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My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall
John Major
The former Prime Minister takes a remarkable journey into his family past to tell the richly colourful story of the British music hall in this Theatre Book Prize-shotlisted history.Music hall was one of the glories of Victorian England. Sentimental, vulgar, class-conscious, but always patriotic and on the side of the underdog, it held a mirror to the audiences’ hopes and fears, and sometimes the general absurdity of life.Vast, smoke-filled auditoriums were packed night after night in nearly every town and city in Britain. The most popular performers, such as Marie Lloyd, Vesta Tilley and George Robey, were among the highest paid and most celebrated figures in the land.This was the world that John Major’s father Tom entered at the age of 21 as a comedian and singer. In My Old Man, the former prime minister uses his father’s story as a springboard for telling the entertaining history of the music hall, from its origins in Elizabethan times through to its heyday in the nineteenth century and eventual decline with the rise of radio and cinema in the twentieth century.Packed with colourful anecdotes about the great performers of the day, this warm-hearted history conjures up a lost age.



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Dedication (#u7d2b65db-34ec-5f6b-b39e-e51127a2107f)
In loving memory of Tom, Gwen and Kitty, and of my brother Terry, whose ambition in life was to see this book written

Contents
Cover (#u633c1021-12c9-5dbb-bbb9-daa8eabcae28)
Title Page (#ulink_d4499b81-d75d-5d90-b7c3-a4c8020ae6df)
Dedication (#ulink_ae6a5c40-1bab-5552-b0c5-6097f5485a17)
Leaving the Stage (#ulink_15b377a6-bf55-57a7-b12c-df06420f9fc5)
1 The Road to Music Hall (#ulink_bff2854c-dc7a-5a27-bfb4-86f796940971)
2 The Basement and the Cellars (#ulink_f8fc8a55-7041-57bf-8fb7-beb502d49d47)
3 At the Fringe (#ulink_2efe2f70-ac90-5bf5-a60c-9c88bc2e1052)
4 The First Pioneer (#ulink_90ef281d-cf25-5a0a-bd03-805ff5bb9d01)
5 Explosion (#ulink_67fa6e0e-38e9-5c2a-950f-1be7aaa513ea)
6 The Swells and the Costers (#ulink_b3f17b3e-e6c3-557a-90cd-cdf34333f248)
7 The Serio-Comediennes (#ulink_d11acc3a-aa2b-5427-8887-e5f921285583)
8 Marie Lloyd (#ulink_38c5c69a-0472-579c-9685-dc69f8ace084)
9 Dan Leno and Little Tich (#ulink_f677dcc9-9644-5379-9d64-87441abe4dae)
10 The Comic and the Minstrel (#ulink_f493e447-f23c-51ac-a812-be4d37281a30)
11 The Cross-Dressers: Girls Who Were Boys (#ulink_06549efc-3c94-57cd-af40-93597522a9a1)
12 Top Hats and Black Faces (#ulink_31f9ec55-f823-51eb-81a8-8f486b6c8e49)
13 The Business of Pleasure (#ulink_31a2602d-82a7-52a1-a9a8-f5bb9164b718)
14 Warp and Weft (#ulink_b0944bcd-84cb-50b7-86f2-72d4748d0ee8)
15 The Exotic and the Bizarre (#ulink_2d51fc8a-78b8-502f-9e37-c9ef67916a0c)
16 Amusement of the People (#ulink_fc63e04a-8a34-5279-87c4-1ac5a0472a34)
17 The Literati and the Artists (#ulink_8eae8f3f-b6ae-5f5b-aca1-a3f37280b37f)
18 Enterprise and Outrage (#ulink_b7950064-b1e7-5a81-ab22-0730e73b117c)
19 Overseas Music Hall (#ulink_ddd6b99c-c647-564b-bf79-9f026c2b813c)
20 Music Hall War (#ulink_1ec70e6b-e6ac-5b33-a75a-411e1439d9d1)
21 Tom and Kitty (#ulink_3085d61b-e065-5a6f-aeec-9c520fef28fd)
22 The Seeds of Decline (#ulink_be125464-a1b5-5156-8117-eea738d1349f)
23 World War I (#ulink_3e9b50c8-faa3-51a3-a021-4f2c04813ba0)
24 Aftermath (#ulink_cec2b72b-9bbb-5859-9c2f-6beb31d35541)
Index of Songs (#ulink_d7c480de-6ee9-5789-add5-963ede0c4799)
General Index (#ulink_e12048ca-33d5-5a9f-9c80-b8e1615079e5)
List of Illustrations (#ulink_6971a5fd-aa3f-5d53-acf3-4f4eba1e5f78)
Acknowledgements (#ulink_704dc846-2a1c-5ce2-94af-dfc3bca772dd)
Author’s Note (#ulink_d1052d79-ecee-5e65-9e34-dcf29b17f2fc)
About the Author (#ulink_b2e0fb23-247f-55a1-a840-a1a22ac33104)
Other Works (#ulink_b2077633-ca9b-50c4-86e9-e54d73705d60)
Picture Section (#ulink_04212029-d9ae-5329-b0bc-f0f115bd309d)
Copyright (#ulink_060e747e-c35e-51f9-8670-6502aa6d93ea)
About the Publisher (#u87567e45-429f-5edb-8f57-c83cb2fc0af8)

Leaving the Stage (#u7d2b65db-34ec-5f6b-b39e-e51127a2107f)
‘Who is to write the history of music hall? What a splendid theme …’
JOHN ROBERTSON, HISTORIAN (1856–1933)
In March 1962, I sat with an old man as he lay dying. He was barely conscious, with familiar half-smiles dancing across his well-worn and gentle face, but I knew where he was in his imagination – where he wanted to be. The lights were bright. A boisterous audience was cheering. Aged eighty-two, and over thirty years since he had left it, he was back on the stage. In life he had few possessions, but he died a richer man than most, with a song in his heart and joy in his soul.
He was my father, Tom.
The men and women who entertained so royally are all dead. They are gone, but not quite forgotten. We know some of their names, and some of their songs, but few people now living saw them onstage. Their magic is now the stuff of myth and legend.
But then, music hall has always been an elusive concept. What exactly is it? Is it a style of singing comic ballads? That is certainly the principal ingredient, but it is far from the whole. Is it a theatre, hosting a mixture of variety? Up to a point, yes – but it is so much more than that.
Even the name is misleading. ‘Music’ hall was never simply music, but encompassed everything from the sublime to the surreal. A typical evening’s fare might include opera and ballet, popular singers and comedians, speciality acts, animal acts, acrobats, monologists and any other performer who might, however loosely, ‘entertain’. Nor was the setting necessarily a hall. Elements of music hall were widespread in pleasure gardens, taverns, streets and markets long before the nineteenth century. Its growth was organic: often haphazard, ramshackle – more the product of events than rational planning. And always, always it was a reflection of the lives and tastes of its audience.
The term ‘music hall’ was invented by the early entrepreneurs who built theatres to exploit widely popular forms of entertainment. These entrepreneurs have a role to play in the history of music hall, but it is sentimental myth to claim they invented it. It had its heart in the East End of London, yet it was not purely a southern phenomenon. It was centred on the capital because that was where the biggest audiences were to be found, but from the outset it was popular in towns and cities across the length and breadth of Great Britain. Lancashire, in particular, provided music hall talent almost on a level to rival London.
