Since Christopher Tobias’ last access to popular music before Unexpected Danger was 1913, I thought I’d look into the sort of thing he might have heard. These are what I came up with. The Peelenium links are original recordings from the time period chosen to represent their time-periods in a millenium celebration (1999).
http://peel.wikia.com/wiki/Peelenium_1912
http://peel.wikia.com/wiki/Peelenium_1913
Here’s the Peele entry for 1928.
http://peel.wikia.com/wiki/Peelenium_1928
I’m finally finding sources of the music itself, which is helpful.
Audio track for “I Hear a Thrush at Eve” (1913)
Found at Audio Archive (https://archive.org/details/audio), which sorts recordings by date.
Given how long that last link is, I hope it works!
If only I had this when I was writing Unexpected Danger!