My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall

Dedication

In loving memory of Tom, Gwen and Kitty, and of my brother Terry, whose ambition in life was to see this book written

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Leaving the Stage

1 The Road to Music Hall

2 The Basement and the Cellars

3 At the Fringe

4 The First Pioneer

5 Explosion

6 The Swells and the Costers

7 The Serio-Comediennes

8 Marie Lloyd

9 Dan Leno and Little Tich

10 The Comic and the Minstrel

11 The Cross-Dressers: Girls Who Were Boys

12 Top Hats and Black Faces

13 The Business of Pleasure

14 Warp and Weft

15 The Exotic and the Bizarre

16 Amusement of the People

17 The Literati and the Artists

18 Enterprise and Outrage

19 Overseas Music Hall

20 Music Hall War

21 Tom and Kitty

22 The Seeds of Decline

23 World War I

24 Aftermath

Index of Songs

General Index

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

About the Author

Other Works

Picture Section

Copyright

About the Publisher

Leaving the Stage

‘Who is to write the history of music hall? What a splendid theme …’

JOHN ROBERTSON, HISTORIAN (1856–1933)

In March 1962, I sat with an old man as he lay dying. He was barely conscious, with familiar half-smiles dancing across his well-worn and gentle face, but I knew where he was in his imagination – where he wanted to be. The lights were bright. A boisterous audience was cheering. Aged eighty-two, and over thirty years since he had left it, he was back on the stage. In life he had few possessions, but he died a richer man than most, with a song in his heart and joy in his soul.

He was my father, Tom.

The men and women who entertained so royally are all dead. They are gone, but not quite forgotten. We know some of their names, and some of their songs, but few people now living saw them onstage. Their magic is now the stuff of myth and legend.

But then, music hall has always been an elusive concept. What exactly is it? Is it a style of singing comic ballads? That is certainly the principal ingredient, but it is far from the whole. Is it a theatre, hosting a mixture of variety? Up to a point, yes – but it is so much more than that.

Even the name is misleading. ‘Music’ hall was never simply music, but encompassed everything from the sublime to the surreal. A typical evening’s fare might include opera and ballet, popular singers and comedians, speciality acts, animal acts, acrobats, monologists and any other performer who might, however loosely, ‘entertain’. Nor was the setting necessarily a hall. Elements of music hall were widespread in pleasure gardens, taverns, streets and markets long before the nineteenth century. Its growth was organic: often haphazard, ramshackle – more the product of events than rational planning. And always, always it was a reflection of the lives and tastes of its audience.

The term ‘music hall’ was invented by the early entrepreneurs who built theatres to exploit widely popular forms of entertainment. These entrepreneurs have a role to play in the history of music hall, but it is sentimental myth to claim they invented it. It had its heart in the East End of London, yet it was not purely a southern phenomenon. It was centred on the capital because that was where the biggest audiences were to be found, but from the outset it was popular in towns and cities across the length and breadth of Great Britain. Lancashire, in particular, provided music hall talent almost on a level to rival London.

Music hall was able to thrive because of a fortunate combination of circumstances. In Victorian Britain, wages rose and working hours fell. The nineteenth century was an intensely musical era that saw a huge growth in choral societies, brass bands and religious music. Street entertainers earned a few pennies playing zithers, piccolos, banjos, concertinas or fiddles. Opera companies toured the provinces. Popular music embraced minstrel songs and the ballads of Tin Pan Alley. Popular operetta arrived as the gift of Gilbert and Sullivan. The development of railways enabled performers to tour the whole country. Demand for their work saw the publication of inexpensive sheet music. There was a huge growth in the sale of musical instruments. Amidst all this, music hall was shaped and defined as one of the glories of the Victorian era. Sentimental, vulgar, class-conscious, insular – but always patriotic, and on the side of the underdog. It held up a mirror to people’s hopes and fears, joys and heartbreaks, and the general absurdity of life.

The strands of music hall began to come together in the early nineteenth century, but had comprehensively disentangled by the mid-twentieth. Like a shooting star, it flared brightly into orbit, then fizzled out; but its heyday was brilliant, and its lifespan encompassed the story of a world changed beyond recognition.

In its formative years, the vulgarity and sentimentality of music hall attracted a largely working-class audience, but its appeal was far wider. It took root in England only a few years after there had been a real fear of revolution, and helped to turn sour resentment into a patriotic roar of joy. It was low-born but irresistible. Its songs have become the folk songs of a nation. As Kipling observed, they filled a gap in our history. Music hall attracted the magic brush-strokes of Sickert, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Long after its heyday, entertainers such as Max Miller, Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd and Morecambe and Wise had an empathy with their audience reminiscent of music hall in its prime. Bruce Forsyth and Roy Hudd have it to this day.

