Eamonn O’Keeffe has been awarded a CCSF scholarship to complete the fourth and final year of his doctoral work focused on military musicians during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars at the University of Oxford. He takes an innovative approach, with deep archival exploration, to examine how military practices, culture and music, in particular, have infiltrated British society as well as colonial contexts, including Canada. His research has been inspired by eleven summers of volunteering and working as a drummer and historical interpreter at Fort York in Toronto, where he brought the site’s War of 1812 history to life for visitors.
In the 18th and 19th centuries military music was ubiquitous in the United Kingdom and its overseas colonies, encouraging enlistment and enlivening martial reviews and public spectacles. Eamonn’s doctoral thesis argues that these musicians helped to instil discipline and boost morale within the army, whilst also providing professional entertainment in garrison towns.
Wartime military expansion provided opportunities for ordinary boys and men to obtain musical skills, and Eamonn’s work examines the varied careers of discharged martial musicians. His research highlights the importance of ex-soldiers as instructors of working-class brass bands and as leading figures in colonial musical life, particularly in Canada. He also considers martial music as a politically charged exponent of patriotism and protest, contending that British political radicals, Irish Catholics, and Upper Canadian reformers all emulated military sounds and spectacles in public demonstrations, often with the involvement of musically-trained ex-servicemen.
Prior to his DPhil, Eamonn completed an MPhil at the University of Cambridge with a dissertation on honour, duelling and courts-martial in the early 19th Century British army. He has presented his work at numerous academic conferences and workshops, and edited the memoirs of a Napoleonic-era Coldstream Guards sergeant, Narrative of the Eventful Life of Thomas Jackson, in 2018. He is a Council Member of the Society for Army Historical Research, one of the world’s oldest military history societies.
Demonstrating a strong commitment to public engagement, Eamonn recently appeared on the BBC One TV series “Who Do You Think You Are?”, to share his expertise on the lives of army drummers with Kate Winslet. His identification of a remarkable passage on homosexuality in a farmer’s diary from 1810 received widespread media attention in February 2020; he has interpreted its implications on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Dan Snow’s History Hit and Songs of Praise on BBC One, alongside publishing an academic essay on the discovery.
