song’s association with the First World War is almost iconic. Noël Coward borrowed Blighty for his sprawling 1931 stage production Cavalcade, about British life in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the Academy Award–winning 1933 film version, however, Coward dropped Blighty in favour of another Godfrey song, Take In an undated interview, Godfrey had a more modest recollection of how the song came about: “At the old Oxford Music Hall there was a show called ‘Blighty.’ Bennett Scott, A.J. Mills and I were going by, and one of us suddenly Noël Coward used the song for his 1931 stage production Cavalcade, about British life in the first two decades of the twentieth century and in the 1944 film This Happy Breed. [ citation needed] It was also used in the 1954 Errol Flynn film Lilacs in the Spring. [ citation needed] a b "Why Do the Brits Call the U.K. 'Blighty'?", on Anglophenia, BBC America. Accessed 30 December 2020. British singer Kevin Coyne also released a version on his 1978 album Dynamite Daze, with piano accompaniment by Tim Rice. [4] [5] Use in other media [ edit ]

it was effervescent Dorothy Ward, wife of Music Hall star and songwriter Shaun Glenville, who introduced it. In a newspaper article, Miss Ward Repatriated prisoners,” Scotsman, 24 April 1943. The newspaper also reported, for good measure, that the soldiers had been heardFred Godfrey wrote the song with Bennett Scott and A.J. Mills after passing a music hall in Oxford where a show called Blighty was showing. He recounts: "One of us suddenly said “What an idea for a song!” Four hours later it was all finished, and the whole country was singing it soon afterwards. I got — not very much." [1] [2] White, Peter (24 June 2013). "Blighty closes as Drama opens for UKTV". www.broadcastnow.co.uk. Media Business Insight Limited . Retrieved 20 March 2014. The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress. Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛtl/ but /ˈpɛtl̩i/. Vowels

Blighty" in the Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014; and in Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, 2010. Accessed 27 February 2016.Recordings by Florrie Forde [3] and Ella Retford are the most commonly heard versions, though Dorothy Ward first sang it. a b c Wild, Kate (21 February 2014). "The English expressions coined in WW1". BBC Magazine . Retrieved 22 February 2014. After the introduction of conscription in 1916, the distinction between soldiers and civilians became less clear, and vocabulary passed readily from one group to the other. This is the case with ... Blighty. The Urdu words vilayat ("inhabited country", specifically Europe or Britain) and vilayati ("foreign", or "British, English, European") were borrowed by the British in the 19th Century.... But it was the regional variant bilayati - rendered as Blighty in English and meaning "Britain, England, home" - which really took off in Britain. Although it was first used during the Boer war, it was not until WW1 that Blighty spread widely and developed new meanings.

The term subsequently gained an ironic connotation in its closeness to the English word “blight” meaning epidemic. It’s an example of typical post imperial British self effacement.Filming Locations for Bryan Forbes' Sixties classic The L-Shaped Room in Notting Hill". Movie-locations.com . Retrieved 9 June 2018. Blighty" is a British English slang term for Great Britain, or often specifically England. [1] [2] [3] Though it was used throughout the 1800s in the Indian subcontinent to mean an English or British visitor, it was first used during the Boer War in the specific meaning of homeland for the English or British, [4] [1] and it was not until World War I that use of the term became widespread. [4] Etymology [ edit ] The word derives from the Urdu word Viletī, (older sources mention a regional Hindustani language but the use of b replacing v is found in Bengali) meaning 'foreign', [4] which more specifically came to mean 'European', and 'British; English' during the time of the British Raj. [5] The Bengali word is a loan of Indian Persian vilāyatī ( ولایاتی), from vilāyat ( ولایت) meaning 'Iran' and later 'Europe' or 'Britain', [6] ultimately from Arabic wilāyah ولاية‎ meaning 'state, province'.

Coward favoured Blighty once again, having returning Tommies sing it as the camera pans over the London streets of 1919 from high above in the film’s opening sequence. The length of the list of known Blighty recordings attests to the song’s popularity over the 100 years since it first captured the public’s ear. One of the more unusual, and moving, versions is that of British blues singer Kevin Coyne, on his 1978 LP Dynamite Daze. Another unexpected tribute came in 1986 from the influential BritishBlighty, Christmas 1917". Digital.nls.uk. The War Office, The Admiralty, The Red Cross . Retrieved 13 February 2014.