was eccentric enough for a stage career, but had no interest in joining the profession. My brother Terry and I were devoid of artistic talent, although I often reflected that my chosen career was akin to show business. Certainly, Prime Minister’s Questions often resembled my father’s description of a raucous night at the Glasgow Empire.
There may have been a good reason for our parents’ lack of disappointment that we failed to follow them onto the stage – at least in my father’s case. At the age of twenty-two he had had a brief liaison with Mary Moss, the wife of a young musician, and in 1901 their son, another Tom, was born. Like his father – our father – Tom became a music hall performer. He had a beautiful tenor voice, but also, I fear, a horrible temper – particularly after a night’s carousing.
Tom Junior appeared onstage in many guises – as ‘Signor Meneghini’, ‘Tom Moss’ or ‘Signor Bassani’. Physically, he was about as unlike my muscular father as it was possible to be: medium height, with a small van Dyke beard, and the plump body of the archetypal tenor. Even when he was past fifty, when I first came to know him, he could sing, and when he did (which was rare), I would listen enraptured as, unaccompanied by music, his voice soared effortlessly to the higher notes. If it had not been for his rebellious, anti-authoritarian nature, his career might have progressed from the shadows into the spotlight. He had the talent, but not the discipline. As my mother put it, ‘Tom doesn’t like being told what to do.’ Truly, Tom was my father’s son.
My parents lived life on a rollercoaster. Alternately well-off and hard-up, in work or out, on top or in difficulty, they inhabited a Micawberish world in which – somehow, sometime – all would be well. But, of course, it hardly ever was. And when the problems piled up, my mother – who had never even heard of Voltaire, let alone read him – echoed Dr Pangloss in Candide in believing that, as disaster followed disaster, it was, no doubt, ‘all for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. She had learned to expect hardship, and when it came knocking at her door she was ready to confront it.
One day, at around the age of nine, I remember rushing home for tea and, in my hurry, throwing open the kitchen door. My father, who was fitting a lightbulb, fell from the stool he was standing on and cracked his head on the tiled floor. Clearly dazed, he was taken off to bed. Although I did not know it at the time, his sight had been fading for many months, as cataracts dimmed his vision; but as it worsened, I was certain that his failing sight was as a direct result of my childhood exuberance. No one ever suggested anything of the kind, but since my feelings of guilt were never known, I was never disabused.
This was but one of many family misfortunes: business failure, debt, bankruptcy, failing health, the loss of our home. The two rented rooms in Brixton in which we found sanctuary were in a house owned by my half-brother Tom, who until then I had never met. My parents had not told me who he really was. My father was too lofty to explain, and my mother would have moved heaven and earth to protect me from ‘that sort of thing’. My father’s health and sight continued to worsen while my mother shielded him from as much as she could, particularly her worries over debt. Her world centred on him, and he accepted her care as his right. In this, if in little else in life, he was a very lucky man. Throughout their travails, my parents had always accepted setbacks with equanimity. Misfortune was nothing new. Shows opened, shows closed. You were top of the bill, or bottom. But tomorrow always held glittering possibilities. That was their philosophy of life.
My father’s health deteriorated further, and he became bedridden. An active man all his life, he now had nothing to do, and nowhere to go. Nor did he have an audience to bring him alive. Here, at least, I could make amends for my nine-year-old clumsiness. I became his audience. He sang the songs he’d known, and recited the monologues he and Kitty had written. ‘The girl I love is up in the gallery,’ he would sing – quietly changing the gender of the lover – and as his eyes watered I’d wonder if he was thinking of Kitty. But when he spoke of his life in the theatre, a smile was never far away. I learned that although Marie Lloyd had a saucy tongue, she had a heart of gold. That Dan Leno and Little Tich were giants of the profession. That Nellie Wallace was ‘ugly but funny’, and Gertie Gitana was lovely in every way. That Nosmo King, in haste to create a stage name for himself, glimpsed the ‘No Smoking’ sign on the carriage windows of a train he was boarding, and never looked back. That Vesta Tilley was the finest cross-dresser of them all – ‘And what’s more,’ said my father, clearly impressed with titles, ‘she became a Lady.’ And so she did.
Somehow, word of my father’s plight spread. Strangers, often eccentric men and women, would arrive at our door. Careworn, often shabbily dressed, they were all of my father’s vintage, or near to it. Prosperity, if it had ever touched them, had long since fled. Some were talented, some loveable; some both, some neither. But all had the urge to entertain. Often vulnerable, they were intensely human in their wish to give pleasure, in their thirst for applause and in the love they had for their profession.
They sat at my father’s bedside drinking whisky until supplies ran out, and then called for tea. If their conversation was stilted at first, it soon became intimate. Memories were stirred, emotions flowed. Old stories were told, old times remembered – no doubt, as Shakespeare put it, with advantages. Sometimes, these reunions became uproarious, and tears of mirth rolled down their and my father’s cheeks. Sometimes emotion overcame them, and tears of a different kind were wiped away.
I can see and hear them still. I saw how cheers and applause had filled their lives, and for a short time they were back there, in the good old days, positively aglow with their reminiscences, a fierce joy in their hearts. They were full of generous impulse. They treasured their remembered triumphs, but had not forgotten the flops, the rejections, the let-downs, the days without work, the lash of critical opinion. It was not until years later, with the political critics poised, invective flowing and the national audience restive, that I fully understood all the emotions that had been so familiar to them.
I listened avidly as they talked of their shared past. They were born to perform. Onstage they had come alive. The career they chose was one in which fame and fortune was elusive, but heartbreak was not. Few had enjoyed great material rewards, although they talked with affection and without envy of those who had been successful. Once, several guests around my father’s bed argued over whose songs had the most memorable choruses. Was it Florrie Forde or Harry Champion? An impromptu concert ensued, in which ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ competed with ‘Any Old Iron’ and ‘I’m Henery the Eighth, I am’ before a draw was declared. At the time it seemed there was an unending flow of guests, but memory plays tricks. There were perhaps fifteen in all. But the pleasure their presence gave to my father was disproportionate to their number.
Many years later, when I became a public figure, some commentators wrote disparagingly of my parents and their profession. My parents may not have had much in the way of possessions or money, but as human beings, in their kindness and goodness, they were richer than most. And, most important of all to them, they had standing amongst their peers, and careers that had not only given personal joy to themselves, but pleasure to others. As my father, with whisky in hand and philosophy in flow, once observed: ‘Entertainers exist to brighten people’s lives – critics are their antidote.’
The lives of many music hall performers were poignant. Each act was individual, and most had no support structure. The glad hand proffered to the multitude often hid a lonely soul. Some had only modest talent. Many fell upon hard times, and even the successful often found it hard to cope with fame. The artistes’ interests often fared badly in a commercial world. And, stripped of its glamour, music hall was, first and last, a commercially driven business. Its leading entrepreneurs – Charles Morton, Edward Moss, Oswald Stoll, Richard Thornton and their colleagues – were quintessentially Victorian figures, vigorous believers in profit who were always on the lookout for market opportunities. They were not in show business; they were in business. Understanding market forces as well as any modern businessman, they found that the music hall model worked, and so they cashed in. They
