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4

       The First Pioneer

      ‘Only one quality – the best.’

      CHARLES MORTON’S MOTTO

      Music hall was shaped by the changing social environment, but time and the right set of circumstances were required for it to flourish.

      By 1820, one quarter of the world’s population was governed from London, and Britain was evolving from a rural to an urban society. Populations in towns and cities doubled and redoubled. The search for jobs drove teeming throngs of villagers to the towns, where cheap back-to-back hovels were thrown up to house them. But there were improvements: working hours fell, and wages rose.

      The choice of amusements was widening. Madame Tussaud’s waxworks opened in 1835. Hampton Court and Kew Gardens were welcoming visitors. The Henley Regatta and the Grand National were both held for the first time in 1839. Football was growing in popularity. Cricket was becoming a national institution as young William Gilbert Grace learned to bat and bowl in his Gloucestershire orchard. It was a new world that set the stage for music hall. One elusive element remained to be put in place, and Parliament was soon to enact it, albeit in muddled form. It would prove to be a catalyst for music hall.

      The law and the theatre had been at loggerheads for centuries, and by 1840 the situation had become absurd. The Lord Chamberlain regulated legitimate theatre, but local magistrates were responsible for music and dancing licences. The scope for inconsistency was very wide. The patent monopoly, under which Charles II had granted Drury Lane and Covent Garden the sole right to perform drama, now included the Haymarket, which George III had added to the magic circle. To everyone other than the beneficiaries of the monopoly, this was absurd, and the law was regularly flouted. This led to ludicrous litigation, and the threat of actors being arrested for the heinous crime of performing Shakespeare. Parliament sought to impose order on this chaos, and in 1843 the Theatre Regulations Act abolished the monopoly of the patent theatres. Thereafter, anyone could stage drama if they first obtained the approval of the Lord Chamberlain.

      So far, so good. But the Lord Chamberlain’s licence gave permission only to perform drama, not to serve the audience with food and drink, or to allow smoking. The alternative of a magistrate’s licence permitted eating, drinking and smoking, but did not permit the licensee to stage drama. It is clear from reading the (very limited) debates on the Bill that the legislators did not understand custom and practice in the theatres, and gave no consideration to the great diversity of performances beyond legitimate drama. The legislation succeeded only in creating confusion.

      The Act was a hotchpotch. It failed to address the provision of food and drink, and left old habits and customs in place. Even the officials responsible for the law were bewildered. When the Lord Chamberlain’s representative was asked to clarify it to a Parliamentary Select Committee more than twenty years later, in 1866, he told them that ‘spirits and refreshments are not to be sold within the audience part of the theatre’, but added, ‘excepting the people who walk up and down the pit with baskets’. They were, of course, selling food and drink.

      Some impresarios ignored the law. Sam Lane, who ran the Britannia on a Lord Chamberlain’s licence, sold food and drink, and allowed smoking, but was never censured. It may be that the authorities were content to leave the great unwashed of the East End alone, for if the West End theatres flouted the same rules, they were closed.

      The new legislation did at least present a clear choice: an impresario could produce either drama or light entertainment. The wrong choice could mean ruin – as it did for the Grecian Saloon in City Road, when it chose drama and alienated its clientèle – whereas the right choice could mean riches.

      Charles Morton’s Canterbury Arms, which opened in Lambeth in 1852, is generally regarded as the first purpose-built music hall. It set a trend that popularised the music hall genre, and was widely copied. Morton, born in Hackney in August 1819, grew up among the poor with an appetite for work and a sharp eye for detail. He saw his neighbours warm to street singers, cluster around peep shows, applaud itinerant performers and, when the pennies permitted, visit the cheaper inns and taverns. The theatre drew him like a magnet, and he attended shows whenever he had the means to do so. Aged thirteen, his first visit was to the Pavilion, Whitechapel – familiarly known as ‘the Drury Lane of the East’ – which specialised in plays catering for sailors and the large Jewish population that thronged the East End. At the nearby Old Garrick Theatre he saw the tragi-comic play Damon and Pythias, starring Charles Freear and William Gomershall, an actor famed for his comic impersonation of Napoleon. The young Charles Morton became a habitué of East End theatres, and grew familiar with public tastes.

      Once his elementary education was over he worked as a tavern waiter, and saw at close quarters how entertainment and food and drink brought in the crowds. He earned extra cash, and a reputation for honesty, as a runner for the ‘list men’, the early pub-based bookmakers. At the age of twenty-one, in 1840, he became the licensee of his own pub, the St George’s tavern in Belgrave Road, Pimlico. Pimlico was a brand-spanking-new development, a world away from the East End. It was close to the pleasure gardens at Ranelagh, Cremorne and Vauxhall, where young Morton continued his education by seeing the talent available for hire.

      As a licensee, Morton put all he had seen and learned into practice. His guiding principle was excellent service, food and drink, and to these he added a ‘free and easy’ room with amateur talent performing, ‘For Gentlemen Only!’, free of charge. These were common features at many taverns, but Morton’s astute business brain and engaging personality made them very attractive, and as the St George’s became more profitable he hired professional acts to lure more customers. Some of his regulars were servants at Buckingham Palace, and they invited him to dine with them in their quarters. He returned home with a tablecloth full of delicacies from the royal pantry.

      Morton was a natural entrepreneur who understood the power of promotion. Bookmaking was a profitable sideline, and he promoted his sweepstakes for big race meetings by advertising in the Era.

      Morton worked long hours to earn a more comfortable way of life. He was a very visible host, but, unusually for the time, he was abstemious, having no wish to drink away his profits. He walked and fished for recreation, making plans as he did so. As business prospered he traded up to the Crown in Pentonville, and then to the far more fashionable India House tavern in Leadenhall Street in the City. His credo was to exceed the expectations of his customers. At the India House he abandoned entertainment to concentrate on offering good fare in a congenial atmosphere – ‘Only one quality – the best’ had become his motto, and would remain so throughout his long life. The absence of entertainment defied convention, but in the City, where men met to eat and drink and discuss business, the India House was a haven – and a shrewd business move.

      Despite the lack of song and dance at his City tavern, Morton never lost sight of the profit to be gained by feeding mind and body at the same time. He was a regular visitor to every sort of entertainment venue, and made note of money-making opportunities that were missed. He saw that the shows catered only for men: there were no women, no girls with their boyfriends, no families. Half the population was being ignored. Morton saw a huge untapped potential, and pondered how to exploit it without losing male patronage.

      The solution was not obvious. Women had little or no money of their own, and even if they had, the social conservatism of the age would prevent them from attending taverns without a male escort. Morton realised that if men were accompanied by their wives or girlfriends, they would spend only the same sum between two customers. There was no extra profit in that. Worse, there might be a loss, since the entertainment mix would need to take account of females in the audience. The dilemma was still unresolved when Morton and his brother-in-law Frederick Stanley bought the Old Canterbury Arms in Westminster Bridge Road (then called Lambeth Marsh) in 1849. It was an ancient alehouse, once owned by the Canon of Rochester, and named as a homage to the medieval pilgrims who fed and watered there en route to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket.

      The Canterbury Arms was in a squalid neighbourhood, but it had a theatrical pedigree stretching back

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