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profits. They were similar to the singing rooms and harmonic meetings that flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and are a genuine precursor to music hall. In many free and easies customers would be invited to contribute a song, but more astute landlords recognised that popular acts were a greater draw. Often the artistes’ wages were linked to alcohol sales: one singer, Thomas Weldon, earned a penny for every pint drunk by his audience while he was singing. In such an environment rousing entertainment and drunken revelry went hand in hand, but the wise landlord, conscious of the need to keep his licence to trade, tried to keep order by acting himself as chairman of the evening. Sometimes the entertainment was bawdy, but working-class audiences were often more prudish than the bohemian clientèle of the sophisticated song and supper clubs or the underclass who frequented the penny gaffs.

      Apart from the landlord, the key figures in the free and easies were the chairman – familiar from the catch clubs, harmonic meetings and song and supper clubs – and the pianist who accompanied the singers. For many years the chairman would remain a central part of the music hall formula. His role was twofold: to keep order, and to pace the performance to ensure there were ample opportunities for customers to purchase refreshments.

      The pianist was also pivotal. A minority could sing as well as play. Most were men, but the largest crowd-pullers were the small number of young women. They not only had novelty value, but were an obvious attraction to a largely youthful male audience. Contemporary advertisements in trade journals such as the Era offered a salary of up to £2 a week, with the added enticement of full bed and board. Although advertisements often specified ‘steadiness’ and ‘gentility’ as necessary qualifications for the job, prudish authority took a dim view of female pianists: as late as 1880 Bradford Council banned their employment in city taverns – perhaps the requirement to ‘be agreeable to customers’ aroused suspicion.

      Nonetheless, whether male or female, competent accompaniment to the singers was essential. The artistes might be professional, semi-professional or amateur, but before 1850, when sheet music became cheap enough to be commonplace, many might simply hum the tune and then expect the pianist to improvise while they sang. Even with sheet music, pianists would be expected to be able to change key to match the vocal abilities of more hapless performers. It was a great relief to everyone when the pianist was familiar with the singer’s repertoire.

      Most of the songs were rousing choruses, sentimental ballads, patriotic anthems or celebrations of working-class people and their lives. Almost fifty years later, the theatre manager John Hollingshead recalled the free and easies of 1840, and his description reveals how closely they resembled music hall: ‘The long room of the pot-house was the auditorium and, at a table larger than any other in the room was the stage, round which was seated the professional talent. The Chairman was a necessity to keep order and to draw out any volunteers who wished to distinguish themselves.’

      Although the free and easies are poorly documented compared to their smarter cousins, there is one contemporary source that offers a unique insight into their world – the diaries of Charles Rice, a British Museum porter by day and ballad singer by night. They are a rich source of information written from the perspective of a performer.

      Rice was born in 1817, the son of an optician, and his love of show business was evident from an early age: at eighteen he would copy out and collect performing bills from newspaper advertisements. We know nothing of his education, but his handwriting and observations reveal a certain level of sophistication. This was not reflected in his comparatively humble daytime employment, which was merely a backdrop to his evenings as an entertainer. He began at the British Museum as a twenty-year-old assistant messenger in 1837, and remained there, barely promoted for thirty-eight years, until he was sacked after lengthy periods of absence from work. His work day began at 7 a.m. – a punishingly early hour after late nights in smoky free and easies – and ended at 4 p.m. By the time he was sacked his pay had risen to £100 per annum, but in poor health and, so far as we know, without alternative employment, he died the following year at the age of fifty-eight.

      Rice loved performing, and the money he earned enhanced his lifestyle. In the 1840s his salary at the museum was between £1 and thirty shillings a week. In the evenings, as a singer, he earned up to six shillings a night. There was also the fringe benefit of free drinks, at a time when alcohol was a large part of a working man’s expenditure. The price of renting a room for a single man was no more than two shillings a month, and food would cost a further seven shillings or so. With total earnings of around £3 a week, Rice had significant disposable income.

      He worked hard, and was in demand. In 1840 he sang at the King’s Arms in Holborn on Mondays and Saturdays, at the Hope in Drury Lane on Tuesdays, at the Adam and Eve in St Pancras Road on Wednesdays, and the Horse and Dolphin, Macclesfield Road, on Thursdays and Fridays. It was a gruelling itinerary, and explains his lack of application in his job at the museum: he rarely returned home before midnight – later if he dropped in to the pie shop for a late supper, as he often did. He must have been exhausted, and probably hungover, for much of the time.

      In his diaries, Rice passes judgement on his fellow performers. He writes of their songs, giving us a clear idea of the range on offer and what was popular. Amidst many anonymous names, more famous figures also appear, although not always to perform: Ross, Cowell, Sloman and other leading performers were no doubt searching for material in the free and easies, while the extraordinary Herr von Joel might have been surprised to find pub performers offering impersonations of him. Rice writes also of dancers, catch and glee singers, and ‘Grecian statues’ without disclosing whether or not the latter were clothed: it is likely they wore skin-tight costumes, but in view of the high necks and long skirts of the early Victorian era, figure-hugging clothing would have been quite sufficient to attract an audience.

      Rice had a repertoire of around forty songs. Each evening he would sing a selection of six to nine of them, including encores. Some were adaptations of poems or narratives which he had arranged as songs for his own use. These included Ingoldsby Legends, ‘The Jackdaw of Rheims’, Jack Sheppard and parts of The Pickwick Papers, all of which suggests that he had talent far beyond what might be assumed by his intellectually undemanding work at the British Museum.

      When it came to what his audience wanted, Rice had a fine judgement, and amended the lyrics of any song that might offend. The popular street song ‘Billy Taylor’ had many versions, some extremely rude. It tells the tale of Billy’s sweetheart disguising herself as a man and joining the navy after Billy has been impressed into service. Rice chose to clean up the tale of how her gender was discovered. Similarly, he adapted W.T. Moncrieff’s satirical ‘Analisation’ to focus on maids, young men and young wives in sentimental terms – quite different from the original.

      In 1842, Rice married and moved to the emerging gentility of Somers Town, north of Euston Road, at the much higher rent of £1 a week. For eight years his diary falls silent. When it resumes, in 1850, his star seems to have waned, and he is engaged at less salubrious taverns, such as the Catherine Wheel, Whitechapel, which was better known as a haunt for prostitutes than a home for wholesome entertainment.

      As purpose-built saloons, more suitable for mixed company, grew in number, the audiences at the free and easies waned. Rice did appear at larger proto-music halls such as the Yorkshire Stingo in Paddington and the Mogul Saloon in Drury Lane, but only occasionally, and well down the bill. His diary becomes increasingly bitter as he bemoans miserly landlords, incompetent pianists and inattentive audiences. Life was not going well for him: he tried to lose his dog by leaving her in unfamiliar surroundings, but the loyal animal kept returning to him. Eventually he gave her away to his greengrocer. In March 1850 Jemmy Vincent, his friend and pianist, committed suicide by shooting himself. But however tough life must have been for Rice, he could not afford to let his audience down: the evening after Vincent’s suicide he was back onstage, singing at the disreputable Catherine Wheel.

      In May 1850 Rice started a ‘singers’ republic’ at his old haunt the Grapes, in Southwark, which operated on the new business model of customers paying for entrance, with ‘free’ drink as part of the package. He shared the gate money with his fellow performers in lieu of a flat wage, and at first the enterprise was a success, with around eighty paying customers a night. But it didn’t

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