by Dave Haslam
As well as his passion for demolishing partition walls, Boris Watson loved chess – he invested in a dozen chess boards and made them available to all patrons – but it was mainly a private drinking club, one of many in Soho. The strategy was to create a constitution, a committee and a membership list. English licensing laws in the 50s stipulated that pubs stopped serving at two-thirty in the afternoon, shut at three and did not reopen until seven at night, but the law could be swerved by means of private-club licences, which allowed for drinking in the afternoon and after-hours.
I explained to the staff at the Dean Street Townhouse that if they’d been here one evening in the late 1950s, the chances are there would be two jazz bands playing on the premises; up the lift in the Gargoyle there would be Alec Alexander’s band, and down the twisting stairs in the Mandrake an in-house combo, including pianist Joe Burns, Percy Borthwick on bass and Robin Jones on drums, which welcomed impromptu jazz sessions with visiting musicians.
After looking around the basement of the Townhouse, where many of the rooms are now store cupboards, Jacob took me to the top floors, where there are beautiful bedrooms and the same rich, hushed ambience as the restaurant. I didn’t tell him that after Gargoyle’s had shut, the top floor had become a strip club; if I had, I’d have felt the need to whisper it.
On an assignment for The Face late in 1982, Derek Ridgers took some photographs of people involved with Gossips, and looking at these, I realised with Cecilia that the club entrance was down the side of the building; not on Dean Street but round the corner, on Meard Street. There are two fire exits there now. It seems to be the case that the door on the left was where the lift would have been to take Stephen Tennant and friends up to his brother’s Gargoyle club, and Marc Almond up to the Batcave. And the door on the right would take you to the ground floor and down into the basement, where artists like Edward Burra might spend an afternoon dining at the Mandrake, and late in 1978 Steve Strange, peering at the outfits in the queue, would grant entry to the lucky few, down an unmarked stairwell, to a couple of dark rooms and a mirrorball.
On Meard Street we recreate the scene as best we can. Cecilia stands outside the fire exit, strikes a pose and we laugh. Jacob joins us and takes a look at the photographs. He says he’d heard from his dad it was a bit rum around these parts in the old days.
CHAPTER ONE
Bare-necked ladies, shaggy-looking Germans, everyone is drunk
Music halls 150 years ago were key buildings and major commercial businesses, frequented by thousands of regulars; the raucous, communal, mass night-time entertainment of the day, part pub and part nightclub, part circus and part talent show. They’d present onstage a mix of comic and sentimental songs, magic tricks and satirical sketches. In some of them more sensationalist entertainments were available: human freaks, tightrope walkers, troupes of Red Indians and cross-dressing singers. The story of the British music halls also includes ersatz nudity, evidence of break-dancing in Liverpool a century and a half ago, an early attempt to create a mirrorball, and the sad story of the failed escapologist.
The standard audience tended to be young workers and families, but some of the halls were said to be the centres of vice and violence, frequented by prostitutes, drunken sailors and ne’er-do-wells. There are music venues in our current era that carry a heavy vibe but I’ve never seen the likes of this sign posted outside a tavern in 1872: ‘All persons are requested, before entering the dancing saloon, to leave at the bar their pistols and knives, or any other weapon they may have about them’.
Moral guardians, local churchmen, temperance campaigners and disapproving newspaper editors kept a close watch on music halls. Their fear was that Victorian values of sobriety and respectability could be undermined by the halls; that the working class, unfortunate women, and youths might be corrupted by risqué comic songs and the occasional glimpse of female skin in an environment of heavy drinking and enlivened passions, when instead they could be working, learning or praying. One of the first music halls was the Star in Bolton, owned and run by Thomas Sharples. In the mid-1840s, on some nights, 1,500 people would attend his venue, but his business suffered a setback after a fire in 1851. Having started work on the repair and rebuild, Sharples set a reopening date but his application for a new licence was opposed by some local religious groups, who petitioned the magistrates to deny a licence not just to the Star but to all other singing saloons in the town, claiming that they were ‘flood-gates of vice and licentiousness’.
