by Dave Haslam
These developments in the music hall industry, though, including concessions to middle-class tastes, were no defence when competition came from the cinema. Audiences in search of escapism and entertainment flocked to see so-called ‘moving pictures’ in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and many music halls closed, or were themselves converted into cinemas. The City Varieties took to showing films on some nights of the week, but they continued to find there was a demand for talent shows, and also instigated regular wrestling contests.
As we shall see in the next chapter, after the First World War the jazz wave crashed over Britain and a generation was swept up by it, and by the end of the 1920s the younger crowd were more likely to be found in dance halls on Fridays and Saturdays than old music halls. The remaining music halls were more widely known as variety theatres; comedy was now the staple diet. Harry Joseph took over the lease on the City Varieties in 1941 and, in the quest for financial survival, found a number of inspired ways to entice locals to his venue. According to Grace, on one occasion he presented a young woman attempting to hypnotise an alligator live onstage. I asked her how the alligator got on and off stage, as there didn’t seem room backstage to manoeuvre him (or her). She said she didn’t know if it was a him or a her and wasn’t sure where the alligator was kept. However, we both agreed we’d have paid sixpence to see such a thing.
In the 1950s, it wasn’t so much other kinds of live entertainment as the rise in home entertainment which threatened to keep crowds away from venues like the City Varieties, notably the increasing availability and popularity of television. Harry Joseph began to programme attractions that television didn’t include. In a typical bill from 1962 he would present a selection of strippers – Francesca, Maria and Renee – with other performers providing comedy capers and a risqué revue like Who Goes Bare? But he also forged a lucrative alliance with the new medium, scoring a coup in 1953 when the City Varieties became the home of the weekly BBC show The Good Old Days.
The Good Old Days, a more than slightly sanitised and nostalgic TV series, was a feature of the TV schedules for thirty years. The audience dressed in period costume and the chairman was Leonard Sachs. His role was one of the elements that had survived through the music hall era, inherited from the tradition of free-and-easies, and evolved into a performance in its own right. Sachs would introduce the entertainers with extravagant phrases delivered in a very elaborate approximation of aristocratic speech.
Almost 2,000 performers were filmed during The Good Old Days at the City Varieties, many of them household names then and since, including Ken Dodd, Bernard Cribbins, Roy Castle, Morecambe and Wise, and the great Les Dawson. Les Dawson was a bridge between the music hall of a hundred years before and the light entertainment of the day, a master of double entendres, more than proficient at the piano forte, with a range of memorable onstage characters, and he always raised a titter with jokes about the wife’s mother.
Other TV shows have had one foot in the heyday of the music hall, among them The Black and White Minstrel Show, which was on prime-time TV from 1958 to 1978, complete with blacked-up characters and stereotypes galore. The show was much mocked and parodied and the subject of a petition calling for its end as early as 1967. Since its cancellation, The Black and White Minstrel Show has come to be seen more widely as an embarrassment, despite its huge popularity at the time. Less controversially, in our present era we’ve educated ourselves to expect Saturday night TV to include a number of the elements of a night out as it might have been presented by Thomas Youdan or Harry Joseph: talent shows, dance competitions and even performing dogs.
Leeds City Varieties closed in 2009 and reopened, refurbished, in 2011. Wilton’s Music Hall – the other hall to receive major funding for refurbishment – evolved from a pub on Grace’s Alley in Stepney, east London, called the Prince of Denmark (also known as the Mahogany Bar). The Prince of Denmark was the haunt of sailors, thieves and prostitutes. It appears John Wilton hoped that by building a music hall behind the pub he could bring a bit of calm to the otherwise disorderly premises. Wilton’s Music Hall opened on 28 March 1859, packed with 1,200 people and with John Wilton in the chair. The entertainers in its earliest days included a resident choir and resident comics, including Sam Collins, a London-born former chimney sweep who presented himself as an ‘Irish’ singer; Mr and Mrs Randall, the character duologuists; and Mr Charles Sloman, well known for his improvisatorial talents, who was also Wilton’s first designated music director.
