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

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the East End Mission of the Methodist Church. As the result of a campaign mounted in the 1960s by the poet John Betjeman, together with performers and conservationists, Wilton’s has survived demolition* and is currently undergoing restoration.

      We can see from contemporary pictures and descriptions that the Canterbury, Weston’s, Wilton’s and the Oxford all conformed to the same structural elements: main auditorium, balcony, easy access to the bar, and a raised platform for the performers. The only variants were the differing levels of interior splendour. There were a handful of other more sophisticated halls: the South London Palace at the Elephant and Castle and the Alhambra Palace in Leicester Square were circular halls with the deep proscenium we are familiar with today.

      The Canterbury, having passed from Morton to the impresario and self-styled ‘People’s Caterer’ William ‘Bill’ Holland in 1867, saw many changes. It was rebuilt and expensively furnished, with a thousand-guinea carpet, fit – so the advertisements said – ‘for people to spit on’. This odd comment followed suggestions that the luxury of the carpet might make some of the humbler patrons feel awkward.

      The upgraded Canterbury focused on comedy acts, George Leybourne being a particular favourite, before it was sold on nine years later to George Villiers, who introduced ballet as a key attraction. It passed to a further four owners in the next fifteen years, outliving its contemporaries only to be destroyed by Hitler’s bombs in the Second World War.

      The Alhambra, a building of Moorish design, had begun life in 1854 as the Royal Panopticon, a showcase for contemporary achievements in science and the fine arts. It closed after only two years, and in 1858 E.T. Smith, the lessee of the Drury Lane Theatre, added a circus ring and reopened it as the Alhambra Palace. The son of an admiral, Edward Tyrell Smith was a restless eccentric with an original mind and an appetite for risk. He had previously been a policeman, auctioneer, land agent, publican, wine merchant, picture dealer and – briefly – owner of the Sunday Times. He had directed Cremorne Pleasure Gardens, and as a publican in 1850 had enticed customers by dressing his barmaids in bloomers, which shocked some but attracted far more.

      Taking on the Alhambra was a brave venture, for it was situated in the French quarter of Leicester Square, which had an unsavoury reputation. In 1859 the journal Peeping Tom reported: ‘London cannot boast of another spot where an equal amount of aspiring fallen humanity vegetates’ – plainly the author had not visited parts of the East End. ‘What a chronicle of misery and woe … of innocence betrayed and vice made more vicious would not Leicester Square yield if it could be made to speak … Its internal filth and outward show are all French and even the dirty urchins who wallow in its gutters are tainted with French notions. “Ici on parle francais” is written on every front, upon every window, on every shopwoman’s and shopman’s countenance.’ Francophobia, it seems, was alive and well in mid-Victorian London.

      Smith had been refused a licence to run the Alhambra Palace as a theatre for legitimate drama, but was granted a music licence by local magistrates. At a cost of £120,000 he converted the circus ring to an open area for tables and chairs, and added a proscenium and a stage. The Alhambra became one of the largest music halls, with a capacity of 3,500, and Smith employed the pugilists Tom Sayers and John Heenan to give exhibitions of boxing there. Sometimes popular taste outran official approval: in 1870 the theatre fell foul of the London County Council when the Colonna Group, featuring ‘Wiry Sal’, danced the can-can with an enthusiasm that was far too racy for officialdom. For a brief time the theatre was closed.

      The shape of the Alhambra reflected its past. In contrast, the South London Palace not only had a circular structure with the proscenium, but at the rear of the hall, beyond the tables and chairs set out for dining, were benches ranked ‘theatre style’, with shelves on the back of each to hold glasses. It also offered arm-height shelves around the perimeter of the hall, where customers who chose to stand could place their drinks. This was a glimpse of the future, but further refinements had to await sites in the prosperous suburbs, where land was cheaper and space was less of a constraint.

      The building programme in the quarter of a century following the opening of the Canterbury was frenetic, but many of the new music halls had short lives. Some were lost to new development, or poor management, or changing fashions. But the greatest hazard was fire. Like its namesake in Sheffield, the Surrey Music Hall in Blackfriars was destroyed by fire in 1865. The Royal Standard, Pimlico, burned down in 1866. The South London Palace, where the interior resembled a Roman villa, was destroyed by fire in March 1869, but reopened a mere nine months later with its audience capacity tripled to around four thousand.

      Charles Morton’s Oxford was burned down in February 1868. The audience had left, and Morton was making a final check of the auditorium when he noticed a flickering light in the gallery. By the time he reached it a couple of seats were on fire. He tried to extinguish the flames, but they soon defeated him. Horse-drawn fire engines arrived in short order after the alarm had been raised, but the fire spread to the paint on the Corinthian columns supporting the extravagantly ornamental roof, which was soon ablaze. Furniture and fittings, hangings and carpets, the wardrobe full of costumes, the contents of the bar, which helped to fuel the flames, were all consumed. Only the wine and spirits in the cellar survived. Just a month earlier, Morton had sold or sub-let the Canterbury to William Holland, so he now had no theatre to manage, and the jobs and prospects of the entertainers and support staff at the Oxford were lost. Morton being Morton, he arranged a benefit concert at the Crystal Palace to help those in need. This provoked its own controversy, and a famous impersonation. Morton sold the ruin of the Oxford and moved on.

      A new Oxford, rebuilt by M.R. Syers and W. Taylor, and designed by the architects Edward Paraire and William Finch Hill, opened in August 1869, only to be burned down once more three years later. Syers, who by then had parted company with Taylor, opened a third Oxford in March 1873. Once again designed by Paraire, it differed from its predecessor in one very important detail: the tables and chairs for eating and drinking had been replaced by rows of comfortable seating. This was part of a trend. The simplicities of the earlier designs – an empty floor space bordered by grandeur – no longer met the demands of management or audience, and music halls began to move recognisably towards the variety theatres of later days. The third Oxford was renovated again in 1892, reopening a year later. It survived as a theatre until 1927, when it became a Lyon’s Corner House.

      The worst disaster in the history of British theatre occurred when a fire broke out at the Theatre Royal, Exeter, on 5 September 1887. During a performance of the romantic comedy Romany Rye a naked gas flame did its worst and flames billowed from the stage. There was panic in the auditorium. One hundred and eighty-six people, mostly in the upper galleries, died from asphyxiation or being caught in the crush to get to the upper tier’s only exit. Just two years earlier the first Theatre Royal in the town had burned to the ground, without loss of life, but lessons had not been learned. On the morning of 6 September all that remained of the theatre was a smouldering shell. Blame for the tragedy was placed upon the lack of a safety curtain and insufficient exits.

      Partly as a consequence of the fires that destroyed so many theatres, health and safety requirements were a perennial irritant for owners. In 1878 the Metropolitan Board of Works (later the London County Council) introduced a Certificate of Suitability which had a profound effect on the economic viability of music halls. Most of the new regulations were sensible and simple, but expensive enough to destroy profitability, and music hall was always a business: no profits, no performance. Up to two hundred halls closed down because their owners could not afford to reinforce shaky floors or install safety curtains as a barrier to fire. But the old halls were unsafe, and many of the new breed of owners saw the legislation as a catalyst for new development and the plusher facilities we now associate with the golden age of music hall. Vast emporiums of gilt, with upholstered seats and decorations of nymphs and cherubs,

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