free drinks, at a time when alcohol was a large part of a working man’s expenditure. The price of renting a room for a single man was no more than two shillings a month, and food would cost a further seven shillings or so. With total earnings of around £3 a week, Rice had significant disposable income.
He worked hard, and was in demand. In 1840 he sang at the King’s Arms in Holborn on Mondays and Saturdays, at the Hope in Drury Lane on Tuesdays, at the Adam and Eve in St Pancras Road on Wednesdays, and the Horse and Dolphin, Macclesfield Road, on Thursdays and Fridays. It was a gruelling itinerary, and explains his lack of application in his job at the museum: he rarely returned home before midnight – later if he dropped in to the pie shop for a late supper, as he often did. He must have been exhausted, and probably hungover, for much of the time.
In his diaries, Rice passes judgement on his fellow performers. He writes of their songs, giving us a clear idea of the range on offer and what was popular. Amidst many anonymous names, more famous figures also appear, although not always to perform: Ross, Cowell, Sloman and other leading performers were no doubt searching for material in the free and easies, while the extraordinary Herr von Joel might have been surprised to find pub performers offering impersonations of him. Rice writes also of dancers, catch and glee singers, and ‘Grecian statues’ without disclosing whether or not the latter were clothed: it is likely they wore skin-tight costumes, but in view of the high necks and long skirts of the early Victorian era, figure-hugging clothing would have been quite sufficient to attract an audience.
Rice had a repertoire of around forty songs. Each evening he would sing a selection of six to nine of them, including encores. Some were adaptations of poems or narratives which he had arranged as songs for his own use. These included Ingoldsby Legends, ‘The Jackdaw of Rheims’, Jack Sheppard and parts of The Pickwick Papers, all of which suggests that he had talent far beyond what might be assumed by his intellectually undemanding work at the British Museum.
When it came to what his audience wanted, Rice had a fine judgement, and amended the lyrics of any song that might offend. The popular street song ‘Billy Taylor’ had many versions, some extremely rude. It tells the tale of Billy’s sweetheart disguising herself as a man and joining the navy after Billy has been impressed into service. Rice chose to clean up the tale of how her gender was discovered. Similarly, he adapted W.T. Moncrieff’s satirical ‘Analisation’ to focus on maids, young men and young wives in sentimental terms – quite different from the original.
In 1842, Rice married and moved to the emerging gentility of Somers Town, north of Euston Road, at the much higher rent of £1 a week. For eight years his diary falls silent. When it resumes, in 1850, his star seems to have waned, and he is engaged at less salubrious taverns, such as the Catherine Wheel, Whitechapel, which was better known as a haunt for prostitutes than a home for wholesome entertainment.
As purpose-built saloons, more suitable for mixed company, grew in number, the audiences at the free and easies waned. Rice did appear at larger proto-music halls such as the Yorkshire Stingo in Paddington and the Mogul Saloon in Drury Lane, but only occasionally, and well down the bill. His diary becomes increasingly bitter as he bemoans miserly landlords, incompetent pianists and inattentive audiences. Life was not going well for him: he tried to lose his dog by leaving her in unfamiliar surroundings, but the loyal animal kept returning to him. Eventually he gave her away to his greengrocer. In March 1850 Jemmy Vincent, his friend and pianist, committed suicide by shooting himself. But however tough life must have been for Rice, he could not afford to let his audience down: the evening after Vincent’s suicide he was back onstage, singing at the disreputable Catherine Wheel.
In May 1850 Rice started a ‘singers’ republic’ at his old haunt the Grapes, in Southwark, which operated on the new business model of customers paying for entrance, with ‘free’ drink as part of the package. He shared the gate money with his fellow performers in lieu of a flat wage, and at first the enterprise was a success, with around eighty paying customers a night. But it didn’t last, and the enterprise was shelved after a mere forty-one customers turned up one late-October evening. Rice’s diary ends on the last day of 1850, when he thanks the Almighty for carrying him through undisclosed ‘difficulties’ and adds the plaintive plea that ‘things may be looking up by this time in 1851’. So far as we know, they never did.
The heyday of the free and easies ended when music hall proper began to mushroom. Even so, many continued to thrive: the King’s Head, Knightsbridge; the King and Queen, Paddington Green; the Swan, Hungerford Market; the Salmon and Compass, Pentonville; the Salmon and the New Inn, both in Borough. But they were swimming against the tide. In the hierarchy of entertainment the downmarket free and easies were near the bottom, outclassing only the lowest of the low – the penny gaffs.
It is likely that the penny gaffs were given their name by the costermongers who formed a large portion of their audience. The name was not haphazard: the price of entry was a penny, and while ‘gaff’ has many meanings, one being a cockney term for ‘place’, another is a slang term for a cockfighting pit, which in its crudeness and brutality is an apt description of the barbarous behaviour that was typical of a penny gaff.
Costermongers play a significant role in the story of music hall. Colourful, definitively working-class and instantly recognisable in their short jackets, neckerchiefs, bell-bottomed trousers and peaked caps, they were a large, close-knit community of street traders who became one of music hall’s most enduring stage personas. Entrepreneurial, resilient and streetwise, they earned their living selling fruit and vegetables, fish and shellfish in the formal and informal markets from which most working-class Londoners obtained their food. Their very name was a nod to the ‘costard’ variety of apples. Many walked the streets, selling their wares from barrows or rickety carts, earning perhaps no more than a few shillings a week.
In the 1840s it was estimated that there were about 40,000 costers in London. The social investigator Henry Mayhew gives a vivid account of a Saturday-evening market in November. The brightness was the first thing he noticed: naphtha flares, candles, gas jets, grease lamps, the fires of the chestnut-roasters. Then the noise – hundreds of traders at hundreds of stalls calling out their wares: ‘Chestnuts, a penny a score,’ ‘Three a penny, Yarmouth bloaters,’ ‘Beautiful whelks a penny a lot,’ ‘Penny a lot, fine russets,’ ‘Ho! Ho! Hi-i-i. Here’s your turnips.’ Everything cheap and of use to the poor was there: saucepans, crockery, old shoes, trays, handkerchiefs, umbrellas, shirts. ‘Go to whatever corner of the Metropolis you please,’ Mayhew noted, ‘and there is the same struggling to get a penny profit out of the poor man’s Sunday dinner.’
It is not hard to see why costers became such powerful stereotypes. They lived their lives on the streets, and were transparently masculine in their habits. Beer shops were their natural haunts: Mayhew claimed that nearly four hundred of them catered directly for costers. Gambling was endemic, and they frequently bet their stock money against a tray of pies as they waited for the wholesale markets to open. They boxed for beer and placed side bets. Bouts were short, since the winner was the first man to draw blood. Although illegal, dog fights in beer shops were also common. Ratting was popular, as was pigeon-keeping. Many of these activities found their way into the music halls and their portrayal of the coster idiom.
Dances – tup’nny hops – were also popular, particularly with women. These too were held in the beer shops, organised exclusively for costers. Music was provided by a fiddle, a harp and a cornopean – a kind of hooped trumpet, not unlike a French horn. They danced hornpipes, jigs, polkas and a kind of sword dance with tobacco pipes (presumably churchwardens) in place of swords. These dances acted as a kind of coster marriage bureau, where couples as young as fourteen could meet and decide to set up house together, sometimes on the same evening.
Marriage was rare; 90 per cent of costers cohabited. Men were free to do what they pleased, but women were expected to be faithful, and could be beaten up for even talking to the wrong man – or, it seems, for almost anything. Many women regretted the