Music hall was able to thrive because of a fortunate combination of circumstances. In Victorian Britain, wages rose and working hours fell. The nineteenth century was an intensely musical era that saw a huge growth in choral societies, brass bands and religious music. Street entertainers earned a few pennies playing zithers, piccolos, banjos, concertinas or fiddles. Opera companies toured the provinces. Popular music embraced minstrel songs and the ballads of Tin Pan Alley. Popular operetta arrived as the gift of Gilbert and Sullivan. The development of railways enabled performers to tour the whole country. Demand for their work saw the publication of inexpensive sheet music. There was a huge growth in the sale of musical instruments. Amidst all this, music hall was shaped and defined as one of the glories of the Victorian era. Sentimental, vulgar, class-conscious, insular – but always patriotic, and on the side of the underdog. It held up a mirror to people’s hopes and fears, joys and heartbreaks, and the general absurdity of life.
The strands of music hall began to come together in the early nineteenth century, but had comprehensively disentangled by the mid-twentieth. Like a shooting star, it flared brightly into orbit, then fizzled out; but its heyday was brilliant, and its lifespan encompassed the story of a world changed beyond recognition.
In its formative years, the vulgarity and sentimentality of music hall attracted a largely working-class audience, but its appeal was far wider. It took root in England only a few years after there had been a real fear of revolution, and helped to turn sour resentment into a patriotic roar of joy. It was low-born but irresistible. Its songs have become the folk songs of a nation. As Kipling observed, they filled a gap in our history. Music hall attracted the magic brush-strokes of Sickert, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Long after its heyday, entertainers such as Max Miller, Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd and Morecambe and Wise had an empathy with their audience reminiscent of music hall in its prime. Bruce Forsyth and Roy Hudd have it to this day.
Popular artistes from music hall shaped the attitudes of our nation: Harry Lauder’s nightly jokes about Scottish miserliness fed a public perception that turned a myth into an accepted truth. Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel and Dan Leno personified the ‘little man’, put upon by life. Other stereotypes entered folklore. Music hall eulogised courtship and motherhood, yet ridiculed marriage as a comic disaster. It mocked single women for being unmarried, but made ‘the missus’ the butt of jokes. It was never politically correct, and in a less sensitive age ‘nigger minstrels’ and ‘coon’ acts were part of its staple diet. At times of war it could be fiercely jingoistic – indeed, the word was popularised in ‘By Jingo’, a music hall song, during the Baltic crisis of 1877–78. Even after its demise, music hall continued to have an impact. In 1942, the pro-nudist magazine Health & Efficiency denounced ‘music hall comedians and their imbecilic jokes’ for the reluctance of the public to join nudist camps. More positively, the demand for entertainment without alcohol led to the foundation in 1880 of the ‘Old Vic’ theatre in south London.
Once scorned, music hall would come to be seen as epitomising a past age of success, and as an art form that gave pleasure to millions. It had some powerful advocates. In 1978, James Callaghan, then Prime Minister, used a music hall song at a TUC congress to announce that he would not be holding an expected general election: ‘There was I, waiting at the church …’ he sang, echoing Vesta Victoria three-quarters of a century earlier. The country was praying for an election – but it was not to be. Nor was this an isolated acknowledgement of Callaghan’s affection for music hall. At another trades union gathering he charmed his dinner companions by singing, ‘I’m the man, the very fat man, who waters the workers’ beer.’ It is an irony that he used a music hall song to draw grumpy trades unionists closer to the government, since over seventy years earlier disputes over music hall had bitterly divided the Puritan and non-Puritan elements of the embryonic Labour movement.
Tories were susceptible too. Lord Randolph Churchill had ‘an almost music hall style of public speaking’, claimed his biographer, while his son Winston, a great admirer of the music hall artiste Dan Leno, was apt to sing ‘old world cockney songs with teddy bear gestures’. Churchill, like the Labour movement, will enter our story again.
Music hall reached its zenith in the 1890s. Vast auditoriums were packed each night in nearly every British town and city, and fourteen million tickets were sold each year. The most popular performers were among the highest-paid and most celebrated figures in the land. ‘I earn more than the Prime Minister,’ noted Little Tich, ‘but I do so much less harm.’ Owners of theatres became rich, and their money and fame gave them an entrée to the Establishment elite. But even as music hall stood unchallenged in its supremacy, the forces that would destroy it were taking shape.
On 28 December 1895, in the dimmed artificial light of Le Grand Café, avenue des Capucines, Paris, a small group of thirty-three individuals were viewing the first public screening of commercial cinema. On the bill were ten one-minute films, the brainchild of two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière.
Five years later, at the turn of the century, my father Tom, then twenty-one, entered the profession. For nearly thirty years – the prime of his working life – he earned his living in music hall and variety. His fortunes fluctuated, but in old age, when his health and prosperity were gone, these were the years he remembered with the greatest affection.
In 1902, Tom met Kitty Grant, a vivacious and attractive brunette five years older than him, and they formed a double act, Drum + Major.* (#ulink_923459d8-754a-53ec-8aca-6545836a2fd1) When Kitty’s husband, David, died in 1910, she and Tom legalised a relationship that had long been stable. They wrote their own songs, sketches and monologues, and as they became more popular they formed their own revues, with which for over twenty years they toured the country, as well as North and South America. In February 1906, they became founder members of the Variety Artists’ Federation. Playbills reveal that they performed with the greats: Marie Lloyd, George Robey, Florrie Forde, Vesta Tilley and Harry Champion.
These great and happy times ended in tragedy when Kitty died following an onstage accident. My father carried on alone, although not for long. In Tom and Kitty’s show there were two young speciality dancers, ‘Glade and Glen’. ‘Glen’, whose real name was Gwen Coates, a slender imp of a girl, had been asked by the dying Kitty to ‘look after Tom’. And so she did for the next forty years. She was at his side when he died, caring for him as she had done for so long. My mother, the eternal, uncrushable optimist, knew the show must go on, but her smile was never again so bright. When she herself died ten years later, in the dark of a long night, she was in hospital, alone for once, for her death was unexpected. Did she think of Tom? I am sure she did, for she had done so all her life.
When I was born my father was sixty-four, my mother thirty-eight. I was Tom and Gwen’s late child, a just-in-time baby – the one she had hoped for, but feared she would never have. It was not an easy birth: my mother, never robust in health, nearly died, and I became dangerously ill. But we both survived. Most of my mother’s hopes for the future were invested in me, but whatever gifts my parents passed on to their children, the talent to entertain was not among them. My eldest brother, Thomas, had died within hours of his birth. My sister Pat, a fine dancer as a child, was eccentric enough for a stage career, but had no interest in joining the profession. My brother Terry and I were devoid of artistic talent, although I often reflected that my chosen career was akin to show business. Certainly, Prime Minister’s Questions often resembled my father’s description of a raucous night at the Glasgow Empire.
