by Dave Haslam
Some workers in the textile, mining and other industries would absent themselves on some or all Mondays. This wasn’t covered by law or regulations, it was simply custom in certain districts. This day off was dubbed ‘St Monday’ and would follow a Saturday payday and a night on the town. In some cases workers who’d grown up in rural or other traditions were resistant to regimented regular work imposed by mechanised manufacturing industries and given the choice between earning a few extra pennies or a day off, took the time off, especially if they were being paid piecework and could earn the money back by increasing their productivity another day. Some just wanted to enjoy drinking time. A royal commission on employment in 1842 found that Mondays in mining communities were ‘chiefly spent by the adults in intemperance or recovering from the effects of it, or sometimes mere physical repose’.
Sunday evening offered an extra chance for some carousing. Angus Bethune Reach toured Manchester and the surrounding districts, documenting the lives of the working poor, working hard, playing hard. There’s both fear and exhilaration in his account of being out on the Oldham Road one Sunday evening in 1849: ‘The public houses and gin shops were roaring full. The whole street rung with shouting, screaming and swearing, mingled with the jarring music of half a dozen bands.’
On corners or near markets, passers-by would be entertained by street performers, including singers with a surprisingly wide repertoire. One of the public houses Angus Bethune Reach may have visited that evening was the George & Dragon on Swan Street, where the entertainment included songs known as ‘broadsides’, often songs with a local connection, like ‘Manchester’s Improving Daily’, and ‘The Manchester Town Hall Waltz’.
The liveliness of music-filled nights out in public houses and the fast-growing variety of local, comic and romantic songs were easily transferable into more formal music hall programmes. In addition, performers and proprietors incorporated such pieces as Rossini’s overture to the opera William Tell and selections from the operatic works of Vincenzo Bellini in their programmes. In fact, some pieces from the classical canon became well known to almost everyone, even the street urchins, thanks to choirs, bands, organ grinders and street performers.
While the working class visited music halls and pub function rooms and experienced music and dancing on the street, the well-to-do had private clubs, charity balls and events in private houses. Thomas De Quincey came from a comparatively well-off family, who were wealthy enough to live among green fields two miles outside Manchester. He was an enthusiastic opium user and published Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1821. He would go to the opera or to music recitals at least once a week, carrying with him small tinctures of laudanum (a solution of crude opium in alcohol). He called these ‘portable ecstasies’ and said they enhanced his experience of listening to music.
De Quincey recalled having stones thrown at him by street urchins on his way to school, but apart from that there was very little interaction between the social classes. All had their own entertainments, traditions, venues. There was talk that the Alexandra in Manchester attracted sons of factory owners and wealthy merchants but it was assumed they were there for the prostitutes rather than the music performances.
The landowning aristocracy had been the unchallenged power in Britain but the factory owners and the wealthy merchants were new money, the bosses in the new world of large-scale industrial manufacturing. The new wealth in Leeds was in the hands of the mine-owners, the merchants and the textile barons. Taking as a model those London haunts of the ruling class, like Boodle’s and the Carlton Club, two houses on Albion Square were procured and, in 1852, opened as a prestigious gentlemen’s club; it was a meeting place for the town’s leading business and professional men, with a lavish classical interior including coffee, smoking and dining rooms, and a ballroom. It was all very different to Thornton’s Music Hall, 200 yards away.
In London, much of the social scene of the rich and aristocratic revolved around ‘coming out’, the formalised structure by which unmarried young female debutantes would be launched into the world in order to attract prospective husbands. The process took place during a ‘season’ of dinner parties, court occasions and gala balls. During the Regency and early Victorian era, the season ran from just after Easter to the end of June, but later in the nineteenth century it shifted a little and reached through to 12 August, the Glorious Twelfth as it is known, the start of the shooting season. At this point it was expected that the aristocracy and the gentry would have left London and taken themselves off to their country homes; the single men would put the search for a wife on hold and go hunting for red grouse instead.
