men. ‘They’ll never go to heaven,’ she told Mayhew. ‘The lads is very insinivating, and after leaving them places [penny gaffs] will give a gal a drop of beer, and make her half tipsy, and then they makes their arrangements. I’ve often heerd the boys boasting of having ruined gals, for all the world as if they was the first noblemen in the land.’ The girls’ precarious existence at the hands of their male counterparts would be the inspiration for many a lovelorn ‘coster girl’ song.
In the process of looking at the costers and their way of life, both Henry Mayhew and his fellow social commentator J. Ewing Ritchie give us very reliable and detailed accounts of what a penny gaff would have been like. Mayhew attended one near Smithfield which he had heard was one of the least offensive. He was genuinely shocked by what he saw, even though he was more familiar than most outsiders with London’s underclass. Penny gaffs were not theatres or saloons, or even rooms in pubs, but simply shops, and usually tatty ones, that had been turned into seedy temporary theatres. Despite the shortage of space, hundreds of paying customers might be crammed into every performance, of which there could be several during a single day and evening. The audience, Mayhew reported, were ‘with few exceptions’ young people aged between eight and twenty. The front of the shop had been removed, and replaced by paintings of the performers. A band played coster tunes as the audience paid their pennies to enter under the watchful eye of a policeman detailed to keep order.
The performance lasted barely an hour. A ‘comic singer’ sang a filthy song that had the boys ‘stamping their feet with delight’ and the girls ‘screaming with enjoyment’. Another song ‘coolly described the most obscene thoughts, the most disgusting scenes’, causing a child nearby to ‘wipe away the tears that rolled down her eyes with the enjoyment of the poison’. Each crude ditty was succeeded by another, every one being rapturously applauded and encored. The boys stamped, hollered, whistled, cat-called and sang. The dancing was no better. In a ballet featuring a man dressed as a woman, and a clown, ‘the most disgusting attitudes were struck, the most immoral acts represented … here were two ruffians degrading themselves each time they stirred a limb’. The audience upset Mayhew as much as the performance. They had ‘an overpowering stench’; some ‘danced grotesquely to the admiration of lookers-on, who expressed their approbation in obscene terms’; the girls acknowledged such comments ‘with smiles and coarse repartee’.
J. Ewing Ritchie visited two penny gaffs in Shoreditch, an area rich in theatrical history. In Elizabethan times the Curtain Theatre had stood there, and public houses had staged comedies, tragedies and histories. Close by was the Britannia saloon, which still offered daily shows and would soon be converted to a full-scale music hall. In the midst of this long commitment to quality entertainment stood the penny gaff. Since the birth of the Curtain nearly three hundred years earlier, the area had changed. It was no longer open land with a view of working windmills, but crammed with squalid dwellings, public houses, pie shops, clothes marts, shoe depots and street markets. Its crowded streets provided a ready audience, but one which was able to afford only a penny for a show.
Ritchie describes a mediocre evening of low wit and poor dancing before a grubby juvenile audience, chiefly boys, but with a sprinkling of the girls with babies in their arms who were so often present at such shows. The highlight was a pastiche of The Taming of the Shrew in which the henpecked husband turns on the shrew and threatens her with a cudgel as she lies cowering at his feet. This excited roars of approval from the young audience. Ritchie loathed it, believing that similar scenes would be re-enacted later in many Shoreditch homes.
The penny gaffs did not die when music hall swept into fashion. As late as 1881, dirty and dark houses were still being used as makeshift theatres. The entertainment was still tawdry, although perhaps not as brutal or degrading as forty years earlier. The penny gaffs had little to commend them, and much that was reprehensible – but they were part of the making of music hall.
By the 1840s, the ingredients for the emergence of music hall were all present. The public had a taste for community entertainment. Catch and glee clubs had popularised participatory enjoyment. Saloon theatre had offered refined singing and dancing. Song and supper clubs and taverns had familiarised audiences with risqué evenings conducted by a chairman. Food and drink had become a key component of the entertainment experience. Nevertheless, a further impetus was needed. It would soon come, and from an unexpected source.
4
‘Only one quality – the best.’
CHARLES MORTON’S MOTTO
Music hall was shaped by the changing social environment, but time and the right set of circumstances were required for it to flourish.
By 1820, one quarter of the world’s population was governed from London, and Britain was evolving from a rural to an urban society. Populations in towns and cities doubled and redoubled. The search for jobs drove teeming throngs of villagers to the towns, where cheap back-to-back hovels were thrown up to house them. But there were improvements: working hours fell, and wages rose.
The choice of amusements was widening. Madame Tussaud’s waxworks opened in 1835. Hampton Court and Kew Gardens were welcoming visitors. The Henley Regatta and the Grand National were both held for the first time in 1839. Football was growing in popularity. Cricket was becoming a national institution as young William Gilbert Grace learned to bat and bowl in his Gloucestershire orchard. It was a new world that set the stage for music hall. One elusive element remained to be put in place, and Parliament was soon to enact it, albeit in muddled form. It would prove to be a catalyst for music hall.
The law and the theatre had been at loggerheads for centuries, and by 1840 the situation had become absurd. The Lord Chamberlain regulated legitimate theatre, but local magistrates were responsible for music and dancing licences. The scope for inconsistency was very wide. The patent monopoly, under which Charles II had granted Drury Lane and Covent Garden the sole right to perform drama, now included the Haymarket, which George III had added to the magic circle. To everyone other than the beneficiaries of the monopoly, this was absurd, and the law was regularly flouted. This led to ludicrous litigation, and the threat of actors being arrested for the heinous crime of performing Shakespeare. Parliament sought to impose order on this chaos, and in 1843 the Theatre Regulations Act abolished the monopoly of the patent theatres. Thereafter, anyone could stage drama if they first obtained the approval of the Lord Chamberlain.
So far, so good. But the Lord Chamberlain’s licence gave permission only to perform drama, not to serve the audience with food and drink, or to allow smoking. The alternative of a magistrate’s licence permitted eating, drinking and smoking, but did not permit the licensee to stage drama. It is clear from reading the (very limited) debates on the Bill that the legislators did not understand custom and practice in the theatres, and gave no consideration to the great diversity of performances beyond legitimate drama. The legislation succeeded only in creating confusion.
The Act was a hotchpotch. It failed to address the provision of food and drink, and left old habits and customs in place. Even the officials responsible for the law were bewildered. When the Lord Chamberlain’s representative was asked to clarify it to a Parliamentary Select Committee more than twenty years later, in 1866, he told them that ‘spirits and refreshments are not to be sold within the audience part of the theatre’, but added, ‘excepting the people who walk up and down the pit with baskets’. They were, of course, selling food and drink.
Some impresarios ignored the law. Sam Lane, who ran the Britannia on a Lord Chamberlain’s licence, sold food and drink, and allowed smoking, but was never censured. It may be that the authorities were content to leave the great unwashed of the East End alone, for if the West End theatres flouted the same rules, they were closed.
The