In most parts of Britain there are still buildings that reveal a little of their past as a music hall, especially ones built in the late Victorian or Edwardian eras. Of those built earlier, there are several where elements of the facade of the building remains, for example the Gaiety Music Hall on Nelson Street in Newcastle upon Tyne where, visible from the street, above the door is a tablet inscribed ‘MUSIC HALL 1838’. In the case of the Alexandra Music Hall in Canterbury, built in 1850, with a variety of uses since – including some time as a shop and a current life as a student-friendly pub called the Penny Theatre – the basic layout and structure of the music hall is still apparent.
Some mid-nineteenth-century music halls didn’t last longer than a decade or two. As well as at the Star in Bolton in 1851, there were dozens of fires, including at the Surrey Music Hall in Sheffield (1865) and St James’s Hall in Liverpool (1875). Sometimes the halls were rebuilt, but some couldn’t fight off increased competition or closed in the early twentieth century when other forms of entertainment arrived (the cinema and the wireless). In the last hundred years, of course, venues of all kinds have been destroyed by German bombs, and property developers.
Of those venues that are more extensively intact, Hoxton Hall in London and the Britannia Panopticon Music Hall in Glasgow are two surviving mid-nineteenth-century music halls, but both are in a parlous state and engaged in fundraising for much-needed restoration work; both offer visitor tours and occasionally hold events. Two more have received Heritage Lottery Fund payouts, which have enabled them to carry out repairs and refurbishment: Wilton’s in London and the City Varieties in Leeds (the City Varieties also received over £5m from Leeds City Council). Both of these also offer guided tours and visits.
The City Varieties, like many of the first music halls, evolved out of existing ad hoc musical activity in a pub, in this case the White Swan, which had been established in 1760 and served drink and food. The pub had a function room above the bar which hosted informal ‘free-and-easies’, a traditional feature in all sorts of pubs when customers and enthusiastic amateurs would gather and entertain each other with songs. These were often accompanied by a piano and presided over by a ‘chairman’, a master of ceremonies who, in most cases, had a little wooden mallet with which he rapped for order before announcing the next singer. Other informal outbreaks of carousing and sing-songs would occur in pubs, of course. Travelling players might show up, carrying perhaps fiddles or tambourines, or musicians touring with a fair, or street performers on a night out would visit.
Sometime around 1857 Charles Thornton became the licensee of the White Swan, and after just a few years he was encouraged to construct a music hall as an attachment to the pub. He did this in an ambitious fashion, creating a 2,000-capacity room with a high stage at one end and a gallery at the other, rows of benches along the walls and a few tables and chairs at ground level.
The City Varieties is on Swan Street, which runs between Lands Lane and Briggate, a narrow street and perhaps not easy to find. If you approach from Lands Lane you’ll see Swan Street running down the side of Betfred. From Briggate, look out for the Ann Summers shop and you’ll see Swan Street. Grace is the member of staff from the City Varieties who leads the tours; she knows the place well, having first visited the hall fifteen years ago when she signed up in the youth theatre there. The tour I attended on a brisk Wednesday morning was sold out. There were twenty-six of us, and it was busier than Ann Summers (even though they had a sale on). One couple told Grace they b
ought tickets for the pantomime every year, but the rest of us were first-timers.
People have been going out and getting drunk and tracking down pleasure and entertainment for hundreds of years. In London, by the 1840s, the range of venues where music was part of the entertainment included outdoor pleasure gardens like the Cremorne, or supper clubs like the one run by W.C. Evans on King Street, on the edge of Covent Garden. Pubs had long been a traditional feature of life in hamlets, villages, towns and ports of Britain, as were street entertainments, theatres, taverns and brothels. Some venues blurred definitions between, for example, taverns and brothels. St George’s Tavern in Belgrave Road, Pimlico, would regularly feature men-only free-and-easies in the pub’s function room: women who were invited to attend were most likely ‘daughters of joy’, as prostitutes were sometimes called.
