The appellation stuck. Morton’s record was remarkable, and he has an honoured role among the founders of music hall.
5
‘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
