My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall

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, leading the applause and earning the nickname ‘Bravo’ for his enthusiastic endorsement of his own shows. The entertainment was varied. Concerts of music by Rossini, Handel or Mozart were accompanied by embryonic music hall fare from J.A. Cave or Robert Glindon. Musical drama and dancing were regular features, and the theatre began to attract family audiences. Up to six thousand customers passed through its doors in a single day. It was big business, fuelled by the growing purchasing power of the working population.

The entertainment at variety saloons was essentially the same as at song and supper clubs: ballads, comic songs, dance acts, jugglers and comedians performing over a hubbub of conversation and the clatter of table service to an audience intent on eating and drinking. Amid the din, a chairman kept a semblance of order and moved the show along. Once happily refreshed, the audiences joined in cheerfully with the familiar songs of favourite performers, and heckled those who disappointed. An evening in a saloon theatre had the strong participatory flavour of the early catch and glee clubs. It was, in essence, music hall proper before astute marketing labelled it as such and installed it in its own theatres.

The distinction between the entertainment offered at the various forms of theatres was minimal, but the facilities offered to them varied with the social strata the proprietors were seeking to attract. Between the upmarket song and supper clubs at one extreme, and the chaotic, ramshackle penny gaffs at the other, there was a huge gulf.

Charles Dickens, who had a lifelong fascination for the theatre, set out in 1850 to discover how the ‘lower half’ of London amused itself. In this quest he visited the Britannia saloon in Hoxton, and wrote of a mythical Mr Joe Whelks on an evening out. The cost of admission to the Britannia was one shilling for a box, sixpence for the pit, fourpence for the lower gallery or threepence for the upper gallery and back seats. Dickens was not impressed by the clientèle, who were, he wrote, ‘very dirty people’; moreover, they smelled. A large proportion were very young, including ‘girls grown into bold women before they had ceased to be children’ – Dickens observed that these were more prominent in the theatres than at any other assembly ‘except a public execution’.

Dickens found the audience was very attentive to the show, turning lustily on anyone interrupting it while consuming ham sandwiches, oranges, cakes or brandy-balls, and drinking porter which was passed around the galleries in a large can. He described the theatre as spacious, well-lit, and with a large stage. The organisation and management of the audience were businesslike, which was essential in order to accommodate the ten thousand customers who paid to attend the Britannia each week.

Mr Whelks also visited The Cut, Lambeth, where the Royal Victoria (now the Old Vic) could accommodate an audience of three thousand drawn from the slums crammed closely together in the nearby streets. The seat prices were similar to those at the Britannia, and so were the packed and overflowing galleries. Dickens was no kinder to the occupants of the pit at the Royal Victoria than he had been to those of the Britannia. He noted the presence of ‘good-humoured young mechanics’ before painting a disagreeable picture of their fellow theatre-goers. They were ‘not very clean or sweet-savoured’, and as they sat in their seats they ate cold fried soles and drank from flat-stoned bottles. Many of the women carried babies on their hips. The boxes, mercifully, lacked the fish-eaters and the babies, but were still not very salubrious. Among those seated in them Dickens saw pickpockets and soldiers, and observed that his neighbour ‘wore pins on his coat instead of buttons’, and was ‘in such a damp habit of living as to be quite mouldy’. On both of his evenings out Dickens saw plays, so he did not witness the audience participating when familiar songs were performed.

Every karaoke evening organised today is a direct descendant of the ‘free and easies’ of the past. These were the poor man’s song and supper clubs, situated in public houses where entrance was free of charge, with the publican relying on attracting an audience that would boost his sales of food, drink and tobacco – and thus his profits. They were similar to the singing rooms and harmonic meetings that flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and are a genuine precursor to music hall. In many free and easies customers would be invited to contribute a song, but more astute landlords recognised that popular acts were a greater draw. Often the artistes’ wages were linked to alcohol sales: one singer, Thomas Weldon, earned a penny for every pint drunk by his audience while he was singing. In such an environment rousing entertainment and drunken revelry went hand in hand, but the wise landlord, conscious of the need to keep his licence to trade, tried to keep order by acting himself as chairman of the evening. Sometimes the entertainment was bawdy, but working-class audiences were often more prudish than the bohemian clientèle of the sophisticated song and supper clubs or the underclass who frequented the penny gaffs.

