The rise and fall of whistling

There was, at least until recently, an old sign round the back of the Savoy banning whistling by staff or tradesmen. Whistling, it seems, can wind up some people. Winston Churchill hated the practice. Posters were put up in the War Rooms forbidding it. One day, on his way to Downing Street, he heard a paperboy whistling and sharply told him to stop it at once. The boy had some spirit and argued back: ‘Why should I, you can shut your ears can’t you?’

Churchill found this amusing — even if he never learned to love whistling. If he’d lived in my house, he’d have seen it a little differently.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, men — and it generally was men — seemed always to be whistling. It was the alternative soundtrack of my early life. But the whistles have gone quiet. I heard my postman whistling the other week and I realised I hadn’t heard that sound for a very long time.