In the building of the hall, John Wilton prioritised the acoustics but didn’t underspend on the decor or the structure. One feature, a ‘sunburner’, created by Messrs Defries and Sons of Houndsditch, was a huge piece of lighting equipment; although there was no means of rotating it, it was not unlike a giant mirrorball. It hung from the ceiling covered by a combination of more than 20,000 prisms, shards and spangles, all illuminated by the flickering flames of hundreds of tiny gas burners, throwing light into the corners and across the room. The sunburner had a system of ventilation that produced a continual current of fresh air. The Era was impressed: ‘However crowded the room may be, as it was on the opening night, not the least inconvenience is felt from the heat.’
Despite John Wilton gaining a reputation as an authoritative chairman and the presence of two doormen at the entrance to the venue, Wilton’s was never going to find a wholly respectable audience, given the character of the neighbourhood and the realities of life in the East End at the time. These realities included a thriving sex trade. In 1862 a brothel ‘of the very lowest and most infamous kind’ just a few doors away from Wilton’s was closed down after the arrest and conviction of the owners. Prostitutes also operated in Wilton’s itself. On arrival at the hall men with their wives would make for the ground floor of the auditorium, whereas men looking for a less respectable encounter knew to go upstairs to the gallery. Given the clandestine nature and the passing of time, our knowledge of the activities of the prostitutes doesn’t extend much beyond a sense of dubious goings-on and dark dealings. For example, one of the rooms off the main auditorium was registered for use as a ‘Finishing school for young ladies’.
The refurbishment of Wilton’s has taken the venue back to its condition in 1878, some nineteen years after it first opened and a few years after John Wilton had moved on to manage the refreshment department at the Lyceum Theatre in the West End, but most significantly, just after it reopened following a fire in August 1877. It feels very much like a first-generation, unregenerated music hall, especially in contrast to the 1900-style City Varieties. It’s bare, dark, atmospheric.
Wilton’s didn’t have much of a life after 1878, closing as a licensed music hall in 1881. There’s evidence, however, that it remained open in some guise, perhaps operating illegally (there are reports of female prize-fighting and women singing shocking songs ‘of blasphemous indecency’). The next owners, though, came from a different part of the moral scale: Wesleyan Methodists, who took over the building and used it as a mission until 1957 when it was sold to Coppermill Rag Warehouse.
In the modern era, after being semi-derelict for several decades, Wilton’s has had various periods of fundraising and refurbishment, enough to provide a space for a number of events, including actress Fiona Shaw in an adaptation of The Waste Land in 1997, Mojo magazine presenting the Black Keys in 2008, a stage version of The Great Gatsby in 2013 and a showing of Fritz Lang’s silent film Metropolis with a live musical accompaniment in 2015. Like the City Varieties, guided tours are available. Mine started with a piece of cake in the Mahogany Bar and ended with a drink in the gallery bar. It was only early evening, about seven o’clock, but also in the bar were a couple in their twenties in a tight embrace, kissing (with tongues and everything). I fancy they’d been roused by a combination of wine and the aura of licentious history.
Undoubtedly, though, the most shocking episode in Wilton’s history occurred on 25 November 1863. Peter Melloy was a regular and popular performer at th
e venue. One evening he was singing at a charity event and the hall was packed with an estimated thousand people. But a large man in the audience – one Thomas Bunn – started to heckle Melloy, telling him to get off the stage. Then he got up from his bench and stood at the front of the stage shouting, ‘Shut up, we have had enough of that.’ Melloy was wearing a felt hat (it was part of his act) and he threw it at Bunn, and the two then got into an altercation during which Bunn continued to shout ‘insolently and impertinently’ (according to one account). Those who were seated rose to see what was happening and Melloy jumped off the stage and punched Bunn twice on the head. Bunn fell, and was taken to the supper room and then the bar-parlour, where he was still unable to stand. He was then carried home to St Mark’s Street where he died less than an hour later. According to James Sequira, a surgeon who discovered internal bleeding in Thomas Bunn’s brain, the blows received were most certainly the cause of death.