Apart from the landlord, the key figures in the free and easies were the chairman – familiar from the catch clubs, harmonic meetings and song and supper clubs – and the pianist who accompanied the singers. For many years the chairman would remain a central part of the music hall formula. His role was twofold: to keep order, and to pace the performance to ensure there were ample opportunities for customers to purchase refreshments.

The pianist was also pivotal. A minority could sing as well as play. Most were men, but the largest crowd-pullers were the small number of young women. They not only had novelty value, but were an obvious attraction to a largely youthful male audience. Contemporary advertisements in trade journals such as the Era offered a salary of up to £2 a week, with the added enticement of full bed and board. Although advertisements often specified ‘steadiness’ and ‘gentility’ as necessary qualifications for the job, prudish authority took a dim view of female pianists: as late as 1880 Bradford Council banned their employment in city taverns – perhaps the requirement to ‘be agreeable to customers’ aroused suspicion.

Nonetheless, whether male or female, competent accompaniment to the singers was essential. The artistes might be professional, semi-professional or amateur, but before 1850, when sheet music became cheap enough to be commonplace, many might simply hum the tune and then expect the pianist to improvise while they sang. Even with sheet music, pianists would be expected to be able to change key to match the vocal abilities of more hapless performers. It was a great relief to everyone when the pianist was familiar with the singer’s repertoire.

Most of the songs were rousing choruses, sentimental ballads, patriotic anthems or celebrations of working-class people and their lives. Almost fifty years later, the theatre manager John Hollingshead recalled the free and easies of 1840, and his description reveals how closely they resembled music hall: ‘The long room of the pot-house was the auditorium and, at a table larger than any other in the room was the stage, round which was seated the professional talent. The Chairman was a necessity to keep order and to draw out any volunteers who wished to distinguish themselves.’

Although the free and easies are poorly documented compared to their smarter cousins, there is one contemporary source that offers a unique insight into their world – the diaries of Charles Rice, a British Museum porter by day and ballad singer by night. They are a rich source of information written from the perspective of a performer.

Rice was born in 1817, the son of an optician, and his love of show business was evident from an early age: at eighteen he would copy out and collect performing bills from newspaper advertisements. We know nothing of his education, but his handwriting and observations reveal a certain level of sophistication. This was not reflected in his comparatively humble daytime employment, which was merely a backdrop to his evenings as an entertainer. He began at the British Museum as a twenty-year-old assistant messenger in 1837, and remained there, barely promoted for thirty-eight years, until he was sacked after lengthy periods of absence from work. His work day began at 7 a.m. – a punishingly early hour after late nights in smoky free and easies – and ended at 4 p.m. By the time he was sacked his pay had risen to £100 per annum, but in poor health and, so far as we know, without alternative employment, he died the following year at the age of fifty-eight.

Rice loved performing, and the money he earned enhanced his lifestyle. In the 1840s his salary at the museum was between £1 and thirty shillings a week. In the evenings, as a singer, he earned up to six shillings a night. There was also the fringe benefit of free drinks, at a time when alcohol was a large part of a working man’s expenditure. The price of renting a room for a single man was no more than two shillings a month, and food would cost a further seven shillings or so. With total earnings of around £3 a week, Rice had significant disposable income.

He worked hard, and was in demand. In 1840 he sang at the King’s Arms in Holborn on Mondays and Saturdays, at the Hope in Drury Lane on Tuesdays, at the Adam and Eve in St Pancras Road on Wednesdays, and the Horse and Dolphin, Macclesfield Road, on Thursdays and Fridays. It was a gruelling itinerary, and explains his lack of application in his job at the museum: he rarely returned home before midnight – later if he dropped in to the pie shop for a late supper, as he often did. He must have been exhausted, and probably hungover, for much of the time.

