The story of music hall

The origins of Music Hall

My lords, ladies and gentlemen! The story of  the music halls!

Music halls can be traced back to the taverns and coffee houses of 18th century London where men met to eat, drink and do business. Performers sang songs whilst the audience ate, drank and joined in the singing. By the 1830s taverns had rooms devoted to musical clubs. They presented Saturday evening Singsongs and Free and Easies. These became so popular that entertainment was put on two or three times a week.

Song and supper rooms

For more middle-class clientele song and supper rooms opened in the 1830s. They served hot food and provided entertainment until the early hours of the morning.

Rooms like The Coal Hole, off the Strand in London soon developed a scurrilous reputation. At Evans’ Song and Supper Rooms in Covent Garden singers were paid £1a week and free drink.

The star of Evans was Sam Cowell who was most famous for his song, 'The Rat Catcher’s Daughter'. It was so popular that fellow performer Charles Sloman, who was famous for improvising lines off the top of his head, wrote an extra two verses.

Sam Cowell was brought up in America but came to Britain in 1840 where he worked as an actor in Scotland and then London.

After a few years of hard graft in the theatre, Cowell began to move into comedy character songs fashionable in the music halls. He was best known for his cockney songs such as 'Villikins and his Dinah' and 'Billy Barlow', but he also burlesqued serious dramas including a version of 'Hamlet' in doggerel.

While enjoying considerable popularity in Britain, Sam accepted an invitation to do a tour in America which turned out to be a disaster. Poverty, a harsh winter, and alcohol destroyed his health and he died young, as did many performers of his generation who drank. He was only 45.

The taverns, saloons and supper rooms would have been noisy and difficult places in which to perform. The audiences chatted throughout the acts and could be very unruly often throwing things at the performers – bottles, old boots, even a dead cat. Industrial towns favoured hurling iron rivets.

In some halls, bottles carried by the waiters were chained to the trays and the orchestra was protected from the missiles by steel grilles stretched over the pit.

While women were not allowed in the middle-class song and supper rooms, working-class women went to the taverns. In the early days they would often accompany their husbands and bring along their children and even babies. Charles Dickens declared in disgust that the pit had became ‘a virtual nursery’.

The Green Gate Tavern

The Green Gate Tavern on London's City Road was a sort of Victorian pub theatre. Many public houses put on entertainment of one sort or another, usually involving music and comedy.

This image from 1854 shows a scene from a play called Paul Pry by John Poole. The play's central character was an idle, meddlesome anti-hero. Not many of the audience seem to be at all interested in what is happening on stage. Just opposite the Green Gate, a rival pub was the Eagle, one of the most famous early music halls which was doing a roaring trade by 1854.

The Borough Music Hall

The Borough Music Hall was built in Union Street, Southwark before 1850. In its early years it had been known as the Salmon Concert Room or Public House, the Alexandra Music Hall, and the Raglan Music Hall. It burnt down in 1871, was rebuilt in 1872, burnt down again in 1883, and was rebuilt again in 1887!

As the picture shows, in this kind of smaller venue the audience could be very close to the performers and the chairman. This helped maintain an intimacy between regular visitors and the artistes, in keeping with the origins of music hall in song and supper rooms and public houses.

It is hardly a surprise that this venue burned down so many times, as fire regulations were lax. The audience were able to sit at tables, where they could eat, drink, and – as the illustration shows – smoke whilst enjoying the entertainment.

The Eagle

The Eagle, on City Road, London, was an East End tavern on the corner of City Road and Shepherdess Walk that presented regular musical entertainment.

The nursery rhyme Pop goes the Weasel features the Eagle. It is about a father spending his weekly wage in the music halls and then having to ‘pop’ or pawn his ‘weasel’ to raise additional money. The ‘weasel’ is thought to refer to a piece of equipment in the tailoring industry. Tailoring was one of the main occupations in London’s East End.

The Eagle did a roaring trade as one of the first music halls. Marie Lloyd, who would become one of the biggest music hall stars there has ever been, appeared there in 1885, at the age of 14.

'Bravo' Rouse, as he was nicknamed, rebuilt the Eagle and renamed it the Grecian Saloon. The novelist Charles Dickens was a regular visitor and wrote about the experience in Sketches by Boz. The Eagle was sold in 1883 to the Salvation Army, perennial enemy of drink and the music halls. The building has since been demolished and the site now boasts a new Eagle pub which has a display of old music hall prints.

The first music halls

The Canterbury Hall

Mr Charles Morton, publican of the Canterbury Tavern in Lambeth, opened the first purpose built music hall, The Canterbury Hall, in 1852. It held 700 people. Audiences were seated at tables and food and drink was served throughout the performance, which took place on a platform at one end of the hall under the watchful Chairman, the vocalist, Mr John Caulfield.

Ladies’ Thursdays

Morton encouraged women into his music hall, believing it to have a civilising influence on the men. He introduced Ladies’ Thursdays, where women could accompany a gentleman to the hall. However gentlemen did not necessarily take their wives for a night out. Prostitutes would walk up and down the aisles of the auditorium touting for customers, and the halls developed a vulgar reputation.

