Turned Out Nice Again Read online

  While entrepreneurs like Morton had tended to concentrate on a handful of halls at a time, later proprietors like Sir Oswald Stoll and Moss Empires built nationwide chains, and Matcham’s modus operandi found great favour with these operators. Manchester-born Edward Moss had begun his career as a variety theatre proprietor in Edinburgh in 1877, aged 25. His theatres came to be regarded as the ‘number one’ halls, the circuit – thirty halls strong by 1925 – being known to performers as ‘the tour’. His peak as a promoter of new hall building came in 1900 with the opening of the Hippodrome on Charing Cross Road, a circus theatre where audiences could thrill to the sight of twenty-one forest-bred lions, or a man riding a turtle in the giant water tank. Moss was knighted in 1905 for his services to entertainment and charity, but died just seven years later. His Times obituary reported that his ‘ambition was to be a country gentleman and sportsman’, the rather sniffy implication being that a variety theatre proprietor could never be a gentleman.6

  Oswald Stoll, Australian by birth, had begun his career as an impresario in Cardiff in 1889 with the takeover of Leveno’s music hall, which he renamed the Empire. This was a popular choice in an age when the world map was predominantly red. Before long, he had a chain of eight halls, all run with a high moral tone. On his death in 1942, The Times noted that his Cardiff experience ‘of rowdy audiences made him determine to do all he could to raise the status of music halls and make them places of family entertainment’, the paper having evidently got used to the idea of show business types as worthwhile human beings in the thirty years since Moss’s death.7

  Stoll’s career peaked with the opening of the Coliseum on St Martin’s Lane in 1904, an Italian Renaissance-style 2,358-seater on which Matcham was encouraged to pull out all the stops. The building was revolutionary in the most literal sense, from the mechanized glass globe at the top of the facade to the concentric rings of the revolving stage, which could run in any combination of directions. This technological marvel even allowed horse races to be staged in the theatre. Slightly less impressive was the truncated railway that carried royal visitors from their carriage to the foyer; it failed to work satisfactorily and was soon removed.

  From the grandest halls, like the Coliseum, down to the plainest provincial venues, each variety theatre had a dedicated support staff – prop men, wardrobe mistresses, set builders and stagehands, who put the shows together and took them apart again. Peter Prichard, who later became an artists’ agent, was brought up in a family of such craftsmen and women:

  At the turn of the century, the theatres had their own carpenters, because they made all their own scenery and things like that. My grandfather had been a stage carpenter when it was a profession, but he went from theatre to theatre. My grandmother’s bid to fame was that she had been wardrobe mistress on Buffalo Bill’s last tour of England. Her sister, my great aunt, had a boarding house [in west London] and some of the cast lodged with her. She said that it included the American Indians who were in the show, because they weren’t allowed in the hotels. We had a lot of the props still in the cellar, but we were bombed. We had a load of spears, bows, arrows and shields of the Red Indian period that were left there.8

  As the buildings, the management and the skills of the support staff developed through the second half of the nineteenth century, so did the entertainment on offer. One of the earliest professional entertainers was W.G. Ross, who forged his reputation in the song and supper rooms with the song ‘Sam Hall, the Condemned Sweep’. He contrived to get the audience on his side with this tale of woe, only to chide them at the end of each verse.

  Into the 1860s and 1870s, the performers remained mostly singers and almost exclusively male. William Randall was a hit at the Canterbury and the Oxford with seaside ditties like ‘On the Sands!’. Meanwhile, just as the US was abolishing slavery, E.W. Mackney9 was making a name in London as ‘the Negro Delineator’, the first ‘blackface’ singer in a line that would continue through Eugene Stratton, G.H. Chirgwin and G.H. Elliott10 and well into the television age as part of the Black and White Minstrel Show.

