Читать книгу My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall - John Major, John Major - Страница 10

‘I have seen the future, and it works.’

LINCOLN STEFFENS, JOURNALIST (1866–1936)

The opening of the new Canterbury was the moment when music hall put down firm commercial roots, even though its golden age lay over a quarter of a century ahead. In the early 1850s the greatest names of music hall were either children or not yet born. The road from the Canterbury to the popular memories they would engender, and to the great empires of Moss, Stoll and Thornton, was long and thorny, but at the end of it lay stars still fondly remembered, and songs that have endured.

Music hall was a new industry that needed a support structure. New theatres were built in every part of the country, requiring architects, builders and designers. Singers, musicians and songwriters were needed for these theatres. Lawyers were employed to advise on the awkward legal division between legitimate theatre and music hall. Disputes over matinées and Sunday performances had to be settled. Health and safety regulations had to be met.

Taverns, concert halls and song and supper clubs were converted into music halls, and Charles Morton soon had rivals. The most formidable was Edward Weston, owner of the quaintly named Six Cans and Punch Bowl tavern in Holborn, who purchased two adjacent properties and in November 1857 opened the purpose-built Weston’s Music Hall on the site. It was launched amid huge publicity, with an elegant dinner for three hundred guests and a little theatrical larceny: Weston engaged the former chairman of the Canterbury, John Caulfield, as his musical director, and Sam Collins as his star attraction. Contemporary advertisements suggest the setting was sumptuous, with high-quality fixtures, fittings, food and drink, all for an entrance fee of sixpence. It was a none-too-subtle declaration of war, and Morton was swift to respond.

Being at Holborn, Weston’s was on the threshold of the West End, where music hall had not yet penetrated. The challenge was irresistible for Morton. In partnership with his brother-in-law Frederick Stanley he bought a seventeenth-century inn, the Boar and Castle, on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. Despite a legal challenge from Weston, whose music hall was only a few hundred yards away, Morton built the Oxford Music Hall on the site, and opened it in March 1861. Constructed in the Italian style and reputedly costing £35,000, it was the most glamorous music hall yet, described by the early music hall historians Charles Stuart and A.J. Park as ‘a point of architectural beauty’. One of the chief features was the lighting, with twenty-eight brilliant ‘crystal’ stars. Its huge capital cost notwithstanding, the Oxford was a highly commercial proposition, with a restaurant area in the auditorium offering sufficient space for 1,800 customers to eat and drink in relays until 1 a.m., served by attractive barmaids. This was typical Morton: the best artistes packaged in an environment with fringe attractions.

At the Canterbury, the additional lure had been an art gallery and library; at the Oxford it was attractive barmaids and bars decorated with flowers. The Oxford also offered Morton an important revenue saving: from the outset he employed the same stars to sing opera selections for both the working-class audience at the Canterbury and the more cosmopolitan customers at the Oxford, transporting them between the two venues in broughams. As at any one time they might include a tenor (Mr St Aubyn), a bass (Mr Green), a soprano (Miss Russell), a contralto (Miss Walmisley) and a mezzo (Miss Fitzhenry), it is evident that a great deal of serious music was juxtaposed with more familiar music hall fare. John Caulfield was recaptured from Weston’s as resident chairman, and his son Johnny was one of the pianists. Miss Fitzhenry enjoyed early success singing ‘Up the Alma Heights’, which delighted every soldier in London, and ‘Launch the Lifeboat’, which enchanted the naval men. With other performers including George Leybourne, Tom Maclagan, Nelly Power and ‘Jolly’ John Nash, all tastes were met.

One of Morton’s innovations at the Oxford was foiled by the magistrates. When he tried to stage matinée performances on Saturdays, he was warned that his licence permitted him to open only after 6 p.m. He had to drop the idea, only to see it become common practice a few years later.

Although the Canterbury, Weston’s and above all the Oxford remained pre-eminent, competition was growing as music halls of every size were opening all around them. In 1860 the South London Palace, designed internally to resemble a Roman villa, opened at the Elephant and Castle, with the black-faced E.W. (‘the Great’) Mackney topping the bill. Harry Hart’s Lord Raglan at Bloomsbury also made its debut, followed swiftly by John Deacon’s Music Hall at Islington, with Fred Williams as chairman.