There may have been a good reason for our parents’ lack of disappointment that we failed to follow them onto the stage – at least in my father’s case. At the age of twenty-two he had had a brief liaison with Mary Moss, the wife of a young musician, and in 1901 their son, another Tom, was born. Like his father – our father – Tom became a music hall performer. He had a beautiful tenor voice, but also, I fear, a horrible temper – particularly after a night’s carousing.
Tom Junior appeared onstage in many guises – as ‘Signor Meneghini’, ‘Tom Moss’ or ‘Signor Bassani’. Physically, he was about as unlike my muscular father as it was possible to be: medium height, with a small van Dyke beard, and the plump body of the archetypal tenor. Even when he was past fifty, when I first came to know him, he could sing, and when he did (which was rare), I would listen enraptured as, unaccompanied by music, his voice soared effortlessly to the higher notes. If it had not been for his rebellious, anti-authoritarian nature, his career might have progressed from the shadows into the spotlight. He had the talent, but not the discipline. As my mother put it, ‘Tom doesn’t like being told what to do.’ Truly, Tom was my father’s son.
My parents lived life on a rollercoaster. Alternately well-off and hard-up, in work or out, on top or in difficulty, they inhabited a Micawberish world in which – somehow, sometime – all would be well. But, of course, it hardly ever was. And when the problems piled up, my mother – who had never even heard of Voltaire, let alone read him – echoed Dr Pangloss in Candide in believing that, as disaster followed disaster, it was, no doubt, ‘all for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. She had learned to expect hardship, and when it came knocking at her door she was ready to confront it.
One day, at around the age of nine, I remember rushing home for tea and, in my hurry, throwing open the kitchen door. My father, who was fitting a lightbulb, fell from the stool he was standing on and cracked his head on the tiled floor. Clearly dazed, he was taken off to bed. Although I did not know it at the time, his sight had been fading for many months, as cataracts dimmed his vision; but as it worsened, I was certain that his failing sight was as a direct result of my childhood exuberance. No one ever suggested anything of the kind, but since my feelings of guilt were never known, I was never disabused.
This was but one of many family misfortunes: business failure, debt, bankruptcy, failing health, the loss of our home. The two rented rooms in Brixton in which we found sanctuary were in a house owned by my half-brother Tom, who until then I had never met. My parents had not told me who he really was. My father was too lofty to explain, and my mother would have moved heaven and earth to protect me from ‘that sort of thing’. My father’s health and sight continued to worsen while my mother shielded him from as much as she could, particularly her worries over debt. Her world centred on him, and he accepted her care as his right. In this, if in little else in life, he was a very lucky man. Throughout their travails, my parents had always accepted setbacks with equanimity. Misfortune was nothing new. Shows opened, shows closed. You were top of the bill, or bottom. But tomorrow always held glittering possibilities. That was their philosophy of life.
My father’s health deteriorated further, and he became bedridden. An active man all his life, he now had nothing to do, and nowhere to go. Nor did he have an audience to bring him alive. Here, at least, I could make amends for my nine-year-old clumsiness. I became his audience. He sang the songs he’d known, and recited the monologues he and Kitty had written. ‘The girl I love is up in the gallery,’ he would sing – quietly changing the gender of the lover – and as his eyes watered I’d wonder if he was thinking of Kitty. But when he spoke of his life in the theatre, a smile was never far away. I learned that although Marie Lloyd had a saucy tongue, she had a heart of gold. That Dan Leno and Little Tich were giants of the profession. That Nellie Wallace was ‘ugly but funny’, and Gertie Gitana was lovely in every way. That Nosmo King, in haste to create a stage name for himself, glimpsed the ‘No Smoking’ sign on the carriage windows of a train he was boarding, and never looked back. That Vesta Tilley was the finest cross-dresser of them all – ‘And what’s more,’ said my father, clearly impressed with titles, ‘she became a Lady.’ And so she did.
Somehow, word of my father’s plight spread. Strangers, often eccentric men and women, would arrive at our door. Careworn, often shabbily dressed, they were all of my father’s vintage, or near to it. Prosperity, if it had ever touched them, had long since fled. Some were talented, some loveable; some both, some neither. But all had the urge to entertain. Often vulnerable, they were intensely human in their wish to give pleasure, in their thirst for applause and in the love they had for their profession.
They sat at my father’s bedside drinking whisky until supplies ran out, and then called for tea. If their conversation was stilted at first, it soon became intimate. Memories were stirred, emotions flowed. Old stories were told, old times remembered – no doubt, as Shakespeare put it, with advantages. Sometimes, these reunions became uproarious, and tears of mirth rolled down their and my father’s cheeks. Sometimes emotion overcame them, and tears of a different kind were wiped away.
I can see and hear them still. I saw how cheers and applause had filled their lives, and for a short time they were back there, in the good old days, positively aglow with their reminiscences, a fierce joy in their hearts. They were full of generous impulse. They treasured their remembered triumphs, but had not forgotten the flops, the rejections, the let-downs, the days without work, the lash of critical opinion. It was not until years later, with the political critics poised, invective flowing and the national audience restive, that I fully understood all the emotions that had been so familiar to them.
I listened avidly as they talked of their shared past. They were born to perform. Onstage they had come alive. The career they chose was one in which fame and fortune was elusive, but heartbreak was not. Few had enjoyed great material rewards, although they talked with affection and without envy of those who had been successful. Once, several guests around my father’s bed argued over whose songs had the most memorable choruses. Was it Florrie Forde or Harry Champion? An impromptu concert ensued, in which ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ competed with ‘Any Old Iron’ and ‘I’m Henery the Eighth, I am’ before a draw was declared. At the time it seemed there was an unending flow of guests, but memory plays tricks. There were perhaps fifteen in all. But the pleasure their presence gave to my father was disproportionate to their number.
Many years later, when I became a public figure, some commentators wrote disparagingly of my parents and their profession. My parents may not have had much in the way of possessions or money, but as human beings, in their kindness and goodness, they were richer than most. And, most important of all to them, they had standing amongst their peers, and careers that had not only given personal joy to themselves, but pleasure to others. As my father, with whisky in hand and philosophy in flow, once observed: ‘Entertainers exist to brighten people’s lives – critics are their antidote.’
The lives of many music hall performers were poignant. Each act was individual, and most had no support structure. The glad hand proffered to the multitude often hid a lonely soul. Some had only modest talent. Many fell upon hard times, and even the successful often found it hard to cope with fame. The artistes’ interests often fared badly in a commercial world. And, stripped of its glamour, music hall was, first and last, a commercially driven business. Its leading entrepreneurs – Charles Morton, Edward Moss, Oswald Stoll, Richard Thornton and their colleagues – were quintessentially Victorian figures, vigorous believers in profit who were always on the lookout for market opportunities. They were not in show business; they were in business. Understanding market forces as well as any modern businessman, they found that the music hall model worked, and so they cashed in. They brought together the talent that wished to perform, and a public that wished to be entertained.
Performers were in a poor position to negotiate. They started off being paid a share of the venue’s profit – essentially from drink sales – and thereafter their salary was linked to their popularity. It was brilliantly straightforward: the bigger the house they attracted, the more they were paid to perform. If their popularity waned, their wages went down – they had no illusions about that. If they didn’t work, they weren’t paid. As a result, many worked too hard, and died too young.
