to the English language, just one indication of the influence of music hall on popular culture. The expression ‘OK’ also made an early appearance in the same song.
Leybourne and Vance continued to trade song for song, with Leybourne’s ‘The Dark Girl Dressed in Blue’ responded to by Vance’s ‘The Fair Girl Dressed in Check’. Vance wrote several of his own songs, but also collaborated with both Green and Lee to produce songs like ‘The Naughty Young Man’, ‘Idol of the Day’ and ‘May the Present Moment be the Worst of Your Lives’. Similarly, Leybourne collaborated with Lee to produce ‘Sweet Isabella’ and the enduring hit, which offered a new phrase to the English language, ‘The [Daring Young Man on the] Flying Trapeze’, written as a tribute to Jules Léotard.
Leybourne was so popular that he sometimes played six halls a night, and had to plead with audiences to allow him to leave the stage to keep to schedule. Jenny Hill, his friend and contemporary, said he had ‘a curious faculty for filling a stage’. He had a faculty for filling his pockets, too. At the height of his fame he was earning the unheard-of sum of £120 a week at the Canterbury. Unfortunately, having filled his pockets, he emptied them, spending as much as he earned on hangers-on and high living, and helping to pay the bills of acquaintances who were poor or sick.
Like all the lions comiques, Leybourne sang topical songs. Apart from ‘The Flying Trapeze’ there was ‘Zazel’ (about the Great Farini’s human cannonball act) and ‘Up in a Balloon’ (ballooning was a hugely popular attraction at the time), both written by G.W. Hunt. Sometimes he cast aside his lion comique manner and sang sentimental and dramatic songs and ballads in a rich baritone – often to the surprise of an audience unaware of the depth of his talent.
Inevitably, the hard-living swell persona he was forced to adopt rubbed off on Leybourne. He drank too much, too often, with too many ‘friends’. By the 1880s his star had begun to wane, although his money continued to be spent recklessly. After a spell as a double act with his daughter Florrie – who married Albert Chevalier – he died aged forty-two in 1884, penniless and understandably bitter about false friends. One of his last hits was ‘Ting Ting, That’s How the Bell Goes’. This song, set in a tea shop, led early music hall historian McQueen-Pope to suggest ironically that ‘Maybe the tea killed him.’ But it didn’t. It was the fame.
Vance never quite hit the heights of Leybourne, but he was a regular bill-topper who remained popular throughout his all-too-short life. He died onstage from a heart attack at the Sun Music Hall, Knightsbridge, on Boxing Day 1888. He was only forty-nine.
Another performer gifted at satirising the upper-class toff was ‘the Great’ MacDermott, a specialist in topical comment. Born John Farrell in London in 1845, he worked as a labourer before joining the navy, where he learned to entertain his shipmates. He could dance and sing, wrote plays (including a version of Dickens’ unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood), and appeared on the legitimate stage before turning to music hall. He developed a ‘swell’ persona, and styled himself ‘the Statesman of the Halls’.
MacDermott was often unpopular with managers because of his tendency towards vulgarity, but he is mostly remembered for singing the G.W. Hunt song ‘By Jingo’, which was intended to move public opinion in favour of intervention in the Turkish–Russian conflict of 1877–78. The song proved so influential it merited a leader in The Times and was quoted in the House of Commons. When MacDermott harangued the Liberal leadership in songs like ‘W.E.G.’s in a State of Lunacy’ (W.E.G. being William Gladstone), there were rumours he was funded by the Conservative Party. There is no evidence for this, and it is unlikely. Music hall audiences were often Conservative – the Conservatives under Disraeli had cut the hours of work, while Gladstone’s Liberals had cut the hours of drink. ‘By Jingo’ famously popularised the word ‘jingoism’, although it was not a new word – as has been suggested – but had been in use for many years.
We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do.
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.
Whatever MacDermott’s politics may have been, the song shows the power of a good tune and catchy lyrics. In his book The Psychology of Jingoism (1901), J.A. Hobson commented on this phenomenon: ‘A gradual debasement of popular art … has raised … the music hall to [a] most powerful instrument … Its words and melodies pass by quick magic from the Empire or the Alhambra over the length and breadth of the land, re-echoed in a thousand provincial halls, clubs, drinking saloons, until the remotest village is familiar with air and sentiment.’
MacDermott was a natural to sing the topical songs written by Fred Gilbert – already famous for ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’ – and neither man shied from political controversy. In 1885, when the Liberal MP for Chelsea Sir Charles Dilke was accused of having an affair with his sister-in-law and her nineteen-year-old sister, it was too good an opportunity for Gilbert and MacDermott to pass over. ‘Charlie Dilke Upset the Milk’ was their far-from-subtle commentary on the scandalous divorce case. The judgement partly absolved Dilke, but after a press campaign continued to stress his impropriety he went to court to clear his name. After a merciless cross-examination he lost the case, and was ruined, ensuring that the song became a phenomenon:
Master Dilke upset the milk
When taking it home to Chelsea;
The papers say that Charlie’s gay‡
Rather a wilful wag!
This noble representative
Of ev’rything good in Chelsea
Has let the cat – the naughty cat
Slip out of the Gladstone bag.
The song caused a serious stir, but, undeterred, Gilbert and MacDermott continued to add new verses as more information came out in court.
Onstage, MacDermott was a great exponent of the ‘call and response’ idiom, where he would involve the audience in dialogue. In ‘Not Much (It’s Better Than Nothing at All)’ he would sing, ‘Not what?’ and the audience would sing back, ‘Not much!’ His ‘Dear Old Pals’ was a lasting hit, and far more mellow than his more controversial songs. When MacDermott retired from the halls he became a theatrical agent and hall manager, and unlike many contemporaries died comfortably well-off, in 1901.
MacDermott’s collaborator G.W. Hunt wrote for many artistes. One of his biggest hits, ‘The German Band’, was written for the last of the ‘big four’ lions comiques, Arthur Lloyd, and transformed Lloyd’s fortunes. Lloyd was one of the most popular artistes of his day, and his songs, many of which he wrote himself, sold in their thousands – yet outside music hall circles he is barely remembered.
Arthur Lloyd was born in Edinburgh in 1839 into a theatrical family, and toured the country as a straight actor, a comic and a singer before arriving in London in 1862. He made his debut at the Sun Music Hall, Knightsbridge, playing the Marylebone Music Hall and the Philharmonic Music Hall in Islington later the same evening. His impact was immediate, and in a matter of months he was appearing at the Pavilion, the Oxford and the Canterbury. In 1868 he became one of the first music hall artistes to perform before royalty – in his case the Prince of Wales at a private party in Whitehall, together with Jolly John Nash and Alfred Vance. An interview he gave the Era offers a flavour of the occasion:
We