In his diaries, Rice passes judgement on his fellow performers. He writes of their songs, giving us a clear idea of the range on offer and what was popular. Amidst many anonymous names, more famous figures also appear, although not always to perform: Ross, Cowell, Sloman and other leading performers were no doubt searching for material in the free and easies, while the extraordinary Herr von Joel might have been surprised to find pub performers offering impersonations of him. Rice writes also of dancers, catch and glee singers, and ‘Grecian statues’ without disclosing whether or not the latter were clothed: it is likely they wore skin-tight costumes, but in view of the high necks and long skirts of the early Victorian era, figure-hugging clothing would have been quite sufficient to attract an audience.

Rice had a repertoire of around forty songs. Each evening he would sing a selection of six to nine of them, including encores. Some were adaptations of poems or narratives which he had arranged as songs for his own use. These included Ingoldsby Legends, ‘The Jackdaw of Rheims’, Jack Sheppard and parts of The Pickwick Papers, all of which suggests that he had talent far beyond what might be assumed by his intellectually undemanding work at the British Museum.

When it came to what his audience wanted, Rice had a fine judgement, and amended the lyrics of any song that might offend. The popular street song ‘Billy Taylor’ had many versions, some extremely rude. It tells the tale of Billy’s sweetheart disguising herself as a man and joining the navy after Billy has been impressed into service. Rice chose to clean up the tale of how her gender was discovered. Similarly, he adapted W.T. Moncrieff’s satirical ‘Analisation’ to focus on maids, young men and young wives in sentimental terms – quite different from the original.

In 1842, Rice married and moved to the emerging gentility of Somers Town, north of Euston Road, at the much higher rent of £1 a week. For eight years his diary falls silent. When it resumes, in 1850, his star seems to have waned, and he is engaged at less salubrious taverns, such as the Catherine Wheel, Whitechapel, which was better known as a haunt for prostitutes than a home for wholesome entertainment.

As purpose-built saloons, more suitable for mixed company, grew in number, the audiences at the free and easies waned. Rice did appear at larger proto-music halls such as the Yorkshire Stingo in Paddington and the Mogul Saloon in Drury Lane, but only occasionally, and well down the bill. His diary becomes increasingly bitter as he bemoans miserly landlords, incompetent pianists and inattentive audiences. Life was not going well for him: he tried to lose his dog by leaving her in unfamiliar surroundings, but the loyal animal kept returning to him. Eventually he gave her away to his greengrocer. In March 1850 Jemmy Vincent, his friend and pianist, committed suicide by shooting himself. But however tough life must have been for Rice, he could not afford to let his audience down: the evening after Vincent’s suicide he was back onstage, singing at the disreputable Catherine Wheel.

In May 1850 Rice started a ‘singers’ republic’ at his old haunt the Grapes, in Southwark, which operated on the new business model of customers paying for entrance, with ‘free’ drink as part of the package. He shared the gate money with his fellow performers in lieu of a flat wage, and at first the enterprise was a success, with around eighty paying customers a night. But it didn’t last, and the enterprise was shelved after a mere forty-one customers turned up one late-October evening. Rice’s diary ends on the last day of 1850, when he thanks the Almighty for carrying him through undisclosed ‘difficulties’ and adds the plaintive plea that ‘things may be looking up by this time in 1851’. So far as we know, they never did.

The heyday of the free and easies ended when music hall proper began to mushroom. Even so, many continued to thrive: the King’s Head, Knightsbridge; the King and Queen, Paddington Green; the Swan, Hungerford Market; the Salmon and Compass, Pentonville; the Salmon and the New Inn, both in Borough. But they were swimming against the tide. In the hierarchy of entertainment the downmarket free and easies were near the bottom, outclassing only the lowest of the low – the penny gaffs.

It is likely that the penny gaffs were given their name by the costermongers who formed a large portion of their audience. The name was not haphazard: the price of entry was a penny, and while ‘gaff’ has many meanings, one being a cockney term for ‘place’, another is a slang term for a cockfighting pit, which in its crudeness and brutality is an apt description of the barbarous behaviour that was typical of a penny gaff.