In the early days of music hall the public demanded affordable entertainment, and they got it: a drink, a seat, a song, the chance to place a bet, a show to watch, something to eat – all for sixpence. There was nothing novel about the entertainment concept – all the artistic forms that featured in the music halls were already in existence – but the business model was new: pub, choral society, restaurant, theatre, comedy venue, betting shop all brought together under one roof. It was imaginative, and for many years it was to prove irresistible.
By 1901, as the Victorian Age ended, music hall faced a new world as rival attractions multiplied: first non-catered variety shows, then radio and recorded music, began to crowd in on the music hall monopoly of mass entertainment. The death blow came with the flickering images first seen in Paris courtesy of the Lumière brothers. Cinema was on its way. Audiences still enjoyed intimate theatres, comic songs, patter, magic tricks – as they do today – but bigger sets and new technology were needed to create more extravagant productions.
Music hall was born of no fixed abode. It was one strand of an impulse to entertain that, throughout the centuries, faced down religious prejudice, social and political hostility, attempts at licensing and censorship. It was the child of many parents, raised in many guises and even more places. But always, it was an art for individuals. And when the individual began to be subsumed beneath a demand for greater spectacle, the pulse of music hall began to slow. There were other changes too. As transport improved, audiences were able to travel more easily, and their entertainment options widened. The success of music hall had come from the people, and as the people tired of it, its allure faded.
This book is not an attempt at a definitive history of music hall – that would fill many volumes. But it is the story of the rise and fall of a unique form of entertainment. Whilst I was writing it, figures who were at first simply names on playbills took shape and came to life. I hope I have painted them faithfully. They were, like all of us, shaped by time and circumstance; fighting – at first for survival, and then for success – in a tough and ruthless profession. Some dreamed but failed. Some succeeded gloriously. Some could not cope with fame. Some were stalked by heartbreak and failure. But they are all part of the story.
The great days of music hall are now gone forever. But its story is glamorous, its impact widespread and its legacy enduring. The art form that was once derided for moral degeneracy has, over time, assumed the iconic status of a world we have lost, and values that have been misplaced. At its core stood the entertainers. Their echo still resounds. This is their story.
It is the final encore for my parents, Tom and Gwen.
* (#ulink_e21113e0-282b-51f9-9840-43d2e08defbc) My father was born Thomas Ball. ‘Major’ was a stage name. Had he not changed it, I would have been John Ball, and thus have shared the name of one of the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381.

1
The Road to Music Hall (#u7d2b65db-34ec-5f6b-b39e-e51127a2107f)
‘Beer flowed freely … occasionally there were big banquets … where there would be heavy drinking, and sometimes a row.’
EDWARD YATES, WRITER, DRAMATIST AND JOURNALIST, RECALLING CREMORNE GARDENS IN THE 1840S IN RECOLLECTIONS AND EXPERIENCES (1865)
All the components of music hall derive from earlier forms of theatrical entertainment: music, dance, comedy, variety, mime, clowning, costume; rapport with the audience; the marriage of food and drink and entertainment; and affordable tickets to attract a mass audience. By the end of the Restoration period all of these were understood, but the full recipe for music hall was not yet in place: some disparate ingredients were still needed before, in John Betjeman’s memorable phrase, it became ‘the poetry and song of the people’. Throughout the eighteenth century the seeds were germinating in pleasure gardens, saloon theatres and catch and glee clubs, and they would soon blossom in song and supper rooms, taverns and music houses.
Pleasure gardens had a long history. The concept had existed since Ancient Rome, when gardens acquired by the Emperor Tiberius were opened to the public. These were free of charge, but their English successors were commercial operations, offering refreshment in an attractive setting. It is easy to see why they became popular. They were a refreshing contrast to rival amusements such as bear-baiting, dog fights and public executions. In an age when travel was too expensive for most, they offered relaxation at weekends and the gentle leisure of walking, playing, eating and drinking at modest cost in pleasant surroundings.
The most fashionable gardens were magnets for refined patrons seeking a genteel mixture of concerts, masquerades, quality dining and, often, fireworks to enliven the evening. Vauxhall Gardens, now the network of streets to the north of The Oval cricket ground, was perhaps the most famous. Cupers Gardens, on the site of the present-day National Theatre, Marylebone Gardens, between Marylebone High Street and Harley Street, and Ranelagh Gardens, broadly on the site of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, were also popular venues. Each garden had its own charm and special attractions. Concerts and novelty acts rubbed shoulders with skittles and bowls. Some gardens featured defined walks punctuated by ornate plantations, water fountains, grottos and follies lured quieter souls, while others offered more raffish customers the wilder delights of gambling.
When Vauxhall Gardens opened around 1660, admission was free but charges were levied for refreshments. It rose to pre-eminence under the management of Jonathan Tyers, who having enlarged the gardens to about sixteen acres, began to charge an admission fee. Orchestras played nightly, and concerts were held in a rotunda where patrons could dine and dance. The energetic Tyers dotted the grounds with architectural attractions and fake gothic ruins. Vauxhall was widely copied at home and overseas. Whales in Bayswater, Highbury Barn in Clerkenwell, Bagnigge Wells in King’s Cross and St Helene Gardens in Rotherhithe all borrowed ideas from Vauxhall, So too did Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen.
Cupers Gardens, the principal London rival to Vauxhall, specialised in firework displays and boasted an ornamental lake, bowling greens, arbours and attractive walks. Each night, at the height of its popularity an orchestra and band played nightly. But it also became a haunt for prostitutes, card sharps and general villainy, which in due course undermined its appeal to more sober citizens. In 1753, its licence was revoked on the grounds that it was ‘a haunt of vice’, and after a brief interlude as a tea garden, Cupers closed in 1760.
The larger gardens built promenade platforms and elaborate music rooms to present the most popular performers of the day. In 1765, the nine-year-old Mozart performed in the rotunda at Ranelagh. This was the birth of saloon theatre, a hybrid of theatre and tavern standing in its own gardens.
The admission charge for the pleasure gardens varied from half a crown for the best-appointed and most fashionable to sixpence for semi-rural tea-house gardens in places like Highbury, Hornsey and White Conduit House in Pentonville, where the entrance fee included a token to be redeemed for refreshment. Tea had only been introduced to England in 1652, but swiftly replaced ale as the national drink. Every strata of society patronised the tea houses, and their new ‘exotic’ import was considered to be a cure for all ills, from headaches to syphilis.
Apart from the efficacious powers of tea, the gardens offering benefits to health were generally spas, whose waters were widely believed to have healing properties. They also provided entertainment, no doubt in the belief that it would soothe their customers and make them less likely to question the effectiveness of the health treatment. But fashions changed, and the spas began to lose custom. Bermondsey Spa is typical: in 1795 a visitor noted: ‘the once famed place was most rapidly on the decline … three idle waiters were clumped for want of a call … As we reached the orchestra, the singer curtsied to us, for we were the only persons in the gardens.’ Nine years later, Bermondsey closed.
