by Dave Haslam
Other engagements in Liverpool for the Leno family followed. In April 1867, George, Henry and their parents appeared at St James’s Hall performing various dances onstage, including clog dancing. But on this occasion part of their act was described as ‘American breakdown dancers’. It appears that break-dancing, all the rage in the late 1970s and early 1980s, might have had some roots in much older traditions. And, in common with the hip hop era, the breakdown dances seem to have been taken up by agile kids of a young age, who grew proficient in them and performed them as party pieces and in public. In 1866 Dan and Henry Leno were then aged six and eight years respectively.
The breakdown was one of a number of dances first performed by slave children (also known as ‘contraband children’), sometimes accompanied by an older slave playing an African ‘banja’, the forerunner of the American banjo. In areas of New York, Irish immigrants with their tradition of jigs and reels were mixing with the children of slaves and former slaves and a cross-fertilisation of dance styles occurred. In the early 1840s the American impresario P.T. Barnum had a young dancer called Johnny Diamond on his books. He’d been spotted dancing for cash at the old Fly Market in New York City. Barnum toured Diamond around America, taking on all-comers in dancing competitions. Another celebrated dancer of the breakdown and a dozen or more other dances was Master Juba (William Henry Lane). Juba (named after the Giouba, a hand-clapping and foot-stomping dance created by slaves) came to Britain with a minstrel company and his fame was such he danced before Queen Victoria in Buckingham Palace.
Dance competitions and other contests were a regular feature in music halls, sometimes with a bizarre twist. Henry Pullan in Bradford regularly presented singing contests open to members of the audience. To differentiate his hall from others, he took to requiring the guest singers to carry a live, squirming piglet in their arms while they sang. Ramping up the hilarity further, he then got the singers (still holding the piglet) to get on a donkey, which was then paraded around the stage while the song was sung. In addition to ludicrous live pig and donkey combinations, music hall proprietors could resort to real bottom-of-the-bill fare like these entertainments described in The Era: ‘Guessing the number of pins or peas in a glass bottle; getting coins out of a bowl of treacle with the mouth.’
There were, of course, also particularly stringent guidelines set out to outlaw the chances of halls presenting scantily clad women onstage, although most music hall proprietors found a happy alternative with what were called tableaux vivants. These were living statues, performers in appropriate dress creating a still scene, usually from history or a myth or legend. Subjects for tableaux vivants in the music hall included sensational moments of Greek or Roman history (for example, ‘Brutus Ordering the Execution of his Son’), but most often performers created scenes which required an underdressed young lady. The trick was the use of flesh-coloured body stockings, which avoided contravening laws on nudity. Among the most popular were scenes featuring Lady Godiva, Adam and Eve, the Goddess Diana, Helen of Troy or one or more of the Sultan’s harem (one often-performed tableau was entitled ‘The Sultan’s Favourite Returning from the Bath’). In retrospect a key ingredient in so many of these tableaux vivants appears to be titillation, but Victorians were to a degree in denial about this, as if the choice of presenting a mythical or historical or biblical figure or Roman goddess requiring young women to assume a state of undress was somehow a coincidence.
Audiences appreciated dramatic scenes. The Millstone Concert Hall in Bolton presented a re-enactment of the Siege of Sebastopol featuring backdrops painted by George Martin and directed by T.H. Merridy. Merridy specialised in producing large-scale battle re-enactments, often involving pyrotechnics and spread over several acres, including at Pomona Gardens in Manchester. Originally known as the Cornbrook Strawberry Gardens, the Pomona Gardens were developed as public pleasure gardens by James Reilly in 1868 and included many attractions such as a ballroom (the Pomona Palace) and multiple leisure attractions in the gardens, from dog shows to archery classes.
The proprietors of the halls were generally colourful characters, chancers, pioneers and idealists who stamped their personalities on their venues and rarely delegated any of the big decisions, and often acted as chairman. They invariably enjoyed the status ownership of a successful hall gave them in the town. In many ways, those music hall proprietors shared the mentality of many of today’s club promoters and not a dissimilar business model. They would take the risk and pay the fees for the night’s entertainment and commission advertisements, handbills and posters. The successful ones knew how to find and nurture a regular audience.
