My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall - John Major

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only briefly, for he died two years after it opened. He was one of the many music hall pioneers who did not live long enough to enjoy the rewards of the trail they had blazed.

      In 1859 the London Pavilion was opened in Tichborne Street, Haymarket, by Emil Loibl and Charles Sonnhammer. Originally a stable yard, it had been converted to the Black Horse tavern two years earlier, run as a song and supper room, and then rebuilt as the much more substantial London Pavilion, with an audience capacity of two thousand. It became the home of variety under Sir Charles (C.B.) Cochran, and would end its life as a cinema three quarters of a century later. But the intervening years wove it into the fabric of music hall history.

      The boom continued throughout the 1860s with the debut of the Alhambra Palace, Leicester Square, together with the Bedford Theatre in Camden, immortalised in oils by Walter Sickert. The Royal New Music Hall, Kensington, the Royal Standard at Pimlico, the Oxford & Cambridge in Chalk Farm, the Regent in Regent Street, the Royal Cambridge in Commercial Street, Whitechapel (where Charlie Chaplin is thought to have made his debut as a soloist) and Hoxton Music Hall all opened in 1864. Gatti’s-in-the-Road, in Westminster Bridge Road, and Gatti’s-under-the-Arches, in Villiers Street, opened in 1865 and 1867 respectively. The latter year brought the Panorama in Shoreditch, Davey’s at Stratford, the Royal Oriental at Poplar and the opening of the Virgo, otherwise the Varieties Theatre, Hoxton. Later known as the Sod’s Opera, this was a seedy, rowdy hall with an insalubrious audience. The pace slowed thereafter, but new building continued. By 1875 London hosted thirty full-time music halls, and double that number by the turn of the century.

      Outside London, public demand for music hall was similarly fierce. Old taverns and ‘free and easies’ had been swiftly adapted: the Adelphi in Sheffield had formerly been a circus, and Thornton’s Varieties in Leeds a harmonica room. In Sheffield, the curiously named Surrey Music Hall – formerly a casino – opened in 1850, and proud locals pronounced it to be the most handsome in the country; sadly, it burned down in 1865. Undaunted, its owner, a former Irish labourer, Thomas Youdan, took over the Adelphi and opened it as the Alexandra Music Hall. Manchester boasted the Star at Ancoats, ‘the People’s Concert Hall’, which had opened in the early 1850s, and the London Music Hall in Bridge Street.

      The old ‘free and easies’ in Nottingham had built up a huge appetite for music hall, and the venerable and grubby Theatre Royal in St Mary’s Gate was renovated as the Alhambra Theatre of Varieties. A little later St George’s Hall attracted local audiences. Its resident chairman was Harry Ball, father of music hall’s greatest male impersonator, Vesta Tilley, who made her debut there in 1868, aged four. Music hall made its Scottish debut with the Alhambra in Dundee, although Scottish old-time music hall continued to centre on Glasgow.

      All of the theatres that followed the opening of the Canterbury faced many of the same problems. One was the law. By sharpening the distinction between drama and music hall the 1843 Theatre Regulations Act had opened up opportunities, but it presented problems too. Charles Morton’s experience was higher-profile than most, but was not unique. The Canterbury¸ as a music hall, was unlicensed for drama, but at Christmas 1855 Morton staged a dramatic sketch which, under the absurdities of the Act, was illegal. Rival managers, keen to undermine him, pounced, and Morton was hauled before the local magistrates. He lost the case on the flimsy grounds that the sketch had two speaking parts; if one actor had played both roles it would have been legal.

      Such trivial prosecutions were to continue spasmodically until 1912. Morton suffered again when he staged an abbreviated version of The Tempest and was fined a nominal £5 by a reluctant magistrate who had seen and enjoyed the show. But, as he pointed out to a disgruntled Morton, the law was the law. Law or not, it was often flouted without action being taken, especially in the less fashionable halls that posed no threat to legitimate theatre. But the banning of drama did have the beneficial side-effect of preserving undiluted music hall fare in the halls.

      Morton’s mini-drama over The Tempest had one lasting consequence. The Times reported the court case, and in doing so described the performance. This was the first time the foremost newspaper in the land had acknowledged the existence of music hall. Once it had done so, Morton, seeing an opportunity, offered it an advertisement for his theatre. The Times, perhaps acknowledging the force that music hall was to become, accepted it. Other theatres followed suit, and a new advertising outlet was born, assisted by the abolition in 1853 of tax on press advertisements.

      Despite Morton’s foray into the fashionable West End, and The Times’s preparedness to accept his money, music hall was not yet respectable, nor would it be for many years. Some strands of opinion regarded it as a malign influence on the working man. In 1831, the Lord’s Day Observance Society had been established to combat ‘the multitudes intent on pursuing pleasure on the Lord’s Day’. The society’s members, led by the vicar of Islington, whose parish was not far from the heartland of enthusiasm for music hall, had in mind such wickedness as coach and steamboat trips and visits to tea rooms and taverns. The vicar’s concern was that such indulgences would ‘absorb much of the money which should contribute to the more decent support of wives and children’. It is not clear when the society thought the working man – whose only day for leisure was Sunday – should enjoy himself, or whether he should at all. In any event, the society was to be a powerful and hostile lobby throughout the life of music hall.

      But the killjoys had powerful opposition. In 1836 Charles Dickens wrote a biting pseudonymous essay, ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’, mockingly dedicated to the Bishop of London: ‘The day which his Maker intended as a blessing, Man has converted into a curse. Instead of being hailed by him as his period of relaxation, he finds it remarkable only as depriving him of every comfort and enjoyment.’ Others agreed. A current song commented:

      No duck must lay, no cat must kitten,

      No hen must leave her nest, though sittin’.

      Though painful is the situation

      She must not think of incubation

      For as no business must be done on a Sunday

      Of course, they’ll have to put it off till Monday.

      Such ridicule had no more effect on the morally upright than Dickens’ disdain. Many Victorians took the Fourth Commandment seriously: Sunday was a day of rest from enjoyment as well as from work, and if it was the only full day of leisure for the working man, that was just bad luck. It was bad luck for the music hall proprietors as well, robbing them of full houses and a day’s revenue. Sunday opening was a battle that would outlast music hall, but the proprietors did not always lose to pious opinion. After a long campaign the ban on opening during Lent was relaxed in 1875, and ten years later the Lord Chamberlain permitted performances on Ash Wednesday – but not Good Friday.

      As competition grew, the design of music halls evolved. Up to the 1850s embryonic music hall mostly found a home in converted and extended taverns. These were usually very basic, although there were exceptions, such as Evans’ Late Joy’s. Early music halls were generally a commercially driven exercise in maximising profit from limited space. Typically, two or more rooms would be knocked into one large space with a rudimentary stage, and a long table (or tables) at right angles to it where the customers sat and were served with food and drink. The chairman compèred the evening from a seat at a table parallel to the stage.

      This primitive set-up was succeeded by adapted, and later purpose-built, halls, often constrained by an existing site – which is why so many music halls were no more than roofed-over yards – but on a grander scale. The second Canterbury Music Hall, built in 1854, was the exemplar: a hall with balconies, a stage and a void in front of it packed with tables and chairs. The design had more in common with a Methodist chapel or a concert hall than a public house or a modern theatre. The Canterbury had other assets, in its gallery, lounge and library, but the actual presentation of the entertainment was still simple.

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