My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall

Better, far better it is to let

Liberals and Tories alone you bet,

Unless you’re willing and anxious to get

Two lovely black eyes.

On the strength of this song Coborn became a much-sought-after act, and was soon booked into long engagements at the Trocadero and the Pavilion. His stage persona was a fortuitous fit with his only other great hit, ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. Written by Fred Gilbert in April 1892, it was based on the exploits of a serial fraudster, Charles Wells, who managed to ‘faire sauter la banque’ – literally ‘blow up the bank’ – at a marathon session at the gaming tables of Café de Paris Casino, Monte Carlo, in July 1891.* (#litres_trial_promo) To add spice to the tale, the £4,000 Wells used to bet with was fraudulently obtained through a scam. He is said to have won twenty-three times from thirty spins of the wheel, making a million francs. The casino was convinced he had used a system, but Wells merely shrugged his shoulders and said it was a lucky streak. He later returned to the Café de Paris, but his luck had run out. He was accused of defrauding investors in a marine engineering swindle, convicted of fraud at the Old Bailey and sentenced to eight years in jail in 1892. Subsequent frauds committed in France led to a further five years’ imprisonment, and he died penniless in Paris in 1926. But Gilbert’s song achieved immortality for both Wells and Coborn.

As a performer whose act was based on a drunken man, Coborn was the perfect exponent of a song based on the louche milieu of Monte Carlo. Onstage he wore a rakishly-set top hat, tailcoat, watch chain, buttonhole, immaculate dickie, monocle and well-groomed handlebar moustache, set off perfectly by his nearly off-balance stance, faraway look and expansive gesticulations. An airily held cheroot and splayed-out fingers completed the look of a man not quite in charge of all his faculties. We are left in no doubt about the affluence of the singer:

I’ve just got here, through Paris, from the sunny southern shore;

I to Monte Carlo went, just to raise my winter’s rent

Dame Fortune smiled upon me as she’d never done before,

And I’ve now such lots of money, I’m a gent

Yes, I’ve now such lots of money, I’m a gent.

The chorus echoes still:

As I walk along the Bois Boolong

With an independent air

You can hear the girls declare

‘He must be a millionaire.’

You can hear them sigh and wish to die,

You can see them wink the other eye

At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.

Coborn sang of affluence onstage, and exercised influence offstage. He was joint founder of the Music Hall Benevolent Fund, set up in 1888 to help performers in distress, and in the early twentieth century he was a firm supporter of the Variety Artists’ Federation. He remained a devoted adherent of the Scottish Kirk throughout his long life.

Coborn sang his two most famous songs thousands of times, in many languages, for over half a century, but he was never able to repeat their success. He slipped from the top of the bill – and often, off the bill – but he sang on, enjoying a career of sufficient length for him to entertain troops in three wars – the Boer War and both World Wars – before dying at home in Paddington in 1945, aged ninety-three.

‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’ was an example of one of the first definable genres of British music hall: the ‘swell’ song. In many ways these were a powerful illustration of the gentrification sought by early entrepreneurs like Charles Morton. Artistes like the Great Vance, George Leybourne, G.H. MacDermott, Arthur Lloyd and Harry Rickards dominated bills in the early days of the halls, and became known as ‘lions comiques’, a term attributed to J.J. Poole, manager of the South London Music Hall.

Gloriously aping their social betters, ‘swells’ were the theatrical peacocks of their day, swaggering around the stage in spats, sporting monocles and outrageous suits of garish cloth. Nearly all the lions comiques – in essence, comic singers – adopted variants of this dress, and wore ‘Dundreary’ whiskers (also known as ‘Piccadilly Weepers’), absurdly long ‘lambchop’ sideburns, often a foot in length.

The inspiration for these adornments came from the stage actor Edward Askew Sothern, who deployed them in his performance of the dim, ineffectual ‘toff’ Lord Dundreary in Tom Taylor’s 1858 play Our American Cousin.† (#litres_trial_promo) This simple physical shorthand was also used to identify dudes, swells and mashers, and many in the audience came to believe that this was how the socially elevated looked and behaved.

Some of the young men in the audience took inspiration from the stage swells. Their songs told of undreamed-of sophistication and idleness. They sang of free-flowing champagne, fine food, beautiful girls and late nights in fashionable districts of London and Paris. It was a heady ideal for the clerks and drapers’ assistants who were among the habitués of music hall.