The pleasure gardens too fell out of favour. Cupers Gardens closed in 1753, Marylebone in 1778 and Ranelagh in 1803. Vauxhall struggled on, but became an irresistible attraction for vice. One customer commented acidly that it would be better ‘if there were more nightingales and fewer strumpets’. In 1813, in an attempt to boost its fortunes, Vauxhall staged a fête to celebrate Wellington’s victory at the Battle of Vitoria, and in the 1820s it introduced sword-swallowers, military re-enactments, shadow pantomimes and performances of comic songs. Crowds flocked to see the intrepid Madame Saqui walk down a tightrope to the ground from a height of sixty feet amid bursting fireworks. In 1827, a thousand soldiers re-enacted the Battle of Waterloo, and in the 1830s the gardens were illuminated by 15,000 glass lamps for 19,000 visitors on a single evening. As the spectacles grew, the price of admission fell from its peak of four shillings and sixpence to one shilling. But economic times were tough, and shillings were hard to come by: the demise of Vauxhall was inevitable.
As Vauxhall declined, it tried to cash in on the growing popularity of comic singers. Novelties were tried: Herr von Joel, an eccentric German comic entertainer, would jump out from behind bushes to entertain passers-by, but unsurprisingly, this often caused more alarm than amusement. In 1840 the owners went bankrupt and the gardens closed. They attempted a relaunch two years later, but even the novelty of balloon ascents and the appearance of popular vocalists like Sam Cowell, Jack Sharp and W.G. Ross could not save them. Fashion had moved on, and in 1859 the gardens closed for ever. By 1832 the roots of music hall were being firmly established in pubs and clubs across England. Yet that year a new pleasure garden opened: Royal Cremorne in Chelsea, which would provide a platform for music hall pioneers, as well as an extraordinary variety of entertainment: balloonists, orchestras, a theatre, archery and a gypsy tent.
The Spa at Sadler’s Wells provides an illustration of the early forces that drove the creation of music hall. A local businessman, Richard Sadler, owned a ‘Musick House’ near the site of the present-day theatre. In 1683 he excavated his land for minerals and discovered an ancient well, and with the skill of a snake-oil salesman, he saw a marketing opportunity.
Sadler promoted the waters as able to cure ‘dropsy, jaundice, scurvy, green sickness and other distempers to which females are liable [he knew his clientèle] – ulcers, fits of the mother, virgin’s fever and hydrochondriacal distemper’. He obtained endorsements from ‘eminent’ physicians, and hundreds of fashionable Londoners were sufficiently convinced to become patrons. Sadler added pipe, tabor and dulcimer musicians to sweeten the experience. ‘Sadler’s Wells’ was soon staging operas.
As competition grew with the discovery of more wells, the genteel air gave way to less refined customers demanding a more earthy experience. Sadler provided it. The operas were replaced by such tasteless absurdities as ‘the Hibernian Cannibal’, who devoured a live cockerel, ‘feather, feet and all’, washed down with a pint of brandy.
William Wordsworth recorded seeing ‘giants and dwarfs, clowns, conjurers, posture makers, harlequins/Amid the uproar of the rabblement, Perform their feats’. A noisy audience and a variety of acts was not yet music hall, but entertainment was being propelled in that direction. Managers were prepared to stage anything to find and hold an audience.
One of the ruses at Sadler’s Wells was to brew very strong beer, and advertise it:
Haste hither, then, and take your fill,
Let parsons say whate’er they will,
The ale that every ale excels
Is only found at Sadler’s Wells.
Sadler’s Wells is relevant to the story of music hall because it shows how landlords, proprietors and managers relentlessly followed the market to maximise profitability. It was their job to give the public what it wanted and to ‘talk it all up’. It was exactly this approach that would drive the development of music hall.
Other early influences on music hall were catch and glee songs. ‘Catches’ – so-called because they were catchy – were songs with simple harmonies composed almost exclusively for male voices. They were initially humorous and light-hearted in content, and intended for the convivial atmosphere of clubs and taverns. As they became identified with low humour and bawdy lyrics, their fan base widened and they became a staple of late-night entertainment.
The first collection of catches was published by Thomas Ravenscroft in 1609. Yet we know they existed by 1600. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (c.1601) Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek are rebuked by Malvolio, never one for mirth, for singing catches with Feste the clown: ‘My masters, are you mad? Have you no wit … but to gabble like tinkers? Do ye make an alehouse of my Lady’s house, that ye squeak out your coziers’ [tailors’] catches?’ It is a revealing accusation, telling us that catches were considered plebeian, but were enjoyed by gentlemen as well as tradesmen. They were convivial and drink-related, probably very rude, and were disapproved of by the Puritan-minded.
Ironically, Puritan hostility may have actively promoted catch-singing. When the Puritan Parliament of 1642 passed legislation to close the theatres, it inadvertently moved the displaced musicians and singers to taverns and inns, where catch-singing took hold. Even worse, many of the organs the Puritans removed from churches also found their way into taverns. In 1657 Parliament responded by passing an ordinance banning ‘idle, dissolute persons commonly called fiddlers and minstrels … from making musick in any Inn, Tavern or Alehouse’. Singing was also banned, but enterprising tavern-owners either turned a blind eye to the law or deliberately misinterpreted it. A mere two years later, the Black Horse tavern in Aldersgate Street was operating as a ‘Musick House’ featuring catches.
The following year, the Puritan Commonwealth was gone and Charles II was on the throne. Music houses began to proliferate, and to move upmarket, as is shown by Samuel Pepys dedicating a book of catch lyrics to his friends at ‘the late Musick Society and Meeting at the Old Jury, London’. Pepys and other contemporary commentators describe a tavern-based scene of music, ale or wine, enjoyed convivially, served by a landlord-in-attendance to a socially diverse group of singers. Henry Purcell was responsible for providing the music to some of the ripest lyrics, perhaps as light relief among the operas, anthems, Court odes and other works of this great British composer.
The most famous of the ‘catch clubs’ was founded by the 4th Earl of Sandwich at the Thatched House tavern in 1762, on a site that is now at the lower end of London’s St James’s Street. The Noblemen’s and Gentlemen’s Catch Club was a highly exclusive dining and drinking club for the cream of Georgian society, where dukes and earls mingled with generals and admirals. Its secretary, Edmund Warren, published collections of catches and left an exhaustive record of the club. The membership clearly shared a love of wine as well as music: in June 1771, 798 quart bottles of claret alone were purchased for only twenty-six members. Non-alcoholic drinks were frowned on, and members who requested them were asked, presumably tongue-in-cheek, to drink ‘at a distant table’, and to do so with ‘a due sense of the society’s indulgence’. Fines were levied for absence or lateness, and ‘drinking fines’ for talking about politics or religion – or singing out of tune. A donation to the club, in the guise of a fine, was expected from any member benefiting from a large inheritance. But the club was more than a bolt-hole for society drunkards. It supported the contemporary music scene, awarding medals and prizes to young performers, while professional musicians such as the popular tenor John Beard and the composer Thomas Arne were among the honorary members.
The club medals bore the motto ‘Let’s drink and sing together’, and they ate together too. The landlord of the Thatched House, William Almack,* (#ulink_6b7680a8-408a-5042-9d7f-9be576cee832) served dinner at 4 p.m., and kept refreshment coming for the next nine hours. After dinner and Grace were concluded, fines were announced, the singing began and the drink flowed .