Popular artistes from music hall shaped the attitudes of our nation: Harry Lauder’s nightly jokes about Scottish miserliness fed a public perception that turned a myth into an accepted truth. Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel and Dan Leno personified the ‘little man’, put upon by life. Other stereotypes entered folklore. Music hall eulogised courtship and motherhood, yet ridiculed marriage as a comic disaster. It mocked single women for being unmarried, but made ‘the missus’ the butt of jokes. It was never politically correct, and in a less sensitive age ‘nigger minstrels’ and ‘coon’ acts were part of its staple diet. At times of war it could be fiercely jingoistic – indeed, the word was popularised in ‘By Jingo’, a music hall song, during the Baltic crisis of 1877–78. Even after its demise, music hall continued to have an impact. In 1942, the pro-nudist magazine Health & Efficiency denounced ‘music hall comedians and their imbecilic jokes’ for the reluctance of the public to join nudist camps. More positively, the demand for entertainment without alcohol led to the foundation in 1880 of the ‘Old Vic’ theatre in south London.

Once scorned, music hall would come to be seen as epitomising a past age of success, and as an art form that gave pleasure to millions. It had some powerful advocates. In 1978, James Callaghan, then Prime Minister, used a music hall song at a TUC congress to announce that he would not be holding an expected general election: ‘There was I, waiting at the church …’ he sang, echoing Vesta Victoria three-quarters of a century earlier. The country was praying for an election – but it was not to be. Nor was this an isolated acknowledgement of Callaghan’s affection for music hall. At another trades union gathering he charmed his dinner companions by singing, ‘I’m the man, the very fat man, who waters the workers’ beer.’ It is an irony that he used a music hall song to draw grumpy trades unionists closer to the government, since over seventy years earlier disputes over music hall had bitterly divided the Puritan and non-Puritan elements of the embryonic Labour movement.

Tories were susceptible too. Lord Randolph Churchill had ‘an almost music hall style of public speaking’, claimed his biographer, while his son Winston, a great admirer of the music hall artiste Dan Leno, was apt to sing ‘old world cockney songs with teddy bear gestures’. Churchill, like the Labour movement, will enter our story again.

Music hall reached its zenith in the 1890s. Vast auditoriums were packed each night in nearly every British town and city, and fourteen million tickets were sold each year. The most popular performers were among the highest-paid and most celebrated figures in the land. ‘I earn more than the Prime Minister,’ noted Little Tich, ‘but I do so much less harm.’ Owners of theatres became rich, and their money and fame gave them an entrée to the Establishment elite. But even as music hall stood unchallenged in its supremacy, the forces that would destroy it were taking shape.

On 28 December 1895, in the dimmed artificial light of Le Grand Café, avenue des Capucines, Paris, a small group of thirty-three individuals were viewing the first public screening of commercial cinema. On the bill were ten one-minute films, the brainchild of two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière.

Five years later, at the turn of the century, my father Tom, then twenty-one, entered the profession. For nearly thirty years – the prime of his working life – he earned his living in music hall and variety. His fortunes fluctuated, but in old age, when his health and prosperity were gone, these were the years he remembered with the greatest affection.

In 1902, Tom met Kitty Grant, a vivacious and attractive brunette five years older than him, and they formed a double act, Drum + Major.* When Kitty’s husband, David, died in 1910, she and Tom legalised a relationship that had long been stable. They wrote their own songs, sketches and monologues, and as they became more popular they formed their own revues, with which for over twenty years they toured the country, as well as North and South America. In February 1906, they became founder members of the Variety Artists’ Federation. Playbills reveal that they performed with the greats: Marie Lloyd, George Robey, Florrie Forde, Vesta Tilley and Harry Champion.

These great and happy times ended in tragedy when Kitty died following an onstage accident. My father carried on alone, although not for long. In Tom and Kitty’s show there were two young speciality dancers, ‘Glade and Glen’. ‘Glen’, whose real name was Gwen Coates, a slender imp of a girl, had been asked by the dying Kitty to ‘look after Tom’. And so she did for the next forty years. She was at his side when he died, caring for him as she had done for so long. My mother, the eternal, uncrushable optimist, knew the show must go on, but her smile was never again so bright. When she herself died ten years later, in the dark of a long night, she was in hospital, alone for once, for her death was unexpected. Did she think of Tom? I am sure she did, for she had done so all her life.

When I was born my father was sixty-four, my mother thirty-eight. I was Tom and Gwen’s late child, a just-in-time baby – the one she had hoped for, but feared she would never have. It was not an easy birth: my mother, never robust in health, nearly died, and I became dangerously ill. But we both survived. Most of my mother’s hopes for the future were invested in me, but whatever gifts my parents passed on to their children, the talent to entertain was not among them. My eldest brother, Thomas, had died within hours of his birth. My sister Pat, a fine dancer as a child, was eccentric enough for a stage career, but had no interest in joining the profession. My brother Terry and I were devoid of artistic talent, although I often reflected that my chosen career was akin to show business. Certainly, Prime Minister’s Questions often resembled my father’s description of a raucous night at the Glasgow Empire.