  The first female performers were making their breakthrough at this time, among them ‘serio-comic’ vocalists like Annie ‘The Merriest Girl That’s Out’ Adams. She helped pave the way for Vesta Victoria, whose signature song was ‘Waiting at the Church’, and Ada Reeve – as well as for the one female music hall performer who remains almost a household name nearly a century after her death. Born Matilda Alice Victoria Wood in Hoxton in 1870, Marie Lloyd became the archetypal music hall female. Her torrid private life (she married three times, never wisely nor too well) was a fitting background for her repertoire of flirtatious, risqué songs, such as ‘I’m a Bit of a Ruin That Cromwell Knocked About a Bit’, ‘Don’t Dilly Dally on the Way’ and the almost-certainly penis-related ‘Wink the Other Eye’. In particular, ‘Don’t Dilly Dally on the Way’, written for Lloyd by Charles Collins and Fred W. Leigh, would have spoken to working class urban audiences, depicting as it did a moonlight flit to avoid paying the rent:

  We had to move away

  ’Cos the rent we couldn’t pay.

  The moving van came round just after dark.

  There was me and my old man,

  Shoving things inside the van,

  Which we’d often done before, let me remark.

  We packed all that could be packed

  In the van, and that’s a fact,

  And we got inside all that we could get inside.

  Then we packed all we could pack

  On the tailboard at the back,

  Till there wasn’t any room for me to ride.

  My old man said: ‘Foller the van,

  And don’t dilly-dally on the way.’

  Off went the van wiv me ’ome packed in it,

  I walked be’ind wiv me old cock linnet.

  But I dillied and dallied,

  Dallied and dillied,

  Lost me way and don’t know where to roam.

  And you can’t trust a ‘Special’,

  Like the old-time copper,

  When you can’t find your way home.

  Another option for female music hall performers was to pretend to be men. Vesta Tilley and Ella Shields were just two of them, but the field was led by Hetty King – billed, with justification, as ‘the world’s greatest male impersonator’. Dressed in a top hat and evening suit, King popularized the song ‘Give Me the Moonlight’, and in her later years became a mentor to crooner Frankie Vaughan, who was always ready to acknowledge her influence.

  The modern concept of the comedian was also beginning to emerge. The greatest of all early practitioners was Dan Leno (real name: George Galvin), who had begun his career as a clog dancer before moving into more verbal forms of entertainment. His meandering, frequently surreal act included comic songs with long, spoken digressions such as this cynical rumination on an all too recognizable tourist trade from his 1901 recording of ‘The Beefeater’:

  There’s no place on the face of the earth like the Tower of London. If you’ve never been there, go again. It’s a glorious place. Everything old. Now in the first place when you visit the Tower of London, it’s free, but you have to pay a shilling to go in. The first ancient item you see is the man that takes the money at the door. Then you pass through the refreshment room, which is the oldest refreshment room in the Tower, and the only one, and there are some very ancient items in the refreshment room, such as the buns, ginger beer, the barmaids and whatnot.11

  Not far behind Leno was the droll George Robey, billed as ‘the Prime Minister of Mirth’ and the first music hall performer to receive a knighthood. Then there was Little Tich, as Harry Relph was professionally known, whose diminutive stature was at odds with the length of his boots. In the north of England, comedians tended to play naïve, going for the sympathy laugh. The king of the ‘gowks’, as these near-simpleton characters were known, was George Formby senior, with his catchphrase ‘Coughing better tonight’, a reference to the chest condition that
would eventually kill him, and songs like ‘John Willie, Come On’, in which the protagonist failed to notice that he was being propositioned by a prostitute. After his death in 1921, his whole act was taken on by his son. By the thirties, however, Formby junior had found his own voice, in risqué songs performed to his own banjolele accompaniment, and was on his way to a level of stardom his father had never achieved, thanks to the medium of film. He also established his own memorable catchphrase, declaring that things had ‘turned out nice again’, even when they obviously hadn’t.