Among those with the highest profile in their home town was Thomas Youdan in Sheffield, the centre of the steel trade, a town of grinders, razorsmiths, edge-tool fitters and scissor filers. Thomas Youdan moved there from Doncaster and became a silver stamper, then began to run a pub on West Bar, the Spink’s Nest, building around it, adding rooms and creating a new venue that became known as the Royal Casino. He incorporated a spacious ballroom, a concert hall and a museum. When the chaotic affairs of the aristocratic Hunloke family of Wingerworth Hall caused them to find a buyer for the wild animals that had been collected there, Youdan snapped them up and opened a menagerie. The Royal Casino was, in fact, everything but a casino. It later became known as the Surrey Music Hall.
Youdan became a powerful member of the community, not least because in the 1860s his Surrey Music Hall was the biggest building in Sheffield (the locals hadn’t got round to building a town hall), and he was responsible for some of the most striking cultural activity in the area, indulging in various crazy schemes. In early 1856, to celebrate the end of the Crimean War, Youdan commissioned a four-ton cake from local confectioner George Bassett. Bassett used over 10,000 eggs in the recipe but when slices were distributed to the old and needy Bassett and Youdan were deluged with complaints that it was undercooked and therefore inedible.
In 1858 Youdan became involved in local politics, being appointed as a workhouse guardian and then taking a seat on the local council, but a suspicion lingers that not all was quite as it seemed with Thomas Youdan. He was attracting a couple of thousand people to his premises two or three times a week, and, like show-business characters in later eras, was embedded in the political establishment and involved in charity work. He was forever engaged in feuds with local venue owners, was several times in court for operating illegal raffle and lottery competitions, and had a shady private life. There was controversy concerning the paternity of a child born to one of his barmaids, who had been only fifteen when the child was conceived (there were allegations, which never went to court, that he’d raped the barmaid). He denied being the baby’s father but the courts found against him and he paid 2/6 (12½p) per week support for the following thirteen years. In March 1865 the Surrey Music Hall was destroyed by fire but within weeks Youdan had bought the old Adelphi Theatre in Furnival Road, which he reopened as the Alexandra Music Hall later the same year.
Sam Hague’s St James’s Hall was another venue that ended up destroyed by fire, in 1875. According to one account, ‘The whole of the roof, the scenery, dresses, and interior of the hall soon became a charred mass of ruins. Poor Hague when he saw the destruction of his popular hall cried like a child.’ Unfortunately Herr Schalkenbach’s famous electric organ, which had travelled safely all around Western Europe, including Paris where Herr Schalkenbach demonstrated it to Napoleon III, was in temporary storage at St James’s and was wrecked in the fire.
Despite the frequent campaigns by anti-alcohol temperance groups including the formation in 1853 of the United Kingdom Alliance for the Suppression of the Traffic in All Intoxicating Liquors, who would picket outside halls or licensing sessions and raise petitions, the prevailing wisdom among magistrates and police was that alcoholic excess was more likely to be found in pubs, beerhouses and gin palaces than in music halls. In addition, many music hall proprietors developed close and often financial relationships with th
e local police, giving themselves some leeway in the event of any incident or complaint. Furthermore, in all the government-led committees and enquiries (like the 1852 Select Committee on Public Houses), along with a need to be mindful of public morality there was also a desire to protect and enhance the tax revenues accruing from alcohol sales.
Music halls were occasionally the site of violence. Genuine troublemakers could cause disruption to an evening’s entertainment, but it was rare. In Manchester, the Victorian streets were home to ‘scuttler’ gangs, hooligans with a level of infamy which matched any gang in modern times, and on a par with the ‘peaky blinders’ of Birmingham. John-Joseph Hillier was one scuttler with a well-earned reputation for violence (he was jailed a number of times for attacking people with a butcher’s knife). Originally from Ireland, he grew up in Salford and was a gang member by his early teens. A scuttler had a certain look – hair well plastered down, a peaked cap worn at an angle, a white scarf, a union shirt, a heavy belt with a big buckle, iron-shod clogs and coarse cotton trousers cut like a sailor’s, with ‘bell-bottoms’.