There may have been a good reason for our parents’ lack of disappointment that we failed to follow them onto the stage – at least in my father’s case. At the age of twenty-two he had had a brief liaison with Mary Moss, the wife of a young musician, and in 1901 their son, another Tom, was born. Like his father – our father – Tom became a music hall performer. He had a beautiful tenor voice, but also, I fear, a horrible temper – particularly after a night’s carousing.

Tom Junior appeared onstage in many guises – as ‘Signor Meneghini’, ‘Tom Moss’ or ‘Signor Bassani’. Physically, he was about as unlike my muscular father as it was possible to be: medium height, with a small van Dyke beard, and the plump body of the archetypal tenor. Even when he was past fifty, when I first came to know him, he could sing, and when he did (which was rare), I would listen enraptured as, unaccompanied by music, his voice soared effortlessly to the higher notes. If it had not been for his rebellious, anti-authoritarian nature, his career might have progressed from the shadows into the spotlight. He had the talent, but not the discipline. As my mother put it, ‘Tom doesn’t like being told what to do.’ Truly, Tom was my father’s son.

My parents lived life on a rollercoaster. Alternately well-off and hard-up, in work or out, on top or in difficulty, they inhabited a Micawberish world in which – somehow, sometime – all would be well. But, of course, it hardly ever was. And when the problems piled up, my mother – who had never even heard of Voltaire, let alone read him – echoed Dr Pangloss in Candide in believing that, as disaster followed disaster, it was, no doubt, ‘all for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. She had learned to expect hardship, and when it came knocking at her door she was ready to confront it.

One day, at around the age of nine, I remember rushing home for tea and, in my hurry, throwing open the kitchen door. My father, who was fitting a lightbulb, fell from the stool he was standing on and cracked his head on the tiled floor. Clearly dazed, he was taken off to bed. Although I did not know it at the time, his sight had been fading for many months, as cataracts dimmed his vision; but as it worsened, I was certain that his failing sight was as a direct result of my childhood exuberance. No one ever suggested anything of the kind, but since my feelings of guilt were never known, I was never disabused.

This was but one of many family misfortunes: business failure, debt, bankruptcy, failing health, the loss of our home. The two rented rooms in Brixton in which we found sanctuary were in a house owned by my half-brother Tom, who until then I had never met. My parents had not told me who he really was. My father was too lofty to explain, and my mother would have moved heaven and earth to protect me from ‘that sort of thing’. My father’s health and sight continued to worsen while my mother shielded him from as much as she could, particularly her worries over debt. Her world centred on him, and he accepted her care as his right. In this, if in little else in life, he was a very lucky man. Throughout their travails, my parents had always accepted setbacks with equanimity. Misfortune was nothing new. Shows opened, shows closed. You were top of the bill, or bottom. But tomorrow always held glittering possibilities. That was their philosophy of life.

My father’s health deteriorated further, and he became bedridden. An active man all his life, he now had nothing to do, and nowhere to go. Nor did he have an audience to bring him alive. Here, at least, I could make amends for my nine-year-old clumsiness. I became his audience. He sang the songs he’d known, and recited the monologues he and Kitty had written. ‘The girl I love is up in the gallery,’ he would sing – quietly changing the gender of the lover – and as his eyes watered I’d wonder if he was thinking of Kitty. But when he spoke of his life in the theatre, a smile was never far away. I learned that although Marie Lloyd had a saucy tongue, she had a heart of gold. That Dan Leno and Little Tich were giants of the profession. That Nellie Wallace was ‘ugly but funny’, and Gertie Gitana was lovely in every way. That Nosmo King, in haste to create a stage name for himself, glimpsed the ‘No Smoking’ sign on the carriage windows of a train he was boarding, and never looked back. That Vesta Tilley was the finest cross-dresser of them all – ‘And what’s more,’ said my father, clearly impressed with titles, ‘she became a Lady.’ And so she did.

Somehow, word of my father’s plight spread. Strangers, often eccentric men and women, would arrive at our door. Careworn, often shabbily dressed, they were all of my father’s vintage, or near to it. Prosperity, if it had ever touched them, had long since fled. Some were talented, some loveable; some both, some neither. But all had the urge to entertain. Often vulnerable, they were intensely human in their wish to give pleasure, in their thirst for applause and in the love they had for their profession.

