959-60, so aged 14/15, near Glasgow!

We were a very enthusiastic singing class (mixed boys and girls), favouring songs with a bit of drama and rhythm to them, like the setting of John Masefield's poem 'Cargoes' -- so 'The Two Grenadiers' was exactly what was guaranteed to get us going. We sang it with feeling (ignoring our tiny female music teacher's attempts to rein us in) and poured out what we thought of as real passion on the lines "The Emperor, the Emperor was taken!". Indeed, the song was so popular with us that we would sing it a cappella at the back of the bus taking us to the local music festival when the teacher entered us as the school choir to sing a 5-part anthem. And we were still singing it lustily on school and Former Pupil excursions over the next few years, in a version which included a nod to Schumann's piano arrangement -- "To France and to freedom two grenadiers -- diddle-iddle-um -- from bondage in Russia were tramping etc.".

Can't remember the names of the various song books that we used, but we also had to sing 'Voi che sapete' and Handel's 'Largo': eventually our wee teacher got fly to our exuberant nonsense and would bribe us with 'Cargoes' or 'The Two Grenadiers' AFTER we'd worked through the more lyrical stuff. And if that wasn't enough, she would call up Moira (THE class singer) to accompany herself on the piano and sing something like Schubert's 'The Trout' or Schumann's(?) 'To Music' -- it always worked and restored us to being biddable citizens.

And ever since then I've been a disciple of the power of music!

(By the way, several of that group met up again last year and could still -- after 52 years -- sing our way through 'Grenadiers' without words on paper!)