Melloy went on trial at the Old Bailey on an indictment charging him with the manslaughter of Thomas Bunn. Extraordinarily, even the wife of the dead man was among those in the court who called for leniency on account of the provocation Melloy had suffered when her husband interrupted his songs. At the trial much was made of Thomas Bunn’s drunken state (he’d tried to start a fight that afternoon in the Three Tuns). The court was told that the singer was a ‘well-conducted and on all occasions a well-disciplined man’. It took the jury just five minutes of deliberation to find Peter Melloy guilty of feloniously killing and slaying Thomas Bunn, but the jury strongly recommended mercy ‘on the grounds of gross provocation’. For killing the heckler, the singer was sentenced to just fourteen days’ imprisonment.
CHAPTER TWO
Dream palaces, degenerate boys, jazz-mad dancing girls
In the 1920s and into the 1930s there was a huge rise in the number of public dance halls. Some were relatively small and local but by the mid-1930s every town or city centre had a major dance hall, holding a couple of thousand people or more. Grand and palatial, these were the ‘palais de danse’ that within a generation had replaced music halls and variety theatres as favourite sites for Saturday nights out.
Most people were living in substandard housing, without access to anything remotely glitzy, but the likes of Bolton Palais, Streatham Locarno and Barrowland in Glasgow offered colour and thrill and sophistication. And not just in the interwar period, but beyond. In the early 1950s trombone player Eddie Harvey would tour with various dance orchestras: ‘The dance halls we played in were dream palaces. They really were. They were just lovely places to go and great places to cop off. That always happened on the last number. That’s when everyone made their move.’
There were also some borderline-illegal venues where flouting convention was the convention; for example, many of the less salubrious London clubs in Soho and the West End attracted drug-dealers, prostitutes, thieves, gangsters, police bribes and police raids. The Hambone was the kind of all-night venue that attracted a mix of bohemian artists, actors and actresses, and underworld characters. I can imagine a night out there being an exciting, powerful experience. You’d leave the glittering lights of Piccadilly Circus and move into the relative darkness of Windmill Street and then take a left into Ham Yard. Once through the door you’d follow an iron balustrade up a flight of steep stone steps, and with each step the banging drums and blasts of a saxophone grew louder. You might have to push your way past a girl in scarlet at the top of the stairs, but then you’d be in.
Ethel Mannin’s 1925 novel Sounding Brass includes a depiction of the Hambone and its clientele. She suggests that many of the patrons are men present with women who aren’t their wives (including one of the central characters, a shady married man who falls for a long-legged dancer). At the club, Mannin describes the musicians: four men playing saxophone, concertina, flute and drums, and a fifth member ‘at a baby grand piano, a pianist who might have been a masculine woman or a feminine man’.
In contrast to some of the goings-on in Soho, and certainly by today’s standards, the average glitzy palais de danse – where singles made their move, couples courted, and everyone danced their troubles away – were chaste places indeed. The most likely time for some action would be at the end of the night during the walk home, but not in the dance hall, where venue operators kept an eye open for intimate shenanigans.
When the Mecca organisation built up an empire of dance halls from the late 1920s onwards, they introduced strict rules about acceptable behaviour drawn up by head office and communicated to every staff member. Respectability was a reputation most dance hall managers craved, and most audiences expected. Some people were always on the lookout for instances of excessive fun, however. A leading Methodist, Lord Rochester, warned, ‘Dancing has been known to lead to impurity of thought, desire and practice.’
Bolton Palais was one of a number of palais de danse built with a ‘sprung’ dancefloor (another example is the Ritz in Manchester); its oak and walnut dancefloor was mounted on over 500 spiral springs. At most of the halls, surrounding the designated dancefloor would be small circular tables, with chairs. There would be balconies, a jazz band would perform from the stage, and cloakroom and toilet facilities would often be in the basement. The staff – bar staff, usherettes and cloakroom attendants – would wear uniforms of some kind.
Nottingham Palais opened on 24 April 1925 with a billiard saloon attached. Dancing would take place most evenings at 8 p.m., with daily thé dansants (tea dances) at 3 p.m. The venue had a large illuminated globe in its entrance hall, and inside was a fountain sending water twenty feet into the air, illuminated by rainbow lighting. Nottingham Palais has survived, though at some cost to its dignity and having undergone several large-scale refurbishments in recent years, it’s now the Oceana, featuring, every Thursday, a night called ‘OMG’.