What was new in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century was the rapid growth of new industrial towns like Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and elsewhere. Families from rural villages, Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Europe, looked to find work in the new manufacturing industries, the factories, the mills. Manchester, for example, grew from a small market town of 48,000 people to a bursting metropolis of 455,000 in the space of fifty years (1801 to 1851).
The 1851 census revealed that for the first time in British history more people were living in towns and cities than in the countryside. Owing to this mass migration, the poor living conditions and the unregulated factories, most areas of many cities were chaotic and unhinged. The urban poor were rootless, strangers, worked to the bone; for these reasons, there was a widespread and almost desperate demand for night-time entertainment in the 1830s and 1840s. In addition, in 1851 around half the entire population was under twenty years old. Like each and every single, active, young person of every generation, the wish of the young Victorians was not to be kept inside the house, but to seek pleasure, and partners. This urban working class, these new communities, were looking for hedonism, sensation and escape.
To help meet this demand, the Theatres Act of 1843 relaxed the rules governing places of entertainment, especially entertainment on licensed premises. Some informal campaigning had been going on. In 1840 Sam Lane was running the Union Saloon in Shoreditch, east London, which despite not being licensed as a theatre was offering onstage entertainments, including sketches and songs. When the authorities prosecuted and fined him, he led a demonstration march, challenging the authorities with the slogan ‘Freedom for the people’s amusements’.
The Theatres Act triggered a sharp rise in the number of pubs building stages and offering not just free-and-easies but more formally organised live performances, or setting up designated ‘music saloons’ in adjacent rooms of buildings. The owner of the St George’s Tavern, Charles Morton, took over the Canterbury Arms off Westminster Bridge Road and, after operating it for a number of years as one of the first music halls in the country, in 1856 refurbished it to the tune of £25,000. Audiences flocked there to hear patriotic or comic songs, and marvel at acrobats, magicians and the likes of Dan Rice the Clown (‘And His Wonderful Performing Dogs’).
Not all music halls were on the scale of the ones built by Charles Morton or Charles Thornton; many weren’t much more than an add-on or a function room. Writer R.J. Broadbent documented the Liverpool music halls of the nineteenth century in his book Annals of the Liverpool Stage, and while a number of music halls were respectably conducted in Liverpool, from his writing it’s clear there were others of a more or less disreputable kind. Broadbent describes an un-named music hall on Williamson Square which appears to have been some kind of pick-up joint, with a less than sophisticated musical offering: ‘After ascending a flight of very rickety stairs we reach the concert-room – a long, narrow apartment in a filthy state. Congregated round the bar inside are a number of bare-necked, lightly dressed girls, women and foreign sailors, all in various stages of intoxication.’
The author also visits the more respectable Parthenon Music Saloon run by J.G. Stoll on Great Charlotte Street, also in Liverpool. The doors of the Parthenon opened at 6.30 p.m. and the programme of entertainments commenced at 7 p.m. As with other big halls, acts had a certain slot they were contracted to fill for a designated amount of time, which was advertised in a printed programme. In this era in most singing saloons and early music halls there was no admission charge as such, but customers gained admittance by buying a refreshment ticket for perhaps 3d (about 1p) which they would then exchange at the bar for drinks. At some venues, waiters would take orders for drinks and young lads would walk the floor with cigars and programmes for sale.
Along with Thomas Sharples and J.G. Stoll, by the end of the 1840s there were numerous venue owners in the provinces who already had thriving music-hall-style businesses, including John Balmbra in Newcastle. Balmbra’s was opened on the first floor of the Wheatsheaf public house and became a landmark in the town. It was there that George ‘Geordie’ Ridley performed the song ‘Blaydon Races’ in 1862. It’s still sung on Tyneside today. The opening verse includes the lines, ‘I took the bus from Balmbra’s and she was heavy-laden / Away we went along Collingwood Street, that’s on the road to Blaydon.’