The former chimney sweep Sam Collins, one of the early stars at the Canterbury and the top of the bill at Weston’s, opened establishments of his own: the Rose of Normandy public house in Edgware Road, alongside which he built the Marylebone Music Hall. At the beginning of his musical career Sam had earned a few shillings a night as a pub singer; in 1863, at the age of thirty-five, he became the respected and much-loved owner of the newly built Collins’ Music Hall in Islington, known colloquially as ‘the Chapel on the Green’. Sadly, Sam was able to revel in his new status 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.

This style of hall can still be seen today in Wilton’s, built in 1859 by John Wilton across the back gardens of five terrace houses situated behind the Prince of Denmark public house in Whitechapel. It was very similar in structure to the Canterbury, and although it is now in disrepair it is the only surviving music hall built between 1850 and 1870. It remained a music hall only until 1879, when it was transformed into 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.

It is reasonable to speculate that the fire at the Oxford was caused by an unextinguished cigar. Smoking was commonplace during performances, and with fumes from gas lighting,† wooden construction and a large number of people in a confined and poorly ventilated space, it made a combustible mix.

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, became fashionable. They were made so by Frank Matcham.

In the vast explosion of theatre-building after 1850, Matcham was the leading figure. He was not the first Victorian architect to specialise in designing theatres: that distinction goes to C. J. Phipps, who built the Garrick and Her Majesty’s in London, as well as regional theatres including the ill-fated Theatre Royal, Exeter. But Matcham become the pre-eminent architect of music halls, and was responsible for the design of more than two hundred theatres. His first success was the Elephant and Castle Theatre in south London, which introduced elephant motifs and the Moorish and Indian styles that went on to characterise so many Victorian and Edwardian buildings. His designs were in huge demand. In 1888 alone he was working on the Alhambra, Brighton; the Mile End Empire and the Grand Theatre, Islington, in London; a major remodelling of the Grand Theatre, Douglas, Isle of Man; and preparatory work on theatres in Blackpool, Bury, Halifax and St Helens. It was exhausting, but Matcham was changing the face of theatre. The Matcham style spread even more swiftly once he began to build for the syndicate-owners Oswald Stoll and Edward Moss in around 1890.

Matcham introduced many innovations: more and better exits to reduce fire risk, push-bar bolt exit locks, and the use of steel to support balconies, which brought to an end the need for pillars that obstructed sightlines. His style had important aesthetic benefits, with curved tiers that seemed to float on air and were visually very attractive. He increased the number of seats, much to the delight of the owners. Matcham’s greatest attribute was his ability to create a different ambience for each theatre. He used a dazzling array of styles, both interior and exterior, drawn from all manner of historical and cultural sources. He was able to create theatres of such elegance and style that even the largest auditorium felt intimate. Sadly, many of his palaces have fallen victim to German bombs and soulless planners. Unenlightened eyes saw his theatres as gaudy, kitsch and deserving of demolition; others, sometimes too late, regarded his designs as temples of pleasure as worthy of preservation as a Roman bath complex. Matcham worked consistently until 1920, leaving a legacy of theatres including the Coliseum, the London Palladium, the Victoria Palace and the Grand Theatre, Blackpool.

Just as architecture and design were changing, so too were music hall performances. Between 1870 and 1890 the chairman disappeared. He had become an anachronism who slowed down the show. Scenery was introduced. Glees were dropped from the programmes and the number of opera selections fell away. Novelty acts, comedians and comic-ballad singers became ever more popular. To increase capacity, rows of theatre seats replaced tables for eating and drinking. As refreshment moved from the auditorium to the bars, the audience became static and quieter. Waiters and cigar-sellers disappeared. Seats were raked to improve sightlines. The house lights were lowered to increase the focus on the performers.

These organic changes, which were commercially motivated, focused attention upon the stage and the performers. The audience might not have been aware of it, but music hall was entering a ‘golden age’, when a new breed of artistes with extraordinary talents would explode into people’s hearts and minds.

* It was subsequently cared for by the London Music Hall Society, and later by Broomhill Opera and the Wilton’s Music Hall Trust. It was reopened as a performance space in 1997, but not for music hall, although in 2009 Dame Norma Major staged a charity performance for Mencap featuring Elizabeth Mansfield as Marie Lloyd.

† Astley’s Equestrian Amphitheatre was reputedly illuminated by 200,000 gas jets.