New music halls

Inspired by the success of the Canterbury, music halls opened up across London. These early halls including the Oxford on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. By 1875 there were 375 music halls in Greater London, which meant a lot more performers were required. Throughout the 1860s it became more common for women to perform in the halls. Performing was a way of escape and independence for working-class women. Many women achieved, if not stardom, a decent living on the halls.

Singing and the comic song remained at the heart of music hall, but gradually the acts increased in diversity. All sorts of ingenious and strange speciality acts developed.

West End music halls

Despite the apparent respectability of the West End halls, music hall was still associated with wild audiences and high living. The audiences were aristocratic young men and the working classes; the middle classes regarded the halls as vulgar places, full of risqué entertainment.

Most of the stars were working class, but such was the glamour of Music Hall that several married into the aristocracy. Managers like Oswald Stoll made a deliberate effort to make music hall respectable. The major West End music halls, like the Palace and the Coliseum, began to attract a higher social class, often wearing evening dress.

The Alhambra

The Alhambra and its rival the Empire, both in Leicester Square, were among the most famous and largest halls, but were also notorious for prostitutes who frequented the bars and promenades. In these theatres the seating had been arranged like a regular theatre, with rows of seats facing a proscenium stage and the bar and refreshment rooms separated from the auditorium.

As Music Hall became more popular, the main attraction for the audience was the entertainers rather than the food and drink. The big stars were so successful that they would perform in numerous halls each night, crossing London in their carriages. By performing in several venues a night the top stars could earn big money. They worked hard and lived fast, but the stresses of this lifestyle meant that many died young.

By the end of the 19th century, there could be as many as 20 acts per show and performances would last up to four hours. Soon music halls were presenting shorter, twice nightly programmes. Performers were now contracted for a period of time, rather than by performance. This meant that popular performers no longer had to dash across London to appear in several halls in one evening.

This is the music cover to the song The Simple Pimple, written in 1891 for George Robey - one of the biggest names in music hall.

The song was about poor Maria, 'our Ria', who was instantly  recognisable wherever she went because 'They know her by the pimple, the pimple on her nose'. He chose this song for his first ever tryout at a matinee performance at the Oxford Music Hall when he was 22. The clerical character and costume were to become his trade mark: a black coat with a small collar and a white vicar's collar underneath, a bald headed wig, reddened nose and cheeks and arched black eyebrows, like those of the great comic Dan Leno. His first performance at the Oxford brought the house down and earned him a 12-month contract.

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Music Hall strike of 1907

As Music Hall became more popular, the performers’ contracts became much stricter.

The main complaint against theatre managers was the 'exclusivity clause'. This prevented performers from working in any other hall in the area within a year of their current contract, even though that contract might only be for a week. Contracts often stated that artists were not allowed to appear in any other theatre directly before or after a performance, nor could they perform in another theatre within a certain distance. This prevented artists appearing at more than one venue in an evening and limited the amount of money that they could earn on one night.

Most contracts included one matinee performance. Some unscrupulous managers announced additional matinees without any additional payments to the artists – one manager even announced four extra performances in one week.

In 1907 things came to a crisis and on 22 January at the Holborn Empire, artists, musicians and stagehands went on strike. Strikes in other London and suburban halls followed, organised by the Variety Artistes' Federation, which had been formed in 1906.

Artists picketed the halls, distributing leaflets declaring ‘Music Hall War!’ and demanding more payment for extra performances. The angry managers tried to keep the music halls open by booking little known acts or bringing performers out of retirement.

But even well paid stars such as Marie Lloyd refused to perform, declaring their solidarity with the striking performers. On one occasion Marie Lloyd sent a telegram to the Tivoli theatre declaring that she was tied up sewing a few flounces on her dress so she wouldn’t be able to perform that evening. 'Little Tich', her co-star, sent one saying that he was 'learning a new cornet solo. Cannot tear myself away'.

This flyer was published by Walter Gibbons, manager of six music halls, including the Holborn Empire, in response to the strike in 1907. Theatre managers desperately tried to keep their theatres running by recruiting retired and unsuccessful acts. The strikers picketed the theatres to try to prevent this, although on one occasion Marie Lloyd told her colleagues not to stop Ms Belle Elmore: 'Don't be daft. Let her in and she'll empty the theatre.' Belle was more famous for marrying, and being the victim of the murderer Dr Crippen than as a performer.

Eventually the managements were forced to give in and additional payments for matinee performances were introduced.

Variety

Matcham’s theatres

In the early 20th century, new purpose-built theatres, many designed by Frank Matcham, sprang up across Britain.

These were the Empires, Palaces and Hippodromes, beautiful Edwardian theatres with chandeliers, gold leaf decorations and red plush velvet seats. Unlike music halls where the audience sat at tables, the Edwardian theatres had proscenium arches, with fixed seats and separate bar and auditorium.

The traditions of eating and drinking during the performance disappeared. Audiences sat in rows in a darkened auditorium which discouraged audience participation. The old spirit of Music Hall gradually faded away and was replaced by variety.