The music hall and theatre world at the time was lively enough to sustain a magazine, The Era, concerned with matters theatrical and associated interests (including the licensed trade). A notice in The Era on 12 March 1865 carried an advertisement for Thornton’s Music Hall promising an ‘Astounding Array of Novelties’. Top of the bill on the opening night was Herr Schalkenbach, who had invented what he called ‘the extraordinary Piano Orchestra Electro Moteur’. It ended up being a lifetime’s work for Herr Schalkenbach, building and perfecting his early version of an electric organ, a very large construction (about the height of two pianos) which had the means to create whooshing sounds and percussion with drums, cymbals and gongs. He toured the invention, later appearing at the Metropolitan Music Hall in Paddington, Crystal Palace and elsewhere. Even more ahead of his time, this one-man Kraftwerk created a soundtrack to an imaginary shipwreck and devised a light show to complement the music he made. His act was deemed to be ‘vastly impressive’ by one reviewer.
The structure of the Leeds City Varieties is pretty much as it was when it was built by Charles Thornton. The sightlines even from the upper gallery are good, although when the venue was packed you’d expect to be jostling for position. According to The Era, there was also a spacious retiring room for the performers and a suite of dressing rooms immediately behind the stage. Grace takes us backstage, where the walls are covered with health and safety advice.
Although the structure and layout remain the same, much of what we see on the City Varieties tour are later additions, including the furnishings, the carpet, the gold leaf on the balcony fascia and the sturdy wooden chairs in the stalls at a comfortable angle. It was more basic when it first opened and Herr Schalkenbach played his electro piano; the venue was upgraded with the addition of balconies down the side and theatre-style seating later in the nineteenth century. Most of the changes were made after Charles Thornton leased the hall to John Stansfield (and ploughed his money into a retail arcade just down the road instead, an arcade that’s still in operation), and then when Thomas Dunford took over (it was during his tenure that, in 1894, the name was changed to the City Varieties). It enjoyed another upgrade in 1898 when it was bought by Fred Wood. Billiards and supper rooms were attached. The following year the ‘Clog Dancing Championship of the World’ took place at the City Varieties.
Upgrades of this sort were common among music halls in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, partly because, after fires and other disasters, the authorities were demanding improvements. But also proprietors hoped that by smartening up the venues and making them more comfortable they might attract a more bourgeois, wealthier audience. The recent work at the City Varieties has concentrated on returning the venue to an approximation of how it might have been in 1900 rather than back to its earliest days. You can see the wisdom in
the decision; it’s now a very comfortable, working theatre, having featured in the recent past magicians and tribute bands, as well as the annual pantomime.
Grace asks us to imagine what this fine and gilded auditorium would have looked like in the hall’s first phase, in the 1860s, before the Heritage Lottery Fund, before the various Victorian refurbishments, and without the gold-leaf balcony adornments, the theatre seating and the swirly carpet. She explained that in the late 1860s, despite the spectacular entertainment, by today’s standards the venue was at the very roughest end of rough and ready, with a wooden floor covered with sawdust to absorb dirt, spilled alcohol and, it seems, much worse. There would be a few tables scattered around, chairs, some stools. ‘It would be different, very different,’ Grace tells us. ‘There’d be drink sloshing around and people standing, chatting, calling out to each other, it would be packed, noisy.’ And then she points up to the lower of the two balconies: ‘Young men who were up there would occasionally relieve themselves over the balcony onto the people below.’
Grace repeats the phrase ‘rough and ready’ a few times, referring to the hall, but life in general for the working class in Leeds and elsewhere was rough and ready. In those boom towns with their rapidly growing populations, housing was a mess, with gross overcrowding, insanitary conditions and exploitation by landlords. The working poor were inhabiting a cross between the Wild West and a shanty town.
Law makers were playing catch-up – the provisions of the Theatre Act reflected that, as did initiatives in the workplace that belatedly attempted to regulate working conditions and hours of work. The Factory Act of 1847 limited a working day for women and children to ten hours and the Factory Act of 1850 closed some loopholes and, among other things, formalised standard practice in the textile districts like Manchester that all work would end on Saturday at 2 p.m.
