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participating. Willetts chose to mount what has been described as a token defense. He first remarked that the songs in question might not be copyrighted at all, as few of them were registered at Stationers' Hall. Then he maintained that the legitimate publishers themselves depended on secrecy, consistently refusing to reveal the terms underwhich they operated. In fact this defense may not have been intended as token at all, since it echoed complaints leveled consistently since the seventeenth century that the enterprise of publishing was itself conspiratorial. In any case, Willetts may have been hoping that parliamentary legislation would render the case moot. It did not, and his own defense proved futile. Willetts was sent to prison for nine months.64

Willetts's sentence marked a fundamental shift. For the first time, the pirates faced severe penalties. They could no longer hope to resume operations a day or so after a raid. Soon after the Willetts trial, a second conspiracy case, this time against the "Leeds Pirate King," a man named John Owen Smithwho had done extensive business with Willetts, resulted in a similar victory for the publishers. Then, in August 19o6, the new music copyright law was finally passed by Parliament, over the objections of Caldwell and his few allies. It had been championed by the senior par- liamentarianT. P. O'Connor, with the all-important advantage ofgovern- ment support (fig. 12.I). Even so, it passed only on the evening of the last day of the parliamentary session, and with the aid of a special sitting of the Lords. The new law confirmed the sea change brought about byWilletts's dethroning, because it ended any hopes that he might have harbored that piracywould be decreed legitimate retroactively. Willetts never recovered. But the king of the pirates had scarcely been deposed when sheet music prices suddenly rose by 5o percent; middle-class musicians might have been forgiven a brief twinge of regret at his downfall.

THE RISE OF THE PIRATE HUNTERS

The music publishers had survived. In the wake ofWilletts's defeat piracy did not vanish completely, but it was drastically reduced in scale. Willetts himself was finished, and Caldwell's arguments seemed forgotten although when gramophone records were included in copyright law a little later it was on terms similar to those proposed by Willetts for popular songs, and compulsory licensingwould be embraced for books, too, albeit on a limited scale.65 The Music Defence Department of the MPA was disbanded. Arthur Preston retired from the MCA; he went on to manage Margaret Cooper, the resident light entertainer for Chappell's ballad concert series at the Queen's Hall, and died in 1926.

FIGURE 12.1. T. P. O'Connor fires a music copyright cannon at the pirates. "The rogues! This ought to sink'em!" Punch 131, no. I (1111Y4 Igo6): U. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library.

In 1944, four decades after Preston's pirate war, it underwent a strange revival when Britain's Ministry of Information decided to recall these events to public view. The Ministry was eager to exploit nostalgia to rebuild public morale as World War II drew to a close. It recruited a film company called Gainsborough Studios to produce a series of movies. Some of the resulting films were based on music-hall themes, and one in particular centered on Abbott and Preston's pirate war. It was entitled I'll Be Your Sweetheart, after a song that had been pirated in those days. Shot in between V2 strikes, the film starred Margaret Lockwood, at the height of her notoriety for her "wicked lady" roles, and the then unknown Michael Rennie, who would soon go to Hollywood and find stardom as the alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still. It told a simple love story tacked onto a onedimensional account of the piracy crisis from the publishers' perspective. The movie was no masterpiece, and it understandably made a negligible impression both at home and in its U.S. release. But, looked at today, it is a rather extraordinary document because it incorporates substantial tranches of dialogue closely