The young ladies were expected to deport themselves in very particular and controlled ways, not just at the dances but at all times. They’d be accompanied by a chaperone (usually an older female relative) and were expected to be elegant and to have what Lord Byron called ‘a floating balance of accomplishment’, including the ability to ride a horse, and perhaps to be able to play the piano or to sing. There were rituals and rules for every situation, including those when, in the company of her chaperone, a young lady might chance upon a male. A well-brought-up young lady (and by implication a potential wife) was expected never to look back after anyone in the street, or catch the eye of a man at a social event, or at church, or the theatre.
It was a relentless few months for the young ladies during the season, when they would be attending three or four parties every night and arriving home at dawn. As with all grand balls and private dances, there were strict conventions covering who could dance with whom, how often, and in what way men and women could observe each other or converse. The liberties of the young ladies, on the face of it, were few, but a little bit of assertive behaviour was acceptable within clearly defined boundaries. For example, a young lady could engage in flirtation at a dance, by use of her fan. If she was to fan herself slowly, it was a sign she was engaged or otherwise unavailable. A fast fan indicated she was independent and not spoken for. A fan shut indicated there was no chance of an encounter, but on the other hand, a deliberate, repetitive opening and shutting of her fan was a very positive come-on. As in any era, you wouldn’t want to send or read the signals wrongly.
The aristocracy liked to feel virtuous but usually preferred to combine philanthropy with some pleasure, some conspicuous consumption and a chance to see and be seen. Not just during the season, but year-round and in all towns, there would be glitzy charity events. In April 1845 a grand fancy-dress ball, in aid of the funds for the formation of public baths and washhouses in Manchester, was held in the Free Trade Hall. According to one account: ‘The display was very picturesque and made a great impression.’ It continued to be the case that most nights out dancing for the well-to-do would be mainly dinner dances in grand halls, or special or charity ticketed balls.
In stark contrast to those nightlife venues where there was a value to being noticed, parading and being part of a glittering high-society occasion, there were other nightlife venues that preferred to be out of sight, including those where gambling or prostitution were a feature. The most extreme example of hidden venues were those where homosexual and cross-dressing men would meet in secret; taverns with function rooms, or select and secret coffee houses, or private homes known as molly houses. The molly houses made every attempt to stay away from the public gaze as they were genuinely outside the law and fraught with danger, given that sodomy was not only illegal but carried the death penalty (it remained a capital offence until 1861).
Rictor Norton in his book Mother Clap’s Molly House tells the story of one famous molly house on Field Lane in Holborn, one of the estimated 200 or so operating in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Margaret Clap (aka ‘Mother Clap’) rented out rooms to tenants and provided food, drink and entertainment. The social and cultural aspect of Mother Clap’s seems to have been important to her and her visitors (other venues were probably not much more than male brothels).
One Sunday evenin
g in February 1726 forty customers were arrested in a raid on Mother Clap’s premises. Police investigations had included a number of undercover constables infiltrating the network. At the subsequent trial, the evidence of one, a Constable Samuel Stevens, was key. He reported that ‘Sometimes they would sit in one another’s laps, kissing in a lewd manner and using their hands indecently. Then they would get up, dance and make curtsies, and mimic the voices of women.’ Of those arrested, three men were found guilty of sodomy and were hanged (Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin and Thomas Wright). The history of molly houses is littered with similar moments, raids and executions, including a raid in 1810 on a pub in Vere Street, to the west of Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. In addition to activities and parties similar to those at Mother Clap’s, it was said that there a homosexual priest, the Reverend John Church, presided over ‘gay marriages’ at the venue. As a result of the Vere Street raid, two men were hanged for sodomy.