Costermongers play a significant role in the story of music hall. Colourful, definitively working-class and instantly recognisable in their short jackets, neckerchiefs, bell-bottomed trousers and peaked caps, they were a large, close-knit community of street traders who became one of music hall’s most enduring stage personas. Entrepreneurial, resilient and streetwise, they earned their living selling fruit and vegetables, fish and shellfish in the formal and informal markets from which most working-class Londoners obtained their food. Their very name was a nod to the ‘costard’ variety of apples. Many walked the streets, selling their wares from barrows or rickety carts, earning perhaps no more than a few shillings a week.

In the 1840s it was estimated that there were about 40,000 costers in London. The social investigator Henry Mayhew gives a vivid account of a Saturday-evening market in November. The brightness was the first thing he noticed: naphtha flares, candles, gas jets, grease lamps, the fires of the chestnut-roasters. Then the noise – hundreds of traders at hundreds of stalls calling out their wares: ‘Chestnuts, a penny a score,’ ‘Three a penny, Yarmouth bloaters,’ ‘Beautiful whelks a penny a lot,’ ‘Penny a lot, fine russets,’ ‘Ho! Ho! Hi-i-i. Here’s your turnips.’ Everything cheap and of use to the poor was there: saucepans, crockery, old shoes, trays, handkerchiefs, umbrellas, shirts. ‘Go to whatever corner of the Metropolis you please,’ Mayhew noted, ‘and there is the same struggling to get a penny profit out of the poor man’s Sunday dinner.’

It is not hard to see why costers became such powerful stereotypes. They lived their lives on the streets, and were transparently masculine in their habits. Beer shops were their natural haunts: Mayhew claimed that nearly four hundred of them catered directly for costers. Gambling was endemic, and they frequently bet their stock money against a tray of pies as they waited for the wholesale markets to open. They boxed for beer and placed side bets. Bouts were short, since the winner was the first man to draw blood. Although illegal, dog fights in beer shops were also common. Ratting was popular, as was pigeon-keeping. Many of these activities found their way into the music halls and their portrayal of the coster idiom.

Dances – tup’nny hops – were also popular, particularly with women. These too were held in the beer shops, organised exclusively for costers. Music was provided by a fiddle, a harp and a cornopean – a kind of hooped trumpet, not unlike a French horn. They danced hornpipes, jigs, polkas and a kind of sword dance with tobacco pipes (presumably churchwardens) in place of swords. These dances acted as a kind of coster marriage bureau, where couples as young as fourteen could meet and decide to set up house together, sometimes on the same evening.

Marriage was rare; 90 per cent of costers cohabited. Men were free to do what they pleased, but women were expected to be faithful, and could be beaten up for even talking to the wrong man – or, it seems, for almost anything. Many women regretted the choices they made as girls. One eighteen-year-old woman had very strong opinions about coster men. ‘They’ll never go to heaven,’ she told Mayhew. ‘The lads is very insinivating, and after leaving them places [penny gaffs] will give a gal a drop of beer, and make her half tipsy, and then they makes their arrangements. I’ve often heerd the boys boasting of having ruined gals, for all the world as if they was the first noblemen in the land.’ The girls’ precarious existence at the hands of their male counterparts would be the inspiration for many a lovelorn ‘coster girl’ song.

In the process of looking at the costers and their way of life, both Henry Mayhew and his fellow social commentator J. Ewing Ritchie give us very reliable and detailed accounts of what a penny gaff would have been like. Mayhew attended one near Smithfield which he had heard was one of the least offensive. He was genuinely shocked by what he saw, even though he was more familiar than most outsiders with London’s underclass. Penny gaffs were not theatres or saloons, or even rooms in pubs, but simply shops, and usually tatty ones, that had been turned into seedy temporary theatres. Despite the shortage of space, hundreds of paying customers might be crammed into every performance, of which there could be several during a single day and evening. The audience, Mayhew reported, were ‘with few exceptions’ young people aged between eight and twenty. The front of the shop had been removed, and replaced by paintings of the performers. A band played coster tunes as the audience paid their pennies to enter under the watchful eye of a policeman detailed to keep order.

