were enormously in vogue, but were not universally popular. The poet and lawyer Arthur Munby’s diary records supping at Evans’ in March 1860 amid ‘a hubbub of nigger howlings’. Later, Paddy Green – or his successor Mrs Barnes, it is not clear which – went even further than offering female singers, by admitting women to the floor of Evans’. As dancing was introduced, Evans’ became a market for vice and a meeting place for seedy London. In 1872 the law changed and Evans’ needed a licence to offer entertainment after 12.30 a.m. – which it did not obtain. This marked the end of the song and supper rooms.
3
‘Never was a theatre so full – never was an audience so excited – never did the scum and refuse of the streets so liberally patronise the entertainment.’
J. EWING RITCHIE, WRITER AND CAMPAIGNER, ON ‘PENNY GAFFS’, FROM HERE AND THERE IN LONDON (1859)
As well as song and supper clubs, concert halls, variety saloons and ‘free and easies’ in pubs and pleasure gardens were nurturing the pre-natal life of music hall. So too, at a less salubrious level, were the infamous ‘penny gaffs’.
The Dr Johnson Concert Room in Bolt Court, Fleet Street – named after the great lexicographer, conversationalist and writer, who had lived in Bolt Court – had many similarities with the supper clubs. The audience, however, comprised neither the animated bohemians who flocked to Evans’, nor the raucous lower end of the market. The food was good, and alcohol plentiful. No prices were advertised, and the all-male clientèle paid their bills upon departure. A chairman kept order – the most notable being the actor and singer John Caulfield – and the performers were frequently the same as those in the supper clubs. Sam Cowell, Joe Cave and Tom Penniket were regulars, often joined by the singers John Moody and George Pervin, and variety acts like the violinists the Brothers Holmes. The diminutive singer Jenny Hill, who learned her trade in less reputable halls, had her first upmarket booking at the Dr Johnson Concert Room, and went on to become one of the most glittering stars of the early music hall.
The variety saloons had their roots in the seventeenth century, when music flourished in the back rooms of public houses. The progression from back rooms to singing rooms to music halls took two hundred years. From the earliest days publicans have looked for legal ways to add to their takings, and – time and again – governments have unwittingly helped them with legislation that backfired. In the early eighteenth century gin was the drug of choice across all classes: ‘Drunk for one penny, dead drunk for tuppence,’ claimed bill-posts all over London. Hogarth’s famous print Gin Lane was created in support of what became the Gin Act of 1751, which attempted to curtail the consumption of spirits by prohibiting distillers from selling gin to unlicensed merchants. But drunkenness remained a serious social problem, and in 1830 the Duke of Wellington’s Tory government tried to alleviate it by introducing a Beer Act to promote a weaker alcoholic alternative to spirits. This well-meaning innovation had an unexpected outcome: it led to the creation of vast numbers of public houses seeking to exploit the huge demand for getting drunk. As competition became fiercer they sought to attract customers by offering increasingly opulent surroundings and more entertainment. The Rising Sun, which opened in 1830 in a Georgian red-brick house in Knightsbridge, was a typical product of the public-house revolution. Twenty years later it was licensed for music and dancing, and a concert hall was added as a ‘music hall’. In 1864 it was rebuilt as the Sun music hall, reputedly one of the finest in London.
Taverns had a key role in promoting music hall. Every publican became a mini-impresario. The image of the jovial ‘mine host’ still persists, but a more accurate image would be of a man with a steely eye for profit. In the first half of the nineteenth century, publicans presided over small businesses catering to all comers, rich and poor. Much more was involved than selling drinks: business acumen was needed to organise fairs, Derby sweepstakes and trips to beauty spots. Pubs housed catch and glee clubs, harmonica clubs and evenings of variety. In Sketches by Boz (1836) Dickens describes ‘Mr. Licensed Victualler’, a Liverpool publican with a singing room, as ‘a sharp and watchful man, with tight lips and a complete edition of Cockers Arithmetic [the accountant’s bible] in each eye’. Mr Victualler’s tavern has ‘a plate glass window surrounded by stucco rosettes, a fantastically ornamental parapet … a profusion of gas lights in richly gilt burners … beyond the bar is a lofty and spacious saloon … with a gallery equally well furnished’. Providing, as it did, a dazzling contrast to the darkness and dirt of the street and the cold and wretched home of the working man, it is no surprise that the sumptuous saloon tavern and the warm and well-lit gin and beer shop had great appeal.
Their popularity was also an unwanted, and unintended, result of government policy. To promote free trade, the duty on spirits was severely reduced in 1825. Unsurprisingly, cheaper drinking led to more drinking, and it was a boom era for publicans – by 1836 there were 36,000 licensed public houses in England and Wales – who used every inducement to promote custom. Brightly decorated windows and gas lights were installed to lure passers-by from the stinking, ordure-covered streets into warm, well-lit, ornate interiors with comfortable seating and the promise of diversion. In the landlords’ battle for customers, ‘singing saloons’ became an important element.
If a saloon did not have a licence to play music, the law was easily bypassed: payment was made using a token bearing the name of the pub, with a value that entitled the holder to a specified amount of food and drink, and entry to the show. When this ‘wet money’ expired customers were pressed either to leave or to buy more drinks as the waiters hovered and the chairman plied his trade. Soon the saloon theatres, often the more profitable part of the business, became distinct from the tavern or pub in which they were housed. Back-room theatres were upgraded to purpose-built halls with the ambience of a theatre, and public houses became a hybrid: half theatre and half public house, usually sited in their own pleasure grounds.
Among the early saloon theatres in London were the Effingham in Whitechapel Road, the Globe Gardens in Mile End, White Conduit House in Pentonville, the Bower in the Lower Marsh, Lambeth, the Albert in Islington, the Britannia in Hoxton, the Union in Shoreditch, the Yorkshire Stingo in Paddington and the Mogul Saloon in Drury Lane. Outside the capital, the Millstone inn, Deansgate, Manchester, led the way. Many of the saloons that opened in London in the late 1830s and early 1840s were either in the rough, tough, deprived East End, or at the northern and southern limits of the City. The Grecian Saloon – part of the Eagle tavern complex on City Road – became one of the most popular.
The Eagle began life as a downmarket pleasure garden, the Shepherd and Shepherdess, but its rural tranquillity was shattered in 1825 when the new City Road was driven straight through the centre of it. It was reincarnated as the Eagle tavern, and became famous when its owner Thomas Rouse, a builder by profession and a publicist by temperament, arranged balloon ascents in the garden. Charles Sloman’s song acknowledged its fame:
Up and down the City Road,
In and out of the Eagle,
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.
Rouse was so successful that in 1831 he built the Grecian Saloon, decorating the entrance with bunting that had been used to adorn Westminster Abbey for the coronation of William IV in September that year. The interior was painted by a pupil of the famous naval artist Clarkson Stanfield, and contained an organ and the latest word in entertainment technology – an automated piano. When it opened for business in 1832 the Grecian was an instant success. It was a class above many saloons, with ‘a spacious apartment containing boxes, pit, orchestra and stage, disposed as in ordinary theatres’. The stage was small, but in the pit ‘in front of each seat there is a narrow level table … adapted [to hold] liquor and refreshments’. Rouse sat in a box,