By 1800, catch-singing was a feature of autumn and winter evenings in taverns across the country. Such evenings took a form that would set a pattern for music hall. A chairman was appointed – usually the publican – who would preside over the entertainment, introduce guest singers and direct the club’s affairs: he did, after all, have a pecuniary interest in its success. The evenings would grow increasingly raucous as the drinking proceeded, and thus the chairman would give events a continued focus. Membership was by subscription, and catch clubs attracted a wide social mix, from aristocrats to the working class, although the more staid middle classes were rarely there. As the evening wore on, the songs became more ribald, and vulgar and obscene lyrics were performed to enthusiastic applause.
The sheer vulgarity of catches helped encourage the popularity of glees. Musicians began to shy away from the crude nature of catches, preferring the more musically sophisticated glees. Glees were also more sentimental, and had wider appeal to both men and women. When a glee club was established at the Newcastle Coffee House in 1787, its founders were largely professional members of the existing catch club who were serious about their music and shied away from the bawdiness of taverns. Coffee houses became their favoured meeting places.
Thomas Lowe presented both catch and glee concerts at Ranelagh Gardens in 1765 in an attempt to boost its flagging fortunes. This, at least, was a success, and catch and glee songs – the catch lyrics being suitably sanitised for the mixed audiences – became a staple ingredient of the pleasure gardens’ programme by the end of the eighteenth century. Drury Lane copied Lowe’s initiative, followed by the Haymarket Theatre in 1770. Until well into the nineteenth century, catches and glees featured on the bill of any theatre or pleasure garden that wished to attract a popular crowd.
By the early nineteenth century, glees – with their sentimentality, inoffensive lyrics and more complex music – began to outstrip the popularity of catches, and the two genres went their separate ways. Catches – with their bawdy, single-sex conviviality and association with bibulous revelry – were to find a new home, and a wider audience, in song and supper clubs. As these began to attract the patronage of the well-heeled bohemian man-about-town, the taverns lost their social mix and became more of a working-class preserve. Glees went on to lay the basis for the songs that would delight audiences throughout and well beyond the era of music hall. Catch and glee singing, and their tavern roots, laid the foundations for the informal, accessible, and initially amateur, but later professional-led, sing-songs that were an important staging post to music hall.
* (#ulink_2f862602-d1a3-52ec-b46a-16e635634873) The rewards of hosting the catch club were significant – Almack became extremely wealthy; among his enterprises was a gambling club in Pall Mall which subsequently became Brooks’s Club.

2
The Basement and the Cellars (#u7d2b65db-34ec-5f6b-b39e-e51127a2107f)
‘A guinea a week and supper each night.’
TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT AT THE CYDER CELLARS
Song and supper rooms, true to their name, were late-night venues offering hot food and musical entertainment. Together with their imitators they were the direct predecessors of music hall. The three most famous were Evans’ Late Joy’s in King Street, Covent Garden, the Coal Hole in Fountain Court, The Strand, and the Cyder Cellars in Maiden Lane. All three catered for bohemian and well-heeled London society. But elsewhere, in London and beyond, variety saloons and concert halls attached to taverns offered similar fare and fun at lower cost, while pubs accommodated the working man in ‘free and easies’. Evans’ Late Joy’s was the pioneer: it initiated an interplay between performer and audience that would become an essential component of music hall.
Evans’ was situated on King Street, in the north-west corner of Covent Garden. The splendid red-bricked building, formerly the London residence of the Earl of Orford, was converted into the Grand Hotel in 1773, probably the first family hotel in London. Around the turn of the nineteenth century it became Joy’s Hotel, and as a dinner and coffee room it thrived on the patronage of the noble and the notable. Nine dukes were said to have dined there on one single evening, and the social elite flocked to the huge basement dining room.
But fashions change. Towards 1820 London society began its exodus further west, and the hotel clientèle faded away. The upper rooms were converted into residential apartments, and the basement was taken over by a former singer/comedian at the Covent Garden Theatre, W.C. Evans. Evans, a bluff, ruddy-faced John Bull of a figure, was moving up in the world, and was eager to display his elevation by renaming his new acquisition to reflect his ownership; but as a shrewd businessman, he wished also to exploit the favourable reputation Joy’s had earned. The uneasy compromise of the rather clumsily named Evans’ Late Joy’s was to launch a thousand smutty jokes.
Evans recast the great dining room into a song and supper room for gentlemen. Evans’ Late Joy’s opened at eight o’clock in the evening, began to fill up at ten, and was packed by midnight. It offered excellent but costly fare, which restricted its clientèle to the affluent. Night after night the hall was packed, the long tables hazy with cigar smoke and merry with good fellowship and noisy conversation. Boys from the Savoy Chapel sang unaccompanied glees. Madrigals were also popular, and choral singing and excerpts from opera enlivened many a night. In the jovial atmosphere, diners would offer their own songs or verses.
Soon professional acts were engaged – all male, naturally – to offer higher-quality entertainment. It must have been a tough assignment, for the food, drink and conviviality of the supper rooms were more important than the cabaret. Artistes had to perform over a perpetual din, and needed skill and personality to win over their audience. Some set a bawdy tone, and as the wine flowed and inhibitions fled, customers would join in to perform the rudest song or story in their repertoire. Evans himself would contribute with a song that became his signature: ‘If I Had a £1,000 a Year’, a sentiment that inspired many a bawdy response as the bills were settled.
Early performers at Evans’ included tenor John Binge, the comedians Jack Sharpe and Tom Hudson, Charles Sloman the Jewish singer/comedian, Joe Wells, and John Caulfield, Harry Boleno and Richard Flexmore, who went on to become the principal clowns at Drury Lane and Covent Garden.
Some of these performers did not live to see music hall thrive: Hudson, the son of a civil servant but himself apprenticed to a grocer, was a popular songwriter, mimic and singer who nevertheless died in poverty in 1844. He wrote and published songs about commonplace events of life that were familiar to his audience. One historian noted that, in Hudson, the lower middle class became articulate. His forte was comedy, and a line from one of his songs, about a sailor who returns to find his wife married to another, gave further currency to the enduring phrase ‘before you could say Jack Robinson’. After his death, friends arranged a benefit concert to raise funds for his widow and children, and subscriptions were offered by many notables, including the Lord Mayor, the Duke of Cambridge and Members of Parliament, as well as his fellow performers. It was a touching tribute to an engaging talent.
Charles Sloman was fiercely proud of the history of his race, which he commemorated in words and music. His career began in the pleasure gardens, but he soon graduated to the supper clubs. Sloman wrote many ballads – his most famous, ‘The Maid of Judah’, at the age of twenty-two – but his true gift was to ‘keep the table in a roar’ by conjuring a rhyme in song upon any subject shouted out to him by a well-refreshed diner. Often he mimicked the idiosyncrasies of diners or sang verses that teased or complimented them, much to the amusement of their companions. Throughout the 1830s Sloman was furiously busy as an entertainer, briefly (and unsuccessfully) as a theatre manager, and as chairman of festivities in taverns. After the 1840s his attraction declined and he was engaged in ever more downmarket venues. He died alone in the Strand workhouse in 1870.