Many of these palais-style public dance halls from the first half of the twentieth century, however, were turned into bingo halls or have disappeared beneath shopping centres, ring roads or apartment blocks. In Glasgow, the Dennistoun Palais was closed in 1962, converted into a Fine Fare supermarket and finally demolished to make way for flats. Galliard Homes have built a housing block, Vision 20, on the site of the Ilford Palais, a former cinema opened as a palais de danse on Boxing Day 1925.
So many of these dance halls remain deep within the communal memory of the towns and cities in which they were situated. On websites with strong local history content, the message boards about nightlife are often full of remembrances of old music venues and nightclubs. We associate going out dancing to favourite venues with our younger, more carefree days, but sometimes the strongest memory is a missed moment, an unrequited passion, a love that never blossomed. Many local papers carry a weekly column where readers try to reconnect with people they met at the palais and have never seen since, someone they shared a glance or a dance with still held in their memory, soundtracked by a certain tune perhaps. Not all letters or posts reflect memories full of poignancy or great fondness. On one website dedicated to celebrating life in Ilford, a former habitué of the Ilford Palais posted: ‘Outside the Palais my girlfriend’s brother had his jaw broken.’
The Hammersmith Palais de Danse opened in west London in October 1919, and in the 1970s and beyond hosted live performances by the likes of Slade, U2, PiL, the Ramones, Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order and the Notorious B.I.G. We’ll make mention of the Hammersmith Palais throughout the next chapters and will discover the identity of the last man to invade the stage at the venue. But even if the Hammersmith Palais had closed after just a few decades, it would still have been considered a significant venue; it was the first of its kind, the blueprint for all the plush public dance halls that followed, and the venue that kicked off the Roaring Twenties in spectacular style.
Hammersmith Palais was opened by two American entrepreneurs, Messrs Booker & Mitchell, who bought up an old skating rink and gave the building an amazing makeover. It was so vast, done up so sumptuously, and – featuri
ng the big new thing, ragtime – it made an immediate impression. The Daily Express gave the Palais an outstanding review: ‘This new super-palace of jazz and other dances of the day is declared to be without its equal as a dancing hall anywhere in Europe.’
Crowds flocked there; some reports claim over 6,000 attempted to attend the opening night. For the first nine months, the resident ragtime band were the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who began their run of engagements sharing the stage with a dancer, Johnny Dale, employed to help excite the crowd and to display the latest dance steps. This wasn’t universally well received: one reviewer likened his moves to a ‘filleted eel about to enter the stewing pot’; another claimed the Dixieland Jazz Band ‘is doing its best to murder music’.
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band had been approached to star at the Hammersmith Palais after having already appeared at Rector’s on Tottenham Court Road, where their popularity grew so quickly a move to a bigger hall was required. Nevertheless, one commentator declared that Londoners ‘are bewildered by the weird discords’. Hammersmith Palais generated its own newsletter, the Palais Dancing News. In its first issue, in April 1920, the newsletter published an interview with the band’s founder Nick La Rocca, who appeared happy to stoke the controversies. He described his band’s music as ‘outbursts’, saying, ‘I even go so far as to confess we are musical anarchists.’
Ragtime made an impact across the range of venues; it was the first jazz craze, an import from America which was first heard in Europe around 1900. Its non-European and syncopated beat marked it out as very different from the waltz, which had dominated dancefloors through the Victorian era, and from other traditional dances. In his 1970 book The Edwardians, J.B. Priestley recalled being at a theatre and experiencing ‘the syncopated frenzy’ of ragtime for the first time in 1913. He’d seen a performance by the Hedges Brothers and Jesse Jacobson – a singing trio (the youngest Hedges brother, Elven, also played piano, saxophone and banjo) – who’d journeyed from America to accept a major music hall contract in England and were sent on tour. White musicians, with their roots in vaudeville, they were far from being what might be considered authentic, but to Priestley their irresistible ragtime rhythms were potent: ‘It was as if we had been still living in the nineteenth century and then suddenly found the twentieth century glaring and screaming at us. We were yanked into our own age, fascinating, jungle-haunted, monstrous.’