The performance lasted barely an hour. A ‘comic singer’ sang a filthy song that had the boys ‘stamping their feet with delight’ and the girls ‘screaming with enjoyment’. Another song ‘coolly described the most obscene thoughts, the most disgusting scenes’, causing a child nearby to ‘wipe away the tears that rolled down her eyes with the enjoyment of the poison’. Each crude ditty was succeeded by another, every one being rapturously applauded and encored. The boys stamped, hollered, whistled, cat-called and sang. The dancing was no better. In a ballet featuring a man dressed as a woman, and a clown, ‘the most disgusting attitudes were struck, the most immoral acts represented … here were two ruffians degrading themselves each time they stirred a limb’. The audience upset Mayhew as much as the performance. They had ‘an overpowering stench’; some ‘danced grotesquely to the admiration of lookers-on, who expressed their approbation in obscene terms’; the girls acknowledged such comments ‘with smiles and coarse repartee’.

J. Ewing Ritchie visited two penny gaffs in Shoreditch, an area rich in theatrical history. In Elizabethan times the Curtain Theatre had stood there, and public houses had staged comedies, tragedies and histories. Close by was the Britannia saloon, which still offered daily shows and would soon be converted to a full-scale music hall. In the midst of this long commitment to quality entertainment stood the penny gaff. Since the birth of the Curtain nearly three hundred years earlier, the area had changed. It was no longer open land with a view of working windmills, but crammed with squalid dwellings, public houses, pie shops, clothes marts, shoe depots and street markets. Its crowded streets provided a ready audience, but one which was able to afford only a penny for a show.

Ritchie describes a mediocre evening of low wit and poor dancing before a grubby juvenile audience, chiefly boys, but with a sprinkling of the girls with babies in their arms who were so often present at such shows. The highlight was a pastiche of The Taming of the Shrew in which the henpecked husband turns on the shrew and threatens her with a cudgel as she lies cowering at his feet. This excited roars of approval from the young audience. Ritchie loathed it, believing that similar scenes would be re-enacted later in many Shoreditch homes.

The penny gaffs did not die when music hall swept into fashion. As late as 1881, dirty and dark houses were still being used as makeshift theatres. The entertainment was still tawdry, although perhaps not as brutal or degrading as forty years earlier. The penny gaffs had little to commend them, and much that was reprehensible – but they were part of the making of music hall.

By the 1840s, the ingredients for the emergence of music hall were all present. The public had a taste for community entertainment. Catch and glee clubs had popularised participatory enjoyment. Saloon theatre had offered refined singing and dancing. Song and supper clubs and taverns had familiarised audiences with risqué evenings conducted by a chairman. Food and drink had become a key component of the entertainment experience. Nevertheless, a further impetus was needed. It would soon come, and from an unexpected source.

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The First Pioneer (#u7d2b65db-34ec-5f6b-b39e-e51127a2107f)

‘Only one quality – the best.’

CHARLES MORTON’S MOTTO

Music hall was shaped by the changing social environment, but time and the right set of circumstances were required for it to flourish.

By 1820, one quarter of the world’s population was governed from London, and Britain was evolving from a rural to an urban society. Populations in towns and cities doubled and redoubled. The search for jobs drove teeming throngs of villagers to the towns, where cheap back-to-back hovels were thrown up to house them. But there were improvements: working hours fell, and wages rose.

The choice of amusements was widening. Madame Tussaud’s waxworks opened in 1835. Hampton Court and Kew Gardens were welcoming visitors. The Henley Regatta and the Grand National were both held for the first time in 1839. Football was growing in popularity. Cricket was becoming a national institution as young William Gilbert Grace learned to bat and bowl in his Gloucestershire orchard. It was a new world that set the stage for music hall. One elusive element remained to be put in place, and Parliament was soon to enact it, albeit in muddled form. It would prove to be a catalyst for music hall.