  Unsurprisingly, given the supper club clientele, one of the main characters of the early music hall had been the high-flyer, either down on his luck, or, as in George Leybourne’s ‘Champagne Charlie’ characterization, ‘good at any time of day or night, boys, for a spree’. Slowly, however, as audiences expanded, a more earthy, working class element began to be depicted on stage. The authentic cockney dialect (a curious, nasal whine only distantly related to the modern ‘cockney’ dialect of Estuary English) was heard loud and clear from the likes of the ‘coster comedians’, who were so called because they acted and sounded like market traders or costermongers. The pioneer was Albert Chevalier, the ‘Coster Laureate’. However, his contemporary Gus Elen is better remembered and documented. Having survived into the age of the talkies, he left a permanent record of his act – including his passionately-sung tribute to the goodness of beer, ‘Half a Pint of Ale’ – in a series of short films for British Pathé.

  Throughout the history of music hall and variety, from the early days at the Canterbury to the circuits over fifty years later, the comedians and singers tended to be the big draws, but it was the speciality acts that helped ensure that variety remained varied. The rule of thumb was that the stranger the performance, the more memorable it was. Take the magician Kardoma, whose act was summed up admirably in his bill matter: ‘He fills the stage with flags.’ He sometimes filled it with flowers, according to his mood and availability of stock. Or perhaps ‘Checker’ Wheel – ‘The man with the educated feet’ – whose star turn was to tap dance in roller skates.

  Among the best known of all the ‘spesh’ acts were the acrobatic troupes like the Five Delevines, who made a speciality out of contorting their bodies into letters of the alphabet, and the Seven Volants. Where these acts were all about feats of agility, others dealt in futility, such as Banner Forbutt, an Australian trick cyclist who, in 1937, managed to stay upright on a stationary bicycle for two hours and thirty-nine minutes. His countrywoman, the contortionist Valentyne Napier, became a massive draw; billed as ‘the Human Spider’, she performed on a web bathed in ultraviolet light. Many spesh acts came from overseas, but others were not all that they seemed. Rex Roper, the lasso-spinning cowboy act, was authentically Western – from Bristol, that is.

  Some forms of dance came under the speciality heading, such as the adagio work performed by the Polish act, the Ganjou Brothers and Juanita, in which Juanita entered on a pendulum hung from the flies, before being thrown all around the stage with great skill by the three brothers.12 Far less strenuous, but no less skilful, was the sand-dancing of Wilson, Keppel and Betty, who, in their cod-Egyptian garb, shuffled in unison to the strains of ‘The Old Bazaar in Cairo’. When booked for appearances in Germany their utterly innocent act was disapproved of by the Nazis because of the bare legs on show.

  Then there were the magicians, from the suave David Devant to the unfortunate Chung Ling Soo (in real life, the resolutely Caucasian, American-born illusionist William Robinson), who was killed on stage at the Wood Green Empire on 23 March 1918, when his bullet-catching trick went horribly wrong. Animal acts always went down well, from Captain Woodward’s Performing Seals to Hamilton Conrad and his Pigeons, via a plethora of dog acts, such as Maurice Chester’s Performing Poodles, Darcy’s Dogs and Cawalini and his Canine Pets. The best documented of all the dog acts was Duncan’s Collies, inherited by Vic Duncan from his father in 1927 and active well into the fifties. Duncan’s dogs had amazing balance, instilled by teaching them to stand on their hind legs on the back of a chair. Highlights of the act included a dog rescuing a baby (in reality, a doll) from what appeared to be a burning building, and a car accident scenario that must have taken years of training. This involved one dog driving a car and another playing dead under the front wheels, while a third, the canine passenger of the car, stood on hind legs at a public telephone calling for an ambulance.

