Smile, Smile, Smile

Pack up your troubles

In your old kit bag

And smile, smile, smile;

While you've a lucifer

To light your fag

Smile, boys, that's the style. . . .

This corny ditty became almost sanctified by the countless heroic circumstances under which it was sung during World War I. The words were written in 1915 by a British vaudeville actor named George Powell. He and his piano-playing brother, Felix Lloyd Powell, who wrote the music, netted $60,000 from the song.

After the war Felix Lloyd Powell wrote other tunes, which were never very popular. He got into real estate in the town of Peacehaven on the Sussex Coast, became the vice chairman of the Piddinghoe Parish Council, was embroiled in a campaign to change Peacehaven's name to Southcliffe. When World War II came, 53-year-old Felix Lloyd Powell joined the Home Guard. Last year he tried his hand at composition again, wrote a song called Home Guards on Patrol. One stanza went:

Some are lean, some are fat,

Some have feet a shade too flat,

Some have whiskers, some have not,

But we're none the worse for that.

But it was his old Tune Pack Up Your Troubles which, after 27 years, the British kept on singing.

One day last week Felix Lloyd Powell went to Peacehaven's Home Guard headquarters. He sat down at the piano and strummed:

What's the use of worrying?

It never was worthwhile--So,

Pack up your troubles

In your old kit bag

And smile, smile, smile.

Shortly afterwards he went to another room, where he could be alone, and shot himself dead.

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