Not everyone was a casualty of fleeting fame. Sam Collins was a firm favourite at Evans’ in the late period, put his money to good use, and at the age of thirty was part-owner of the Rose of Normandy Concert Room in Church Street, Marylebone. Later he bought the Lansdowne tavern and developed his own music hall – Collins’ Music Hall – before a premature death in his late thirties.
Others, less talented than Hudson, Sloman or Collins, were also successful in providing for themselves. After finishing his act – yodelling, imitations of birdsong and presenting his walking stick as a bassoon, flute, piccolo, trombone or violin, complete with sound effects – Herr von Joel, that refugee from Vauxhall Gardens, mingled among the audience selling cigars and tickets for his benefit concert. The cigars were poor value and the benefit a fiction, but no one cared. Cunning old von Joel was such an institution that – in an age in which fraud remained a capital crime – no one begrudged being swindled out of a few pennies.
Evans’ became more raucous as a song and supper room after 1844, when Evans retired and his successor, John Greenmore, known as Paddy Green, built up its reputation. Green had been the musical director during Evans’ reign, and like his old employer he was a former singer at Covent Garden Opera House. In the early 1850s he reconstructed the hall, and spent lavish sums on enlarging the dining room. He decorated the new ceiling, lit the room with sunlight burners and adorned the walls with portraits of theatrical personalities. A platform was erected to serve as a stage for the performers, and the old supper room was downgraded to a café lounge. The improved quality of the service, supplemented by fine food and drink, encouraged the air of masculine bonhomie. Teams of waiters and boys in buttoned waistcoats were on hand to take orders. Chops, kidneys and poached eggs were typical of the fare on offer, washed down with gin, whisky, hot brandy and water or stout. Bills – with the exception of cigars, which were paid for on demand – were settled on departure, with customers declaring what they’d consumed and a waiter called Skinner, known as ‘the calculating waiter’, totting up what was owed. This may have been a haphazard system, but it was an astute piece of marketing by Green. By not challenging what diners claimed had been consumed, he made it unseemly for them to question the waiter’s calculation. No doubt any errors of underdeclaration and overcharging balanced themselves out.
In the swirling smoke of cigars, and amid the clink of glasses and the clatter of cutlery, Paddy Green circulated with a kindly word for the literary, sporting, commercial, political and noble diners who assembled nightly at Joy’s. Posterity has been left a picture of a jovial, grey-haired elderly man moving through the room and beaming at his ‘dear boys’, his invariable greeting to clients, many of whose names he probably could not remember, while taking snuff and exuding an air of familiarity to all.
Green’s jolly nature did not, however, always extend to the most famous of his performers, Sam Cowell. Although tolerated by his admiring audience, Cowell’s habitual lateness exasperated Green. In his performances Cowell brought all his talents to bear: a gift for character, mimicry and visual expressiveness, and a strong, clear voice that enabled him to imbue narrative ballads with drama, comedy or pathos. His songs, often of thwarted love, became enormously popular. ‘Villikins’ and ‘The Ratcatcher’s Daughter’, performed in character with battered hat, seedy frock-coat and huge bow cravat, were demanded by audiences at every appearance. ‘The Ratcatcher’s Daughter’ tells the tale of two working-class sweethearts preparing to marry, although the would-be bride fears she will die before her wedding. And so she does, drowning in the Thames. Her broken-hearted lover then kills himself. We cannot be certain exactly how Sam Cowell presented this song, but its theme of love and tragedy touched the sentimental soul of Victorian London, and it’s easy to see why:
In Vestminster, not long ago,
There liv’d a ratcatcher’s daughter.
That is not quite in Vestminster,
’Cos she liv’d t’other side of the vater.
Her father killed rats and she cried Sprats
All around about that quarter.
The young gentlemen all touched their hats
To the purty little ratcatcher’s daughter.
Such a song could not fail. Though it (just) preceded the birth of the halls themselves, it is one of the first great music hall songs. Cowell sang it in a faux-cockney accent with, Sam Weller style, an inability to pronounce his W’s. It was a model for the rich vein of cockney humour that would follow.
Despite Cowell’s spectacular success, Paddy Green became so frustrated by his erratic timekeeping that he sacked his star performer for persistent lateness. Cowell never appeared at Evans’ again, but found ample employment elsewhere, most famously in the first purpose-built music hall, the Canterbury in Westminster Bridge Road, Lambeth.
Even without Cowell, Evans’ prospered. The principal comedian, Jackie Sharp, a specialist in unscripted, mildly risqué repartee, was at the top of his craft. Sharp’s act featured topical songs that satirised the government. The most well-known, ‘Who’ll Buy My Images?’ and ‘Pity Poor Punch and Judy’, were written by his friend and fellow performer John Labern, one of the foremost comic songwriters of the time. Sharp sang also of the evils of ‘the bottle’ at a time when overindulgence was a national pastime. Sadly, he himself did not heed the lyrics, and like so many others, he frittered away his fortune on alcohol and tobacco. At first drunkenness made him unreliable, and then unemployable. It was not long before a combination of exposure and malnutrition carried him off. He died in Dover Workhouse in 1856, at only thirty-eight years of age.
Cowell and Sharp were star attractions at Joy’s, but they were not alone: on any evening, another fifteen to twenty acts – the small, sweet-voiced tenor John Binge, known as ‘The Singing Mouse’; the big-voiced bass S.A. Jones; the ballad singer Joseph Plumpton – would be there to support them. Most performers were poorly paid, and would try to maximise their income by appearing at more than one venue on the same evening.
Sometime in the 1820s, William Rhodes, yet another former singer from the Covent Garden Theatre, acquired Evans’ principal rivals, the Coal Hole and the Cyder Cellars – the latter of which had hosted entertainment as early as the 1690s. Maiden Lane, where the Cyder Cellars was situated, had a famous pedigree. Voltaire and Henry Fielding had lived there, the great artist J.M.W. Turner was born there (to a wig-maker and his unstable wife), and Nell Gwynne was a resident towards the end of her life. Although the Cyder Cellars often employed the same artists as Evans’, it was far less reputable. It reached the peak of its notoriety around 1840, before Paddy Green took over Evans’, and remained a formidable competitor until its licence was revoked twenty-two years later.
The Cellars offered top-class food and wine, and throughout the 1840s and ’50s its stars were familiar names: Charles Sloman, Tom Hudson, John Moody and Tom Penniket were among those who appeared there regularly. The entertainment was predominantly vocal, although variety was offered by conjurers and jugglers. Among the singers was one whom the more fastidious Evans’ would never employ: W.G. Ross, a former compositor on a Glasgow newspaper.
Ross was a character actor-singer of enormous power. Born in Scotland, he enjoyed success in the north of England before heading south, where he found fame at the Cyder Cellars. He sang many songs – ‘Going Home with the Milk in the Morning’ being a representative example – but his fame rested on a dramatic ballad depicting the tragic fate of a chimney sweep: ‘Sam Hall’. With this song, first sung in 1849, Ross attracted all London, and the Cyder Cellars overflowed nightly, with latecomers turned away. The most boisterous house hushed and the drinking ceased when it was announced that Ross would sing ‘Sam Hall’.