Hillier became the leader of the ‘Deansgate Mob’, based in Manchester city centre and recruiting from the densely packed housing around where the high glass restaurants and corporate office blocks in Spinningfields are now situated. His mob frequently hunted down and attacked a rival gang who were based at a music hall, the Casino on Peter Street, and would do battle inside the hall. He revelled in his notoriety: when newspapers dubbed him the ‘King of the Scuttlers’, he had the phrase sewn onto the front of his jersey.
In reality, it’s unlikely halls were any more dangerous than the street outside (and possibly less so); Deansgate, for example, was described by a local policeman as ‘a plague spot’ of violent crime. The halls were frequented by a mix of the working poor and the lower-middle class, courting couples, husbands and wives, workmates and children. They would draw an audience from the locality and in those close communities everyone tended to know each other and some of the older men would intervene if ruffians were ruining the night.
As well as debates about the role of the music hall in encouraging intemperate drinking, and concerns about the content of the entertainment being less than uplifting, a further issue was prostitution, a widespread, blatant trade in Victorian Britain, particularly in London. That London was rife with vice was partly because there was a bigger reserve of well-off men who would pay for sex, and an ongoing supply of hot-blooded soldiers and sailors passing through the city. But prostitution is always present where there’s poverty, and women had a slightly different social standing in London as a result of the different opportunities for female workers. Factories and mills further north employed thousands of people, male and female, and a young woman could make a relatively good living as a factory operative. In London there were almost no large-scale manufacturing industries, and the most common jobs for working-class women were very poorly paid: domestic servants, for example, including nursemaids. The researcher/journalist Henry Mayhew suggested in the late 1850s that soldiers were notorious for ‘hunting’ nursemaids walking with prams in the park. He claims that a nursemaid or a shop-girl would prostitute herself, not full-time, but occasionally allowing herself to be accosted on the street: ‘She prostitutes herself for her own pleasure, a few trifling presents or a little money now and then.’
Mayhew visits a music hall above a pub on Ratcliff Highway in the East End of London where benches have been pushed back against the walls to create a central dancefloor. He doesn’t hesitate to label the women present as prostitutes, here, he thinks, to pick up sailors. He watches them, calling them ‘brazen-faced’ and describing them as ‘dressed in gaudy colours, dancing and pirouetting in a fantastic manner’. The orchestra of four musicians (a fiddle, a cornet and two fifes or flutes) he describes variously as ‘bearded’ and ‘shaggy-looking’ (‘probably Germans’, he concludes). The music and the waltzing he finds to be ‘exhilarating in the highest degree’. By the end of the evening he is less judgemental of the women in the venue, noting that they’re the most enthusiastic dancers. But he remains unimpressed by the male patrons: ‘The faces of the sailors were vacant, stupid and beery.’
In general, by the 1870s, even the most judgemental could see that the music hall reflected the ubiquity of prostitution rather than created it. Nevertheless there were one or two halls which seemed to encourage vice, and they were to be found in the West End of London rather than in the poorer districts. The Argyll on Great Windmill Street, for example, owned by wine merchant Robert Bignell, attracted some of the wealthiest and most dissolute men and achieved notoriety for its masquerade balls and unceasing rumours that prostitutes operated on the premises. All over London there were lodging houses where prostitutes and clients who’d met on the streets or in pubs or music halls could find privacy, at the cost of a shilling or two per hour. Rooms near the Argyll were the most lucrative in London.