The law and the theatre had been at loggerheads for centuries, and by 1840 the situation had become absurd. The Lord Chamberlain regulated legitimate theatre, but local magistrates were responsible for music and dancing licences. The scope for inconsistency was very wide. The patent monopoly, under which Charles II had granted Drury Lane and Covent Garden the sole right to perform drama, now included the Haymarket, which George III had added to the magic circle. To everyone other than the beneficiaries of the monopoly, this was absurd, and the law was regularly flouted. This led to ludicrous litigation, and the threat of actors being arrested for the heinous crime of performing Shakespeare. Parliament sought to impose order on this chaos, and in 1843 the Theatre Regulations Act abolished the monopoly of the patent theatres. Thereafter, anyone could stage drama if they first obtained the approval of the Lord Chamberlain.

So far, so good. But the Lord Chamberlain’s licence gave permission only to perform drama, not to serve the audience with food and drink, or to allow smoking. The alternative of a magistrate’s licence permitted eating, drinking and smoking, but did not permit the licensee to stage drama. It is clear from reading the (very limited) debates on the Bill that the legislators did not understand custom and practice in the theatres, and gave no consideration to the great diversity of performances beyond legitimate drama. The legislation succeeded only in creating confusion.

The Act was a hotchpotch. It failed to address the provision of food and drink, and left old habits and customs in place. Even the officials responsible for the law were bewildered. When the Lord Chamberlain’s representative was asked to clarify it to a Parliamentary Select Committee more than twenty years later, in 1866, he told them that ‘spirits and refreshments are not to be sold within the audience part of the theatre’, but added, ‘excepting the people who walk up and down the pit with baskets’. They were, of course, selling food and drink.

Some impresarios ignored the law. Sam Lane, who ran the Britannia on a Lord Chamberlain’s licence, sold food and drink, and allowed smoking, but was never censured. It may be that the authorities were content to leave the great unwashed of the East End alone, for if the West End theatres flouted the same rules, they were closed.

The new legislation did at least present a clear choice: an impresario could produce either drama or light entertainment. The wrong choice could mean ruin – as it did for the Grecian Saloon in City Road, when it chose drama and alienated its clientèle – whereas the right choice could mean riches.

Charles Morton’s Canterbury Arms, which opened in Lambeth in 1852, is generally regarded as the first purpose-built music hall. It set a trend that popularised the music hall genre, and was widely copied. Morton, born in Hackney in August 1819, grew up among the poor with an appetite for work and a sharp eye for detail. He saw his neighbours warm to street singers, cluster around peep shows, applaud itinerant performers and, when the pennies permitted, visit the cheaper inns and taverns. The theatre drew him like a magnet, and he attended shows whenever he had the means to do so. Aged thirteen, his first visit was to the Pavilion, Whitechapel – familiarly known as ‘the Drury Lane of the East’ – which specialised in plays catering for sailors and the large Jewish population that thronged the East End. At the nearby Old Garrick Theatre he saw the tragi-comic play Damon and Pythias, starring Charles Freear and William Gomershall, an actor famed for his comic impersonation of Napoleon. The young Charles Morton became a habitué of East End theatres, and grew familiar with public tastes.

Once his elementary education was over he worked as a tavern waiter, and saw at close quarters how entertainment and food and drink brought in the crowds. He earned extra cash, and a reputation for honesty, as a runner for the ‘list men’, the early pub-based bookmakers. At the age of twenty-one, in 1840, he became the licensee of his own pub, the St George’s tavern in Belgrave Road, Pimlico. Pimlico was a brand-spanking-new development, a world away from the East End. It was close to the pleasure gardens at Ranelagh, Cremorne and Vauxhall, where young Morton continued his education by seeing the talent available for hire.

As a licensee, Morton put all he had seen and learned into practice. His guiding principle was excellent service, food and drink, and to these he added a ‘free and easy’ room with amateur talent performing, ‘For Gentlemen Only!’, free of charge. These were common features at many taverns, but Morton’s astute business brain and engaging personality made them very attractive, and as the St George’s became more profitable he hired professional acts to lure more customers. Some of his regulars were servants at Buckingham Palace, and they invited him to dine with them in their quarters. He returned home with a tablecloth full of delicacies from the royal pantry.