Many were shocked – and even repelled – by the song, but far more were fascinated. The merciless lyrics of ‘Sam Hall’ explore the turmoil and emotion of a man, convicted of a capital crime, about to die an early and unnatural death while thousands look on – thousands who will then return home to their suppers, their futures, their families, while he will be dead. Hall’s emotions turn from frustration to bravado to terror, and finally to hatred of those about to kill him. There is fear in the song, but no plea of innocence and no repentance. Sam Hall does not seek sympathy or express regret, he simply spits out his pent-up anger and rage.
It must have been a striking sight. A bearded Ross, in the character of Sam Hall, sitting astride a wooden chair in a cell, bearded, dressed in filthy, torn clothes and a battered hat. At first he would sit silently, his eyes darting in every direction like a terrified animal in a trap. He would then, slowly, light a grubby pipe, on which he would suck as the tension mounted. The silence was broken when he began to sing:
I goes up Holborn Hill in a cart,
In a cart,
I goes up Holborn Hill in a cart,
At St. Giles takes my gill,
And at Tyburn makes my will,
D—n my eyes.
Then the sheriff he will come,
He will come,
Then the sheriff he will come,
And he’ll look so gallows glum,
And he’ll talk of kingdom come,
Bl-st his eyes.
Then the hangman will come too,
Will come too,
Then the hangman will come too.
With all his bl—y crew,
And he’ll tell me what to do
Bl—t his eyes.
In the repetition of the opening lines one can feel the horror that returns unbidden to the mind of the condemned man. As he curses his tormentors, he turns to spit on the cell floor. Ross’s performance was a savage rendition of a bleak song, and its emotional impact made it one of the most dramatic acts ever seen on the variety stage. Its power was such that when Ross finished singing the room would empty, and for ten years it would be a cult song. Ross entered show-business history with his performances at the Cyder Cellars, but he did not gain – or at least keep – wealth or position. He drifted and declined until he hovered – barely recognised – on the edge of the profession. He died in obscurity in the early 1880s.
The Cyder Cellars was in close proximity to the Coal Hole, where William Rhodes had appointed his brother John, a sometime poet, as manager. John Rhodes was a big man, with a fine presence, and under his guidance the Coal Hole flourished. A raconteur with an outgoing personality, he sat at the head of the singers’ table, conducted the evening’s frivolities, joined in the glees and sang solos in an excellent baritone voice. Apart from being the ideal concert chairman, he had a passion for silver plate, and boasted of his collection of silver tankards, goblets, flagons and loving cups that ‘the like could [not] be seen elsewhere in London’. Despite these pretensions, the Coal Hole became notorious for drunken rowdiness. Among the celebrities it attracted on a nightly basis was the actor Edmund Kean, a frequent patron and serial carouser.
In many ways, the Coal Hole was a mirror image of the Cyder Cellars. In addition to engaging the same performers, the tone was similarly low-brow. Joe Wells, a ‘dreadful old creature’, sang ‘very coarse and vulgar’ songs with great gusto; Charles Sloman improvised more spicily than elsewhere. A young singer, Joe Cave, introduced the banjo as accompaniment to ‘Ethiopian’ (Negro) songs in addition to his traditional fare of ballads and opera excerpts. Static near-nudes made their debut in the delphically entitled ‘poses plastiques’. And from the early 1850s the self-styled ‘Baron’ Renton Nicholson presented his infamous ‘Judge and Jury’ trials. Oddly, women were admitted for the poses, which were presented, rather unconvincingly, as classical art – but not the ‘trials’.
Nicholson, ‘a clever, versatile, wholly unprincipled fellow’, had a chequered career. He had owned a scurrilous gossip journal, the Town, before purchasing the Garrick’s Head tavern, where he instituted the ‘Judge and Jury Society’ which later translated to the Coal Hole. The entertainment was comprised of sketches, written by Nicholson, and usually parodying contemporary events. Nicholson, in full wig and gown as the Lord Chief Justice, heard cases argued by a ‘barrister’ and ‘witnesses’. The mock trials were witty, laced with innuendo, often vulgar and irresistible to those who recognised the victims.
At the height of the supper clubs’ fame in the 1840s, the entertainment at venues like the Coal Hole may have been bawdy, even filthy, but few were offended – and certainly not the writers, journalists and intellectuals who were their habitués. If offence was taken by sensitive members of the audience, their ire could swiftly be soothed by devilled kidneys, oysters, Welsh rarebit, cigars, brandy, stout and cider, all of the highest quality.
The Coal Hole attracted a wide cross-section of society. William Makepeace Thackeray, who had a lifelong passion for the theatre, was a frequent attendee, and offers his own recollections of the Coal Hole and the Cyder Cellars. In The Newcomes, John Rhodes, manager of the Coal Hole, is depicted as Hoskins, landlord of the ‘Cave of Harmony’, with, as an added clue, Charles Sloman as ‘little Nabob, the Improvisatore’. In Pendennis, Thackeray describes a bass singer named Hodgen who enjoyed success with a song entitled ‘The Body Snatcher’ – it is clearly W.G. Ross and ‘Sam Hall’ that is being depicted. Thackeray’s description of the ‘Back Kitchen’ where Hodgen performs may be taken as a reflection of the clientèle of the supper clubs: ‘Healthy county tradesmen and farmers … apprentices and assistants … rakish young medical students … young university bucks … handsome young guardsmen … florid bucks from the St. James Clubs … senators, English and Irish … even Members of the House of Peers’.
The song and supper clubs overlapped with the birth of purpose-built music halls which eventually forced them out of business. When William Rhodes died, his widow took over the Cyder Cellars, but it soon declined under her management. At the Coal Hole, John Rhodes was succeeded by his son, who ran it until his death in 1850, after which his widow, and later John Bruton, attempted to revive it, but its day was done. As audiences fell, the content became more lewd, and the authorities pounced: both the Cyder Cellars and the Coal Hole had their licences revoked in 1862.
Evans’ Late Joy’s lingered on, and Paddy Green was host to the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, on a number of occasions – the first public nod to the supper clubs from a member of the Royal Family. One attraction for the Prince appeared to be a singer, Victor Liston, and his popular song ‘Shabby Genteel’, which highlighted a very British trait that still exists:
Too proud to beg, too honest to steal,
I know what it means to be wanting a meal,
My tatters and rage I try to conceal,
I’m one of the shabby genteel.
From the early 1860s, ladies were permitted to enter Evans’ and listen to the entertainment from specially-constructed boxes in the gallery, provided they had a male escort, gave their name and address (as a disincentive to undesirables) and remained hidden behind a screen; notwithstanding these impertinences, many women did attend. Mrs Louisa Caulfield was the first woman to sing there, around 1860, and included ‘Keemo Kino’, a minstrel song, in her repertoire. At that time such songs were enormously in vogue, but were not universally popular. The poet and lawyer Arthur Munby’s diary records supping at Evans’ in March 1860 amid ‘a hubbub of nigger howlings’. Later, Paddy Green – or his successor Mrs Barnes, it is not clear which – went even further than offering female singers, by admitting women to the floor of Evans’. As dancing was introduced, Evans’ became a market for vice and a meeting place for seedy London. In 1872 the law changed and Evans’ needed a licence to offer entertainment after 12.30 a.m. – which it did not obtain. This marked the end of the song and supper rooms.

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