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.
6
‘The main thing is catchiness. I will sacrifice everything – rhyme, reason, sense, sentiment, to catchiness. There is … a great art in making rubbish acceptable.’
FELIX MCGLENNON, LYRICIST AND SONGWRITER, THE ERA, 10 MARCH 1894
Music hall was, first and last, an intimate medium, in which performers and audience were locked in an enduring embrace. Today we can only glimpse this symbiotic relationship through grainy black-and-white photographs and tinny gramophone records in which the singers, mostly past their prime at the time of recording, struggle to perform in the absence of the factor that made them great – the audience.
That bond between artiste and audience – the secret heart of music hall – was so profound that many artistes were not allowed to leave the stage until they had sung their ‘signature’ songs. Their public would join in, and would then whistle them all the way home. Refrains such as:
A sweet tuxedo girl you see
A queen of swell society
or
Oh! I’m in such a mess – I don’t know the new address –
Don’t even know the blessed neighbourhood
or
Observed by each observer with the keenness of a hawk,
I’m a mass of money, linen, silk and starch
are largely forgotten now, but a Victorian music hall audience would await each with the greatest anticipation. Popular songs entered the national canon, and even today we know their choruses: ‘Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay’, ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’, ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’.
From the early days of music hall the songs, and the artistes who performed them, were the backbone of every bill. When appearing at Evans’ or the Cyder Cellars, artistes such as Sam Cowell and W.G. Ross invariably sang ‘The Ratcatcher’s Daughter’ or ‘Sam Hall’, and the audience expected to be indulged over and over again with encores. In an era before recorded music, the live experience was all there was.
It was the combination of singer and song that created stars, and a colossal business sprang up around them. Artistes bought their songs from songwriters, often for a pittance, and those that struck a chord with the audience became closely identified with the artiste throughout their lifetimes, and are today our only remembrance of them. Hall-owners paid handsomely for artistes to sing the songs that had caught the public imagination, and the sheet music was sold with the artiste featured prominently on the cover.
One such singer was Charles Coborn, born Charles Whitton McCallum into a relatively prosperous family in Stepney, east London, in 1852. His father was a shipbroker and a Freeman of the City of London. Coborn’s early life was a model of middle-class convention. He was privately educated, and employed in clerical jobs in the City between 1866 and 1871, subsequently becoming a commercial traveller in women’s accessories. If it were not for his yearning to perform, he might have been just another name in the births, marriages and deaths columns.
After a brief flirtation with the legitimate stage, his early music hall act was based on an impersonation of a drunken man. Its success brought him a debut at the Alhambra, Greenwich, in 1872, under the name Charles Laurie, but this was swiftly changed to Charles Coborn – apparently after Coborn Road, Poplar – because McCallum believed it sounded more sophisticated. He struggled at first to find work, and had to wait three years for his first week-long engagement at the Gilbert Music Hall, Whitechapel. Thereafter, word-of-mouth spread quickly, and he was given the soubriquet ‘the Comic of the Day’ by the Oxford Music Hall manager J.H. Jennings.
Coborn’s first big hit was ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’, which he is said to have co-written with Edmund Forman in 1886. It is a cautionary tale explaining why it is wise not to get too closely involved in party politics. After receiving ‘two lovely black eyes’ from political enthusiasts for arguing about policy, he warns:
The moral you’ve caught I can hardly doubt,
Never on politics rave and shout.
Leave it to others to fight it out
If you would be wise.
Better, far better it is to let
Liberals and Tories alone you bet,
Unless you’re willing and anxious to get
Two lovely black eyes.
On the strength of this song Coborn became a much-sought-after act, and was soon booked into long engagements at the Trocadero and the Pavilion. His stage persona was a fortuitous fit with his only other great hit, ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. Written by Fred Gilbert in April 1892, it was based on the exploits of a serial fraudster, Charles Wells, who managed to ‘faire sauter la banque’ – literally ‘blow up the bank’ – at a marathon session at the gaming tables of Café de Paris Casino, Monte Carlo, in July 1891.* To add spice to the tale, the £4,000 Wells used to bet with was fraudulently obtained through a scam. He is said to have won twenty-three times from thirty spins of the wheel, making a million francs. The casino was convinced he had used a system, but Wells merely shrugged his shoulders and said it was a lucky streak. He later returned to the Café de Paris, but his luck had run out. He was accused of defrauding investors in a marine engineering swindle, convicted of fraud at the Old Bailey and sentenced to eight years in jail in 1892. Subsequent frauds committed in France led to a further five years’ imprisonment, and he died penniless in Paris in 1926. But Gilbert’s song achieved immortality for both Wells and Coborn.
As a performer whose act was based on a drunken man, Coborn was the perfect exponent of a song based on the louche milieu of Monte Carlo. Onstage he wore a rakishly-set top hat, tailcoat, watch chain, buttonhole, immaculate dickie, monocle and well-groomed handlebar