An American, Daniel Kirwan, documented an evening out at the Argyll Rooms in his book about social inequality, Palace and Hovel: Or, Phases of London Life. He suggests the vast majority of men are there without their wives. The women, meanwhile, dazzle Kirwan with their silks and satins and velvets, rich jewels and gold ornaments. The men, many of them in full evening dress, he describes as ‘in respectable society’. The women not so: ‘No virtuous woman ever enters this place,’ he declares. Downstairs with ‘the vulgar herd’ he reckons it’s chiefly clerks and tradesmen dancing the waltzes and quadrilles with various partners. Upstairs in the gallery things move up a level, there are various titillating paintings, groups of wealthy aristocratic gentlemen and numbers of ‘fast women’. He’s introduced to Kate Hamilton, a former art student and once a great beauty, who controlled the trade in women at the Argyll and other venues.
The Argyll Rooms temporarily lost its licence in 1857 on the grounds that it promoted ‘great social evils’. After arguing that its closure increased local street prostitution a licence was granted again by the Middlesex magistrates, although the venue remained controversial and Bignell lost his licence for music and dancing again in November 1878 and the Argyll Rooms closed. As with anxieties about intemperance, the police, magistrates and most newspapers of the day – in all but the most extreme cases – favoured pragmatism. This attitude was neatly summed up by a policeman Henry Mayhew met in 1862: ‘The British Queen, a concert-room in the Commercial Road, is a respectable, well-conducted house, frequented by low prostitutes, as may be expected, but orderly in the extreme, and what more can be wished for? The sergeant remarked to me, if these places of harmless amusement were not licensed and kept open, much evil would be sown and disseminated throughout the neighbourhood.’
There were tidied-up, morally irreproachable ‘people’s concerts’ in the 1840s and 1850s hosted by organisations like the Glasgow Total Abstinence Society and the Leeds Rational Recreational Society. Pressure groups like these and other bodies campaigned for local authorities to build and run civic buildings that could host such events in more morally uplifting surroundings. St George’s Hall in Liverpool and Colston Hall in Bristol were both built with this in mind. Colston Hall opened in 1867 with three auditoriums: the main theatre was mostly used for live concerts, and the smaller halls for such music hall staples as minstrel shows and tableaux vivants.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the unhinged, unregulated chaos of urban life became a little tamer, and challenges to the social order from the Chartists and trade unionists had largely been brought under control. The relative prosperity of the era encouraged conformity among the populace and widespread investment in civic buildings and in leisure. In 1867 Queen Victoria laid the foundation for the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences, an ambitious building that took four years to build and aimed to rival the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris. On opening, however, and for nearly a century afterwards, the acoustics were derided (then partially fixed – in 1969, 135 large fibreglass acoustic diffusing discs were attached to the c
eiling to cut down the echo).
During the 1890s, as new building regulations were introduced, proprietors refurbished their halls with Romanesque arcading, palatial staircases, oak carving and French Empire pilasters, and programming began to reflect more aspirant tastes. In many venues the original music hall audiences – the working poor (casual labourers, apprentices, soldiers, factory workers of both sexes, dockers, servant girls and families) – found themselves joined by middle-class audiences (including the likes of tradesmen, office managers and civil servants). In some establishments in the early days of the music hall members of the audience could arrive late, and come and go as they pleased, but a night out at a music hall was now a more formal occasion, closer to practices at the so-called legitimate theatre.
Another sign of the taming of the music hall industry was the rise of the chains – operators controlling and operating multiple venues. With only a few exceptions, the waywardness and local idiosyncrasies of the halls were replaced with standardised entertainment at venues owned by the chains. J.G. Stoll at the Parthenon in Liverpool was succeeded by his son, J.G. Stoll (Jnr), who married a widowed actress with children from her previous marriage, Roderick and Oswald. Subsequently, on the death of their stepfather, the two brothers assisted their mother in the management of the Parthenon. Oswald Stoll then began building a chain of music halls and became one of the major players in the industry. Edward Moss was another operator with several halls and variety theatres. Moss Empires was created when the two competitors combined (Stoll became the managing director of the company), and became the largest of the music hall chains.