Alfred ‘the Great’ Vance was one of the first swells to come to prominence, and with George Leybourne he can be credited with pioneering the swell style. Vance was born Alfred Peek Stevens in 1839, and, like Charles Coborn and ‘coster laureate’ Albert Chevalier, he came from a middle- rather than a working-class background. Unable to settle in his job as a solicitor’s clerk, he began a career on the stage in the early 1850s. At first he played clowns in pantomime, before turning to music hall, touring all over the country in second-rate halls while creating and refining a multi-character one-man show. Like many others, he adopted a black-face act in 1860, appearing with his brother billed as ‘Alfred G. and C. Vance – Negro Comedians’. He went solo four years later at the South London Palace, singing mainly ‘coster’-style songs, years before the term was widely used.

Vance was an accomplished dancer – although a school of dancing he had opened in Liverpool had failed – and his experience on the legitimate stage made him a formidable character actor. Unlike many contemporaries, he changed costume for every characterisation. This led him to advertise the merits of his tailor, no doubt for a discount on purchases, in his first hit, ‘Chickaleary Cove’. His move upmarket to the ‘swell’ persona, at the other extreme of the performance demographic, occurred shortly after – and possibly as a response to – the rise in popularity of George Leybourne. Vance soon enjoyed a huge success with ‘Slap Bang’, a nonsensical song that became a lifelong signature tune for him.

George Leybourne, born Joe Saunders in Gateshead in 1842, came from humbler stock than Vance. Having trained as a mechanic, he gave up the security of that job to go onstage. He built a local reputation as a performer, and after being spotted performing in Manchester he was brought to London in 1864 by the agent Charles Adolphus Roberts.

Unlike Alfred Vance, George Leybourne was a superstar. The historian Harold Scott argued that, together with Marie Lloyd and Dan Leno, he held ‘a supreme place in music hall history’. That is a contentious claim, but it is evident that contemporary opinion idolised him. He was variously billed as ‘Lion of the Day’ then ‘Lion of a Comic’, and finally, in the name that stuck, the original ‘Lion Comique’.

It was during an engagement at Collins’ Music Hall in Islington in 1865 that Leybourne met Alfred Lee, who wrote his first hit, ‘Chang, the Chinese Giant’, for him. When he performed the song on stilts at the Canterbury, the astute William Holland, who had taken over managing the theatre from Charles Morton, saw an opportunity to create a megastar. He booked Leybourne for an entire year from June 1868, and relentlessly promoted him as the quintessential swell. The long-legged Leybourne was slender, handsome and charming, with a fine baritone voice, and Holland dressed him in smartly tailored suits, along with hats, gloves, cane and winder (an eyeglass), and arranged for him to be taken everywhere in a brougham.

Vance and Leybourne enjoyed a friendly rivalry, often working with the same teams of writers and composers, especially Frank Green and Alfred Lee, and appearing on the same bills. They also shared the same song publisher, the British and American Music Publishing Company. A song would be written for one of them and responded to by the other, often using the same team of writers. Following Leybourne’s 1866 smash hit ‘Champagne Charlie’ – he favoured Moët – (music by Alfred Lee and lyrics by Leybourne), Vance came back in 1867 with ‘Clicquot’ (written by Green and Jules Rivière), to which Leybourne replied in 1868 with ‘Cool Burgundy Ben’ (written by Green and Lee).

While ‘Champagne Charlie’ was a hit, William Holland of the Canterbury persuaded the makers of Moët to supply endless quantities of their product, which Leybourne was seen to drink at all times: ‘Moët’s vintage only satisfied the champagne swell’, as it says in the song. It was superb advertising for Moët, and for Leybourne:

Whenever I’m going upon the spree,

Moët & Chandon’s the wine for me.

Vance’s ‘Walking in the Zoo’ tells of a ‘swell’ taking his alluring ‘cousin’ to the zoo, only to have his amorous intentions foiled by a bite from a cockatoo. Leybourne responded with ‘Lounging at the Aq[uarium]’ (by Lee). Their rivalry served them both well – much like the insults traded between Bing Crosby and Bob Hope over half a century later. ‘Walking in the Zoo’ was soon forgotten, but its abbreviation of ‘zoological’ added a new word to the English language, just one indication of the influence of music hall on popular culture. The expression ‘OK’ also made an early appearance in the same song.

Leybourne and Vance continued to trade song for song, with Leybourne’s ‘The Dark Girl Dressed in Blue’ responded to by Vance’s ‘The Fair Girl Dressed in Check’. Vance wrote several of his own songs, but also collaborated with both Green and Lee to produce songs like ‘The Naughty Young Man’, ‘Idol of the Day’ and ‘May the Present Moment be the Worst of Your Lives’. Similarly, Leybourne collaborated with Lee to produce ‘Sweet Isabella’ and the enduring hit, which offered a new phrase to the English language, ‘The [Daring Young Man on the] Flying Trapeze’, written as a tribute to Jules Léotard.