The London Pavilion, on Piccadilly Circus in the centre of London, started life as a song and supper room, attached to the Black Horse pub. It became a music hall in 1861.

The word 'jingoism', meaning aggressive English nationalism, was coined here when The Great Macdermott sang a song about the English intervention in the Turko-Russian war of 1877.

Oswald Stoll

Variety artists were employed by the season to perform on a circuit of theatres controlled by producers. By 1925 Moss Empires controlled 24 theatres, Oswald Stoll 16.

Oswald Stoll started his career at the age of 14, assisting his mother in running the Parthenon Music Hall in Liverpool, and ended it owning a string of vast music halls. From 1898 to 1910 he was the Managing Director of Moss Empires. Sir Edward Moss was the other giant in the world of music hall management at the time.

In many ways, Stoll was an unlikely music hall manager. He spent most of his life in a little suburban house in Putney in South West London. He did not drink or smoke, and not only did he not swear, he had signs put up backstage prohibiting his employees from using any coarse language.

He was well known among performers as a strict manager, and one who paid his performers as little as he could.

Oswald Stoll built the London Coliseum, designed by Frank Matcham, in 1904.

The Coliseum was at that time the only theatre in Europe that had lifts. It had a marble staircase and tea room on every tier. Oswald Stoll was a teetotaller who wanted to create entertainment for families. The seats in the Coliseum had armrests and for the first time could be booked in advance for performances. There were four performances of the variety show daily.

As well as traditional Music Hall acts, Stoll introduced musical spectaculars, ballets (including the Diaghilev Ballet), and short dramatic plays with major theatrical stars like Sarah Bernhardt.

At first many theatre stars did not wish to appear in a variety bill with acrobats, jugglers and animal acts. Sarah Bernhardt cabled Oswald Stoll before signing her first contract with the message ‘Between tigers. Not’. She was implying that she would not go on stage before or after any animal acts as this would not be appropriate for a woman of her status.

Some Music Hall artists never appeared at the Coliseum - including Marie Lloyd. When the first Royal Variety Performance took place at the Palace Theatre in London’s West End Marie Lloyd was not on the bill. She was considered too vulgar for a Royal audience. In anger she booked another theatre for the same night. The posters for the event proclaimed: ‘Every performance by Marie Lloyd is a Command Performance by Order of the British Public’. She played to a sell out audience.

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The Royal Variety Performance

The first Royal Variety Performance (known as the Royal Command Performance) took place on 1 July 1912 at the Palace Theatre in London’s West End.

King George V and Queen Mary attended. This was a lavish occasion; the theatre was decorated with 3 million roses which were draped around the auditorium and over the boxes. The performers included music hall stars George Leybourne, Gus Elen, Dan Leno, Vesta Tilley, Vesta Victoria and the great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova but with a few notable omissions such as Marie Lloyd (whose act was considered too risqué for the Royal party) and Albert Chevalier. In defiance Marie appeared on the same night at a nearby theatre billed as 'By command of the British public'. Chevalier took out a page in The Era newspaper explaining the unfairness of his omission and why he should have been included.

The Royal party by all accounts enjoyed the show. The only embarrassment occurred when Queen Mary saw Vesta Tilley appear on stage in trousers. Apparently she buried her face in her programme. Women were never seen in trousers until the First World War and it would have been considered most immodest in 1912.

The Royal Variety Performance still takes place every year, raising money for the Entertainment Artists’ Benevolent Fund.

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Variety from the 1920s

The popularity of variety dwindled with the advent of the talking pictures. By the 1930s many theatres had closed or become cinemas. Other forms of entertainment, such as revue, had become popular and many variety performers made their names through radio, film and later, television. In World War I many former acrobats, aerialists and jugglers were killed or injured and could no longer perform, thus robbing the stage of the breadth and variety of acts previously available.

In the 1930s and 40s artists such as Ted Ray, Tommy Trinder, Nellie Wallace, Gracie Fields, Will Hay, George Formby, Sandy Powell and Max Miller appeared regularly in variety up and down the country. These were well known names made famous by radio.

Radio was seen as a way to encourage new audiences to come along to see the show, but because performers didn’t want to give away all their best jokes on the radio they would make the audience laugh at the recording sessions with visual jokes.

This photograph is a sketch from a show called Clown Jewels featuring the Crazy Gang at the Victoria Palace Theatre in 1959. By this date, the comedians who made up the gang – the three double acts Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen, Jimmy Nervo and Teddy Knox, and Charlie Naughton and Jimmy Gold sometimes joined by “Monsewer” Eddie Gray - had been together for 27 years and were all aged between 60 and 72. They had been threatening to retire for years but kept being persuaded to do one more show.

Their shows were made up of sketches in which the gang appeared as different characters. Here Bud Flanagan is a vicar at a choir practice, prising open the collection box with a knife and allowing the boys to play his fruit machine. Many of the reviews agreed that the Gang's jokes were old, corny and frequently terrible, and yet irresistibly funny because of the charm of the performers. They were favourites of the Royal Family, and the Queen and Prince Philip made a surprise visit to the show.

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