To avoid the gaze of the public and police, there were strategies gay men and women developed as the nineteenth century progressed: secret networks, drag balls in private houses or function rooms hired often under false pretences. On Friday 24 September 1880 the Temperance Hall at Hulme Place on York Street in Hulme, just to the south of Manchester city centre, was hired under the name of the Pawnbrokers’ Assistants’ Association. Unbeknown to the steward managing the hall, in reality the event was an assembly of men attending a party. Some of the forty-seven men there were dressed in ‘fantastical fashion’, according to later press reports, and almost half ‘in the garb of women’. The party was raided at two o’clock in the morning and all the men present were arrested.
The following day in court it was revealed that Detective Sergeant Jerome Caminada and the men in his charge in Manchester had instigated undercover surveillance of various assembly rooms since the previous Christmas. The drag ball organisers at the Temperance Hall had done all they could to ensure their privacy; most of the windows had been covered over with calico or paper. Caminada and his men used a ladder to look through a high window at the back of the building to espy the assembly for several hours, until the nature of the proceedings were confirmed to the police.
The police also gained knowledge of the secret code to access the drag ball – seven knocks, followed by the password ‘sister’. They rushed in, along with a group of local men enlisted by the police for the evening, and after a few brief struggles the arrests were made. Most of the attendees were from Manchester and Salford, including a waiter from Weaste and a stonemason from Lower Broughton. Nine men had travelled across the Pennines from Sheffield. One of the witnesses told Mr Cobbett (prosecuting on behalf of the police) and the magistrates, that the dancing he witnessed at the party was too indecent and disgusting to describe. Mr Cobbett said that everything pointed to the event being ‘one of the foulest orgies that ever disgraced any town’.
On the surface the police action seems heavy-handed, the language grim, but curiously, as the court proceeded, the magistrates and Mr Cobbett appeared to engineer the least draconian outcome, pressing for leniency. Despite acting on behalf of the police Mr Cobbett suggested a ‘mild outcome’ and, taking his advice, the magistrates decided merely to have the partygoers bound over for twelve months. None of the most extreme charges were laid, and the private lives of the accused remained unexplored. It could be that some of the accused were known in the wider community and were being protected from a long drawn-out trial or that the authorities had decided Manchester needed to hide the scandal as best it could. Whether Caminada felt he’d got an appropriate result after nine months of surveillance and a major use of manpower is another matter.
Such was the division and ignorance between classes, even though music halls weren’t hidden away out of necessity as molly houses were, they were in effect unseen by the upper echelons of society; or at least, if acknowledged, considered part of an underworld they’d not venture to. News of how the working poor would be entertained would reach the wider world through newspaper reports of fires or disasters, when coverage would be marked by a shock that such places were doing a roaring trade in the middle of the city, frequented (as the papers would have it) by women, young men, and ‘street Arabs’.
The activities and audiences at the music halls were often caught up in ongoing debates regarding drunkenness, although it was really only working-class intemperance that was considered problematic and targeted by a number of mainly failed initiatives. These included the Beerhouse Act, passed during the reign of William IV in 1830, which aimed to wean the populace off their ever-increasing desire for gin by encouraging beer drinking instead. So the act maintained controls on the sale of spirits but, for a payment of two guineas, allowed anyone to set up as a beerhouse with little or no regulation. Dozens of premises opened. An eyewitness at the time noted the carnage that ensued: ‘The new Beer Act has begun its operations. Everyone is drunk. Those who are not singing are sprawling.’
In music hall venues, where shouting and drunkenness were the norm, performers could struggle to get the attention of the audience and there was always room, as Grace at the City Varieties says, for ‘an act that was eye-catching’. For the working poor – with a routine pretty much consisting of, wake up, work in a factory or mill or workshop all day, go home, eat a sugar sandwich, go to bed, wake up, go to work, go home, eat a sugar sandwich – when a Saturday night came round they were ready for something totally bizarre, out of the ordinary. Many music halls were designed so that trapeze and high-wire acts could perform, and music hall proprietors often booked so-called ‘freak show’ performers like Siamese twins and Anna Swan, the Nova Scotia giantess. At the Surrey Music Hall in Sheffield, Thomas Youdan had a penchant for presenting performing dogs.
