monologists and any other performer who might, however loosely, ‘entertain’. Nor was the setting necessarily a hall. Elements of music hall were widespread in pleasure gardens, taverns, streets and markets long before the nineteenth century. Its growth was organic: often haphazard, ramshackle – more the product of events than rational planning. And always, always it was a reflection of the lives and tastes of its audience.
The term ‘music hall’ was invented by the early entrepreneurs who built theatres to exploit widely popular forms of entertainment. These entrepreneurs have a role to play in the history of music hall, but it is sentimental myth to claim they invented it. It had its heart in the East End of London, yet it was not purely a southern phenomenon. It was centred on the capital because that was where the biggest audiences were to be found, but from the outset it was popular in towns and cities across the length and breadth of Great Britain. Lancashire, in particular, provided music hall talent almost on a level to rival London.
Music hall was able to thrive because of a fortunate combination of circumstances. In Victorian Britain, wages rose and working hours fell. The nineteenth century was an intensely musical era that saw a huge growth in choral societies, brass bands and religious music. Street entertainers earned a few pennies playing zithers, piccolos, banjos, concertinas or fiddles. Opera companies toured the provinces. Popular music embraced minstrel songs and the ballads of Tin Pan Alley. Popular operetta arrived as the gift of Gilbert and Sullivan. The development of railways enabled performers to tour the whole country. Demand for their work saw the publication of inexpensive sheet music. There was a huge growth in the sale of musical instruments. Amidst all this, music hall was shaped and defined as one of the glories of the Victorian era. Sentimental, vulgar, class-conscious, insular – but always patriotic, and on the side of the underdog. It held up a mirror to people’s hopes and fears, joys and heartbreaks, and the general absurdity of life.
The strands of music hall began to come together in the early nineteenth century, but had comprehensively disentangled by the mid-twentieth. Like a shooting star, it flared brightly into orbit, then fizzled out; but its heyday was brilliant, and its lifespan encompassed the story of a world changed beyond recognition.
In its formative years, the vulgarity and sentimentality of music hall attracted a largely working-class audience, but its appeal was far wider. It took root in England only a few years after there had been a real fear of revolution, and helped to turn sour resentment into a patriotic roar of joy. It was low-born but irresistible. Its songs have become the folk songs of a nation. As Kipling observed, they filled a gap in our history. Music hall attracted the magic brush-strokes of Sickert, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Long after its heyday, entertainers such as Max Miller, Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd and Morecambe and Wise had an empathy with their audience reminiscent of music hall in its prime. Bruce Forsyth and Roy Hudd have it to this day.
Popular artistes from music hall shaped the attitudes of our nation: Harry Lauder’s nightly jokes about Scottish miserliness fed a public perception that turned a myth into an accepted truth. Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel and Dan Leno personified the ‘little man’, put upon by life. Other stereotypes entered folklore. Music hall eulogised courtship and motherhood, yet ridiculed marriage as a comic disaster. It mocked single women for being unmarried, but made ‘the missus’ the butt of jokes. It was never politically correct, and in a less sensitive age ‘nigger minstrels’ and ‘coon’ acts were part of its staple diet. At times of war it could be fiercely jingoistic – indeed, the word was popularised in ‘By Jingo’, a music hall song, during the Baltic crisis of 1877–78. Even after its demise, music hall continued to have an impact. In 1942, the pro-nudist magazine Health & Efficiency denounced ‘music hall comedians and their imbecilic jokes’ for the reluctance of the public to join nudist camps. More positively, the demand for entertainment without alcohol led to the foundation in 1880 of the ‘Old Vic’ theatre in south London.
Once scorned, music hall would come to be seen as epitomising a past age of success, and as an art form that gave pleasure to millions. It had some powerful advocates. In 1978, James Callaghan, then Prime Minister, used a music hall song at a TUC congress to announce that he would not be holding an expected general election: ‘There was I, waiting at the church …’ he sang, echoing Vesta Victoria three-quarters of a century earlier. The country was praying for an election – but it was not to be. Nor was this an isolated acknowledgement of Callaghan’s affection for music hall. At another trades union gathering he charmed his dinner companions by singing, ‘I’m the man, the very fat man, who waters the workers’ beer.’ It is an irony that he used a music hall song to draw grumpy trades unionists closer to the government, since over seventy years earlier disputes over music hall had bitterly divided the Puritan and non-Puritan elements of the embryonic Labour movement.
Tories were susceptible too. Lord Randolph Churchill had ‘an almost music hall style of public speaking’, claimed his biographer, while his son Winston, a great admirer of the music hall artiste Dan Leno, was apt to sing ‘old world cockney songs with teddy bear gestures’. Churchill, like the Labour movement, will enter our story again.
Music hall reached its zenith in the 1890s. Vast auditoriums were packed each night in nearly every British town and city, and fourteen million tickets were sold each year. The most popular performers were among the highest-paid and most celebrated figures in the land. ‘I earn more than the Prime Minister,’ noted Little Tich, ‘but I do so much less harm.’ Owners of theatres became rich, and their money and fame gave them an entrée to the Establishment elite. But even as music hall stood unchallenged in its supremacy, the forces that would destroy it were taking shape.
On 28 December 1895, in the dimmed artificial light of Le Grand Café, avenue des Capucines, Paris, a small group of thirty-three individuals were viewing the first public screening of commercial cinema. On the bill were ten one-minute films, the brainchild of two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière.
Five years later, at the turn of the century, my father Tom, then twenty-one, entered the profession. For nearly thirty years – the prime of his working life – he earned his living in music hall and variety. His fortunes fluctuated, but in old age, when his health and prosperity were gone, these were the years he remembered with the greatest affection.
In 1902, Tom met Kitty Grant, a vivacious and attractive brunette five years older than him, and they formed a double act, Drum + Major.* When Kitty’s husband, David, died in 1910, she and Tom legalised a relationship that had long been stable. They wrote their own songs, sketches and monologues, and as they became more popular they formed their own revues, with which for over twenty years they toured the country, as well as North and South America. In February 1906, they became founder members of the Variety Artists’ Federation. Playbills reveal that they performed with the greats: Marie Lloyd, George Robey, Florrie Forde, Vesta Tilley and Harry Champion.
These great and happy times ended in tragedy when Kitty died following an onstage accident. My father carried on alone, although not for long. In Tom and Kitty’s show there were two young speciality dancers, ‘Glade and Glen’. ‘Glen’, whose real name was Gwen Coates, a slender imp of a girl, had been asked by the dying Kitty to ‘look after Tom’. And so she did for the next forty years. She was at his side when he died, caring for him as she had done for so long. My mother, the eternal, uncrushable optimist, knew the show must go on, but her smile was never again so bright. When she herself died ten years later, in the dark of a long night, she was in hospital, alone for once, for her death was unexpected. Did she think of Tom? I am sure she did, for she had done so all her life.
When I was born my father was sixty-four, my mother thirty-eight. I was Tom and Gwen’s late child, a just-in-time baby – the one she had hoped for, but feared she would never have. It was not an easy birth: my mother, never robust in health, nearly died, and I became dangerously ill. But we both survived. Most of my mother’s hopes for the future were invested in me, but whatever gifts my parents passed on to their children, the talent