They sat at my father’s bedside drinking whisky until supplies ran out, and then called for tea. If their conversation was stilted at first, it soon became intimate. Memories were stirred, emotions flowed. Old stories were told, old times remembered – no doubt, as Shakespeare put it, with advantages. Sometimes, these reunions became uproarious, and tears of mirth rolled down their and my father’s cheeks. Sometimes emotion overcame them, and tears of a different kind were wiped away.

I can see and hear them still. I saw how cheers and applause had filled their lives, and for a short time they were back there, in the good old days, positively aglow with their reminiscences, a fierce joy in their hearts. They were full of generous impulse. They treasured their remembered triumphs, but had not forgotten the flops, the rejections, the let-downs, the days without work, the lash of critical opinion. It was not until years later, with the political critics poised, invective flowing and the national audience restive, that I fully understood all the emotions that had been so familiar to them.

I listened avidly as they talked of their shared past. They were born to perform. Onstage they had come alive. The career they chose was one in which fame and fortune was elusive, but heartbreak was not. Few had enjoyed great material rewards, although they talked with affection and without envy of those who had been successful. Once, several guests around my father’s bed argued over whose songs had the most memorable choruses. Was it Florrie Forde or Harry Champion? An impromptu concert ensued, in which ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ competed with ‘Any Old Iron’ and ‘I’m Henery the Eighth, I am’ before a draw was declared. At the time it seemed there was an unending flow of guests, but memory plays tricks. There were perhaps fifteen in all. But the pleasure their presence gave to my father was disproportionate to their number.

Many years later, when I became a public figure, some commentators wrote disparagingly of my parents and their profession. My parents may not have had much in the way of possessions or money, but as human beings, in their kindness and goodness, they were richer than most. And, most important of all to them, they had standing amongst their peers, and careers that had not only given personal joy to themselves, but pleasure to others. As my father, with whisky in hand and philosophy in flow, once observed: ‘Entertainers exist to brighten people’s lives – critics are their antidote.’

The lives of many music hall performers were poignant. Each act was individual, and most had no support structure. The glad hand proffered to the multitude often hid a lonely soul. Some had only modest talent. Many fell upon hard times, and even the successful often found it hard to cope with fame. The artistes’ interests often fared badly in a commercial world. And, stripped of its glamour, music hall was, first and last, a commercially driven business. Its leading entrepreneurs – Charles Morton, Edward Moss, Oswald Stoll, Richard Thornton and their colleagues – were quintessentially Victorian figures, vigorous believers in profit who were always on the lookout for market opportunities. They were not in show business; they were in business. Understanding market forces as well as any modern businessman, they found that the music hall model worked, and so they cashed in. They brought together the talent that wished to perform, and a public that wished to be entertained.

Performers were in a poor position to negotiate. They started off being paid a share of the venue’s profit – essentially from drink sales – and thereafter their salary was linked to their popularity. It was brilliantly straightforward: the bigger the house they attracted, the more they were paid to perform. If their popularity waned, their wages went down – they had no illusions about that. If they didn’t work, they weren’t paid. As a result, many worked too hard, and died too young.

In the early days of music hall the public demanded affordable entertainment, and they got it: a drink, a seat, a song, the chance to place a bet, a show to watch, something to eat – all for sixpence. There was nothing novel about the entertainment concept – all the artistic forms that featured in the music halls were already in existence – but the business model was new: pub, choral society, restaurant, theatre, comedy venue, betting shop all brought together under one roof. It was imaginative, and for many years it was to prove irresistible.

By 1901, as the Victorian Age ended, music hall faced a new world as rival attractions multiplied: first non-catered variety shows, then radio and recorded music, began to crowd in on the music hall monopoly of mass entertainment. The death blow came with the flickering images first seen in Paris courtesy of the Lumière brothers. Cinema was on its way. Audiences still enjoyed intimate theatres, comic songs, patter, magic tricks – as they do today – but bigger sets and new technology were needed to create more extravagant productions.

Music hall was born of no fixed abode. It was one strand of an impulse to entertain that, throughout the centuries, faced down religious prejudice, social and political hostility, attempts at licensing and censorship. It was the child of many parents, raised in many guises and even more places. But always, it was an art for individuals. And when the individual began to be subsumed beneath a demand for greater spectacle, the pulse of music hall began to slow. There were other changes too. As transport improved, audiences were able to travel more easily, and their entertainment options widened. The success of music hall had come from the people, and as the people tired of it, its allure faded.

This book is not an attempt at a definitive history of music hall – that would fill many volumes. But it is the story of the rise and fall of a unique form of entertainment. Whilst I was writing it, figures who were at first simply names on playbills took shape and came to life. I hope I have painted them faithfully. They were, like all of us, shaped by time and circumstance; fighting – at first for survival, and then for success – in a tough and ruthless profession. Some dreamed but failed. Some succeeded gloriously. Some could not cope with fame. Some were stalked by heartbreak and failure. But they are all part of the story.