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