  There were even more curious acts on the scene, such as quick-change artists who could reappear in fresh garb in the time it took them to walk behind a screen. One of these was Wilf Burnand, who took to the stage dressed as Scottish singer Harry Lauder, complete with kilt, stick and tam-o’-shanter. Behind the screen he went, emerging barely seconds later as G.H. Elliott in blackface, repeating the trick once again to emerge as Marie Lloyd. Not a word was spoken in Burnand’s act. It was all down to his costume changes and the orchestra playing musical cues associated with each of the artists he evoked.13

  The relative freedom afforded to the music hall meant that material could tackle subjects that might have been deemed unsuitable in a more tightly regulated medium. It was possible to be topical. For example, one song highlighted the expediency and hypocrisy of mainland dwellers’ attitudes to the Irish, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. At this time, there was a great deal of anti-Irish feeling in England, largely inspired by Charles Stewart Parnell’s campaign for Home Rule and his subsequent divorce scandal. One performer, ventriloquist Fred Russell, may even have changed his name to avoid being tainted by association, as his grandson, Jack Parnell, explains: ‘Charles Stewart Parnell was a pretty bad name in this country, so I believe my grandfather changed his name because of that. My father’s stage name was Russ Carr, but I don’t think there was any particular reason for that, it was just a stage name.’14 However, in the Boer War, the Dublin Fusiliers played a vital role, which prompted Albert Hall and Harry Castling to write a song for the performer Pat Rafferty, called ‘What Do You Think of the Irish Now?’:

  You used to call us traitors,

  Because of agitators,

  But you can’t call us traitors now!15

  Around this time, during the early 1900s, Marie Lloyd was at the head of a phalanx of performers who used their freedom to highlight earthier concerns. Lloyd’s risqué repertoire included innuendo-laden songs like ‘She’d Never Had Her Ticket Punched Before’, a tale of an innocent abroad on the railways, but with seemingly lewd undercurrents:

  The man said, ‘I must punch your ticket’, spoke sharp, I suppose,

  Said she, ‘Thou punch my ticket, and I’ll punch thee on thy nose’.16

  Off-stage, her life was a mess of feckless husbands and freeloaders abusing her considerable generosity, but professionally, Lloyd was a very canny operator. Summoned to defend her material by the London County Council licensing committee, she sang one of her supposedly offensive songs very demurely, then an apparently innocent and acceptable song in a lascivious manner, with plenty of winking. Filth, as Tom Lehrer later put it, was in the mind of the beholder.

  Lloyd also used her clout to improve conditions for acts less well-off than herself. A life on the halls was hardest for those lower down the bill – known as ‘down among the wines and spirits’ due to their placement in the printed programme – but it wasn’t a picnic for the stars. In London, a big name would rush, by carriage, between several halls in one night. A typical night for Marie Lloyd began with an 8.30 appearance at the Middlesex, saw her heading south to the Canterbury for 9.10, to the Royal Cambridge at Shoreditch for 10.10, and ended with a bill-topping performance at the Oxford at 10.45. When Dan Leno died in 1904, aged just 43, his Times obituary observed that his ‘mind and body, it seems, were worn out by overwork’.17 The effort had not been entirely wasted, though. Leno was the biggest star of his day and, on the day of his funeral, a crowd three deep and three miles long came to pay its last respects, as his body processed to the Lambeth Cemetery in To
oting.

  The lesson of Leno’s demise was not learned, and proprietors tried to get even more out of the artists they booked. In October 1906, Walter Gibbons, proprietor of the Empires at Islington and Holborn, the Clapham Grand and the Brixton Empress among others, bought the Brixton Theatre. He tried to capitalize on its proximity to the Empress by making acts double up at the two halls. Not surprisingly, the performers cried foul and went on strike. The location of this disagreement was significant. Many London-based music hall performers had made their homes in Brixton and Streatham, because of the all-night tram service, so Gibbons’s action was a high explosive device landing in their back yard.

  Most of the other proprietors weren’t far behind Gibbons in their desire to squeeze even more value out of the talent. Many added matinees without extra pay and placed punitive barring clauses in contracts, preventing artists from appearing at halls within a certain radius, during a set time period. For a performer such as the tragedian John ‘Humanity’ Lawson, it meant that ‘if I enter into contract for say, two years’ time, the law decides that in that particular district of anything from three to ten miles, I must not ply my calling’.18