Music hall songs would cover subjects including life in the local town, the world of work, and love and marriage (depictions oscillating wildly between sentimental portrayals of true love and cynical songs about hen-pecked husbands, and between bawdy tales of extramarital affairs and censorious denunciations of adultery). During the nineteenth century there was much public sympathy for the plight of old and wounded soldiers. According to one historian, when singer Charlie Godfrey began performing a sketch about a neglected old soldier forced to beg, ‘The War Office took steps to have the sketch “barred” as it threatened to be “prejudicial to recruiting”.’
Generally (and for good reasons), commercial operators, required to apply annually to renew their licence, avoided antagonising the authorities. These realities partly explain the conservative nature of music hall songs. It was as if there were tacitly agreed parameters: songs about poverty were popular, but songs proposing radical solutions to poverty or inequality weren’t. Concern at the plight of old soldiers notwithstanding, most songs about Britain at war were unfalteringly patriotic. Audiences had paid their hard-earned cash and left their woes at home; they wanted to be entertained.
Later in the nineteenth century, among the performers who toured nationally, many of the most popular were those who incorporated stock characters into their act. The halls generally dealt in caricatures, like the shy maiden and the gruesome mother-in-law. Actor/comedian George Leybourne became nationally known for his portrayal of ‘Champagne Charlie’, a parody of an idle, hedonistic posh boy. One of the biggest stars of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods was Vesta Tilley, who began her full-time career at Day’s Concert Hall on Smallbrook Street in Birmingham. She was a gifted and celebrated male impersonator who performed various comic character roles, including Monty from Monte Carlo, and Burlington Bertie.
Journalists visiting music halls to report on the entertainment rarely found much that they considered of any artistic value. J. Ewing Ritchie paid a visit to a venue close to Brick Lane, where, on payment of a shilling, he was ushered into a very handsome hall to witness some ‘uninteresting bicycling by riders in curious dress’. Comic singing, relieved by risqué dancing, seemed to be the staple amusement of the place; when one of the female perf
ormers indecently elevated a leg, immense was the applause from the ‘rough element’ at the back of the hall.
One of the other forms of entertainment witnessed by Ewing Ritchie was minstrelsy, a tradition born in America but popular in Britain from the 1840s onwards. White performers blacked their faces with burnt cork or greasepaint or shoe polish, and with a range of props, including woolly wigs, created caricatures of black people and performed songs, sketches and dances. After Ewing Ritchie had watched someone dressed as a black man singing ‘a lot of low doggerel about his “gal”’, he didn’t criticise it for being offensive or demeaning, but for being shallow: ‘It is a curious thing that directly a man lampblacks his face and wears a woollen wig, and talks broken English, he at once becomes a popular favourite.’
In the 1860s, under the stewardship of Sam Hague, St James’s Hall in Liverpool was one of Britain’s most celebrated music and dance venues, with a strong line-up of ‘blackface’ performers. Received industry wisdom was that, curiously, many audiences were more entertained by songs and dances from white blackface minstrels than genuine black Americans, but St James’s Hall also featured a ten-member black minstrel troupe recruited by Sam Hague in the 1860s on a visit to the American state of Georgia. The troupe, dubbed ‘the American Slave Serenaders’, became successful, billing themselves as ‘the only combination of genuine darkies in the world’.
Clog dancing had a long tradition in both America and Britain, going back to the mid-nineteenth century, and accomplished clog dancers were a common attraction at music halls. On 18 July 1866, on the opening night of the Cambridge Music Hall in Toxteth, the Leno family appeared, including young brothers Henry and George (the latter would later take the stage name Dan Leno on the way to becoming a celebrated music hall performer). They were billed as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Leno, the Great, Sensational, Dramatic and Comic Duettists and The Brothers Leno, Lancashire Clog, Boot and Pump Dancers’.