Leybourne was so popular that he sometimes played six halls a night, and had to plead with audiences to allow him to leave the stage to keep to schedule. Jenny Hill, his friend and contemporary, said he had ‘a curious faculty for filling a stage’. He had a faculty for filling his pockets, too. At the height of his fame he was earning the unheard-of sum of £120 a week at the Canterbury. Unfortunately, having filled his pockets, he emptied them, spending as much as he earned on hangers-on and high living, and helping to pay the bills of acquaintances who were poor or sick.

Like all the lions comiques, Leybourne sang topical songs. Apart from ‘The Flying Trapeze’ there was ‘Zazel’ (about the Great Farini’s human cannonball act) and ‘Up in a Balloon’ (ballooning was a hugely popular attraction at the time), both written by G.W. Hunt. Sometimes he cast aside his lion comique manner and sang sentimental and dramatic songs and ballads in a rich baritone – often to the surprise of an audience unaware of the depth of his talent.

Inevitably, the hard-living swell persona he was forced to adopt rubbed off on Leybourne. He drank too much, too often, with too many ‘friends’. By the 1880s his star had begun to wane, although his money continued to be spent recklessly. After a spell as a double act with his daughter Florrie – who married Albert Chevalier – he died aged forty-two in 1884, penniless and understandably bitter about false friends. One of his last hits was ‘Ting Ting, That’s How the Bell Goes’. This song, set in a tea shop, led early music hall historian McQueen-Pope to suggest ironically that ‘Maybe the tea killed him.’ But it didn’t. It was the fame.

Vance never quite hit the heights of Leybourne, but he was a regular bill-topper who remained popular throughout his all-too-short life. He died onstage from a heart attack at the Sun Music Hall, Knightsbridge, on Boxing Day 1888. He was only forty-nine.

Another performer gifted at satirising the upper-class toff was ‘the Great’ MacDermott, a specialist in topical comment. Born John Farrell in London in 1845, he worked as a labourer before joining the navy, where he learned to entertain his shipmates. He could dance and sing, wrote plays (including a version of Dickens’ unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood), and appeared on the legitimate stage before turning to music hall. He developed a ‘swell’ persona, and styled himself ‘the Statesman of the Halls’.

MacDermott was often unpopular with managers because of his tendency towards vulgarity, but he is mostly remembered for singing the G.W. Hunt song ‘By Jingo’, which was intended to move public opinion in favour of intervention in the Turkish–Russian conflict of 1877–78. The song proved so influential it merited a leader in The Times and was quoted in the House of Commons. When MacDermott harangued the Liberal leadership in songs like ‘W.E.G.’s in a State of Lunacy’ (W.E.G. being William Gladstone), there were rumours he was funded by the Conservative Party. There is no evidence for this, and it is unlikely. Music hall audiences were often Conservative – the Conservatives under Disraeli had cut the hours of work, while Gladstone’s Liberals had cut the hours of drink. ‘By Jingo’ famously popularised the word ‘jingoism’, although it was not a new word – as has been suggested – but had been in use for many years.

We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do.

We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!

We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,

The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

Whatever MacDermott’s politics may have been, the song shows the power of a good tune and catchy lyrics. In his book The Psychology of Jingoism (1901), J.A. Hobson commented on this phenomenon: ‘A gradual debasement of popular art … has raised … the music hall to [a] most powerful instrument … Its words and melodies pass by quick magic from the Empire or the Alhambra over the length and breadth of the land, re-echoed in a thousand provincial halls, clubs, drinking saloons, until the remotest village is familiar with air and sentiment.’

MacDermott was a natural to sing the topical songs written by Fred Gilbert – already famous for ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’ – and neither man shied from political controversy. In 1885, when the Liberal MP for Chelsea Sir Charles Dilke was accused of having an affair with his sister-in-law and her nineteen-year-old sister, it was too good an opportunity for Gilbert and MacDermott to pass over. ‘Charlie Dilke Upset the Milk’ was their far-from-subtle commentary on the scandalous divorce case. The judgement partly absolved Dilke, but after a press campaign continued to stress his impropriety he went to court to clear his name. After a merciless cross-examination he lost the case, and was ruined, ensuring that the song became a phenomenon:

Master Dilke upset the milk

When taking it home to Chelsea;