unsuccessfully) as a theatre manager, and as chairman of festivities in taverns. After the 1840s his attraction declined and he was engaged in ever more downmarket venues. He died alone in the Strand workhouse in 1870.
Not everyone was a casualty of fleeting fame. Sam Collins was a firm favourite at Evans’ in the late period, put his money to good use, and at the age of thirty was part-owner of the Rose of Normandy Concert Room in Church Street, Marylebone. Later he bought the Lansdowne tavern and developed his own music hall – Collins’ Music Hall – before a premature death in his late thirties.
Others, less talented than Hudson, Sloman or Collins, were also successful in providing for themselves. After finishing his act – yodelling, imitations of birdsong and presenting his walking stick as a bassoon, flute, piccolo, trombone or violin, complete with sound effects – Herr von Joel, that refugee from Vauxhall Gardens, mingled among the audience selling cigars and tickets for his benefit concert. The cigars were poor value and the benefit a fiction, but no one cared. Cunning old von Joel was such an institution that – in an age in which fraud remained a capital crime – no one begrudged being swindled out of a few pennies.
Evans’ became more raucous as a song and supper room after 1844, when Evans retired and his successor, John Greenmore, known as Paddy Green, built up its reputation. Green had been the musical director during Evans’ reign, and like his old employer he was a former singer at Covent Garden Opera House. In the early 1850s he reconstructed the hall, and spent lavish sums on enlarging the dining room. He decorated the new ceiling, lit the room with sunlight burners and adorned the walls with portraits of theatrical personalities. A platform was erected to serve as a stage for the performers, and the old supper room was downgraded to a café lounge. The improved quality of the service, supplemented by fine food and drink, encouraged the air of masculine bonhomie. Teams of waiters and boys in buttoned waistcoats were on hand to take orders. Chops, kidneys and poached eggs were typical of the fare on offer, washed down with gin, whisky, hot brandy and water or stout. Bills – with the exception of cigars, which were paid for on demand – were settled on departure, with customers declaring what they’d consumed and a waiter called Skinner, known as ‘the calculating waiter’, totting up what was owed. This may have been a haphazard system, but it was an astute piece of marketing by Green. By not challenging what diners claimed had been consumed, he made it unseemly for them to question the waiter’s calculation. No doubt any errors of underdeclaration and overcharging balanced themselves out.
In the swirling smoke of cigars, and amid the clink of glasses and the clatter of cutlery, Paddy Green circulated with a kindly word for the literary, sporting, commercial, political and noble diners who assembled nightly at Joy’s. Posterity has been left a picture of a jovial, grey-haired elderly man moving through the room and beaming at his ‘dear boys’, his invariable greeting to clients, many of whose names he probably could not remember, while taking snuff and exuding an air of familiarity to all.
Green’s jolly nature did not, however, always extend to the most famous of his performers, Sam Cowell. Although tolerated by his admiring audience, Cowell’s habitual lateness exasperated Green. In his performances Cowell brought all his talents to bear: a gift for character, mimicry and visual expressiveness, and a strong, clear voice that enabled him to imbue narrative ballads with drama, comedy or pathos. His songs, often of thwarted love, became enormously popular. ‘Villikins’ and ‘The Ratcatcher’s Daughter’, performed in character with battered hat, seedy frock-coat and huge bow cravat, were demanded by audiences at every appearance. ‘The Ratcatcher’s Daughter’ tells the tale of two working-class sweethearts preparing to marry, although the would-be bride fears she will die before her wedding. And so she does, drowning in the Thames. Her broken-hearted lover then kills himself. We cannot be certain exactly how Sam Cowell presented this song, but its theme of love and tragedy touched the sentimental soul of Victorian London, and it’s easy to see why:
In Vestminster, not long ago,
There liv’d a ratcatcher’s daughter.
That is not quite in Vestminster,
’Cos she liv’d t’other side of the vater.
Her father killed rats and she cried Sprats
All around about that quarter.
The young gentlemen all touched their hats
To the purty little ratcatcher’s daughter.
Such a song could not fail. Though it (just) preceded the birth of the halls themselves, it is one of the first great music hall songs. Cowell sang it in a faux-cockney accent with, Sam Weller style, an inability to pronounce his W’s. It was a model for the rich vein of cockney humour that would follow.
Despite Cowell’s spectacular success, Paddy Green became so frustrated by his erratic timekeeping that he sacked his star performer for persistent lateness. Cowell never appeared at Evans’ again, but found ample employment elsewhere, most famously in the first purpose-built music hall, the Canterbury in Westminster Bridge Road, Lambeth.
Even without Cowell, Evans’ prospered. The principal comedian, Jackie Sharp, a specialist in unscripted, mildly risqué repartee, was at the top of his craft. Sharp’s act featured topical songs that satirised the government. The most well-known, ‘Who’ll Buy My Images?’ and ‘Pity Poor Punch and Judy’, were written by his friend and fellow performer John Labern, one of the foremost comic songwriters of the time. Sharp sang also of the evils of ‘the bottle’ at a time when overindulgence was a national pastime. Sadly, he himself did not heed the lyrics, and like so many others, he frittered away his fortune on alcohol and tobacco. At first drunkenness made him unreliable, and then unemployable. It was not long before a combination of exposure and malnutrition carried him off. He died in Dover Workhouse in 1856, at only thirty-eight years of age.
Cowell and Sharp were star attractions at Joy’s, but they were not alone: on any evening, another fifteen to twenty acts – the small, sweet-voiced tenor John Binge, known as ‘The Singing Mouse’; the big-voiced bass S.A. Jones; the ballad singer Joseph Plumpton – would be there to support them. Most performers were poorly paid, and would try to maximise their income by appearing at more than one venue on the same evening.
Sometime in the 1820s, William Rhodes, yet another former singer from the Covent Garden Theatre, acquired Evans’ principal rivals, the Coal Hole and the Cyder Cellars – the latter of which had hosted entertainment as early as the 1690s. Maiden Lane, where the Cyder Cellars was situated, had a famous pedigree. Voltaire and Henry Fielding had lived there, the great artist J.M.W. Turner was born there (to a wig-maker and his unstable wife), and Nell Gwynne was a resident towards the end of her life. Although the Cyder Cellars often employed the same artists as Evans’, it was far less reputable. It reached the peak of its notoriety around 1840, before Paddy Green took over Evans’, and remained a formidable competitor until its licence was revoked twenty-two years later.
The Cellars offered top-class food and wine, and throughout the 1840s and ’50s its stars were familiar names: Charles Sloman, Tom Hudson, John Moody and Tom Penniket were among those who appeared there regularly. The entertainment was predominantly vocal, although variety was offered by conjurers and jugglers. Among the singers was one whom the more fastidious Evans’ would never employ: W.G. Ross, a former compositor on a Glasgow newspaper.
Ross was a character actor-singer of enormous power. Born in Scotland, he enjoyed success in the north of England before heading south, where he found fame at the Cyder Cellars. He sang many songs – ‘Going Home with the Milk in the Morning’ being a representative example – but his fame rested on a dramatic ballad depicting the tragic fate of a chimney sweep: ‘Sam Hall’. With this song, first sung in 1849, Ross attracted all London, and the Cyder Cellars overflowed nightly, with latecomers turned away. The most boisterous house hushed and the
