Nash was very nervous and persuaded me to go first. I went and sang a song, of which the chorus ran ‘It’s the sort of thing you read about but very seldom see.’ After two or three verses I sang the following: ‘I must now award a word of praise to a gent who’s sitting there/I mean that worthy party who so ably fills the chair,/See how sweetly now he smiles, as pleasant as can be,/It’s a sort of smile I read about but very seldom see.’
As I sang it the Prince leant forward to listen, and all those round him turned and clapped their hands towards him. He seemed immensely amused, and when I had finished the last verse he applauded very good humouredly.
It is a vivid vignette of Victorian deference to the future King.
Arthur Lloyd wrote most of his own material, and was deeply frustrated when it was ‘stolen’ by other performers. In July 1863 he published a warning in the trade press: ‘Comic singers who steal the ideas and songs of others, look out for your time is short.’ The warning was justified, but ineffective.
Lloyd was a highly accomplished man, but not all his offstage enterprises were successful. He ran a successful touring company, and took a three-year lease on the Queen’s Theatre in Dublin in 1874, but when he bought the Star Music Hall in Glasgow in 1881 the remodelling costs and artistic failure reduced him to bankruptcy in only fourteen weeks. Notwithstanding such setbacks, he remained a successful performer and songwriter. His self-composed hits ‘Not for Joseph’, ‘The Song of (Many) Songs’, ‘Pretty Lips’ and ‘Immensikoff, the Shoreditch Toff’, not to mention his breakthrough hit ‘The German Band’, were hugely popular. While ‘The Dark Girl Dressed in Blue’ was successful for George Leybourne, Lloyd’s ‘Not for Joseph’, which tells of a swell who is careful with his money, was the first comic song to sell 100,000 copies:
I used to throw my cash about,
In a reckless sort of way;
I’m careful now what I’m about,
And cautious how I pay:
Now the other night I asked a pal,
With me to have a drain,
‘Thanks Joe,’ said he, ‘let’s see, old pal
‘I think I’ll have Champagne’
[Spoken: ‘Will ye,’ said I, ‘oh, no –’]
CHORUS:
Not for Joe, not for Joe,
If he knows it, not for Joseph,
No, no, no, not for Joe,
Not for Joseph, oh, dear no.
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