Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  Priestley was recalling all this over half a century later, so his observations may well be coloured by hindsight, but he captures something of the various and ambiguous responses to early jazz. The music seemed primal and alive – which was thrilling to some listeners, but dangerous to others. Those twenty minutes in an old Yorkshire music hall, he wrote, signalled ‘the end of confidence and any feeling of security, the nervous excitement, the frenzy, the underlying despair of our century’.

  This, of course, was before sound recording was widely available – radio emerged in the early 1920s, and only a lucky few had access to phonographs and gramophones – so in 1919 jazz was almost exclusively a live experience, mostly first reaching working-class listeners, as it did Priestley, through song and dance revues at the theatre. A monied few, though, had enjoyed access to jazz from just before the First World War at luxury private clubs hosting dinner dances. Murray’s in London, for example, had a restaurant on the ground floor and a large wood-panelled ballroom below, where the house band, led by the black American banjoist/vocalist Gus Haston, was often still in full swing at 5 a.m.

  Thus, in the years prior to the opening of the Hammersmith Palais, the working class hadn’t had the pleasure of taking to a big public dancefloor and dancing to the weird discords of ragtime, though interest was very strong. The Palais experience turned a rumour into a phenomenon, opening just a year after the end of the First World War, when the country had suffered the grievous loss of hundreds of thousands of young men on the battlefield; this led to two contradictory responses. One was a headstrong rush to hedonism, seizing the opportunity to enjoy life and feel free, but the second was a perception that so soon after the war the frivolity was disrespectful to the dead (Vera Brittain described the young as ‘light-hearted and forgetful’).

  All sorts of venues in the jazz age were pressed into service to meet the demand for dancing. Dance fans in villages and small towns would make do with sports halls and church halls, and in some city districts the main dance venue was the local swimming baths. Swimming baths had been built during the late Victorian and Edwardian leisure boom, in part for a very practical reason – to provide the washing facilities that many working-class homes in this era lacked – but also to provide leisure opportunities. Many baths became dance venues in the winter months, including the Alhambra in Nelson (Lancashire), Thornton Heath Baths (Croydon) and Thimblemill Baths (Smethwick). At Thimblemill Baths the main pool was drained every October and the area boarded over with a sprung maple floor. It took two days to drain the pool and two weeks to construct the floor. As well as dancing, through the winter months the baths became the venue for fetes, boxing and hairdressing.

  With their water features, balcony bars and uniformed staff, the big public dance halls put a little bit of luxury within reach of the whole nation. In addition, an increasing number of exclusive, ostentatious private clubs were operating in London through the 1920s and 1930s. One was Ciro’s, which opened in 1915 on Orange Street in the heart of the West End of London, with high-spec decor, ornate pillars and mirrors, and a sliding roof that could be opened in the summer. It was a high-society haunt appealing to the upper classes, offering evening dinner dances and stage shows usually featuring a small jazz orchestra and a troupe of dancing girls. As well as Murray’s and Ciro’s, other exclusive venues in London included the Kit Cat Club, and Café de Paris, both members only, levying a charge of 10/- (50p) or more for dinner dances. London was the only city in the country at the time that could sustain expensive private clubs of this sort; if you’d gone up to Lancashire with ten shillings you’d have had several great nights out paying 7d (3p) for a pint of beer.

  The manager at Murray’s was from Chicago and went under the pseudonym of Jack May. He was one of a number of colourful characters embedded in the Soho nightlife scene, alongside the likes of Freddie Ford and Kate Meyrick. Kate Meyrick ran several venues, the main one being at 43 Gerrard Street in Soho. Throughout the 1920s the activities that went on there were said to include drug-taking, prostitution and after-hours drinking. She evaded sanctions other than occasional fines, which might lead us to suppose she was paying off the police and the authorities. Nevertheless, she had many a day in court when prosecutors waded in with colourful descriptions. ‘It is called a dancing club,’ said one in 1919, of 43 Gerrard Street, ‘but it would be no exaggeration to call it a dancing hell – an absolute sink of iniquity.’

  Jack May, meanwhile, was often alleged to be involved in dealing cocaine and opium, although the most notorious opium dealer in the Soho clubs of the 1920s was Chinese restaurant owner the Brilliant Chang, who was implicated in more than one high-profile drug-related death and the subject of sensational media stories. As well as opium and cocaine dealing and addiction, all-night drinking, flighty females and men dressed as women also triggered moral panics between the wars.

  Youngsters (by which I mean people in their late teens) habitually face – or even court – parental disapproval of their lifestyle choices and music tastes. The perception of the ‘generation gap’ became widespread in the 1960s but, as I’ve documented in my book Manchester, England and elsewhere, there was a good deal of incomprehension and hostility among parents when youngsters began frequenting dance halls and other jazz venues in the 1920s. Jazz had arrived and, within a generation, all the Saturday night rituals had changed: the routines, the clothes, the venues, the music. Older generations tended to disapprove especially of the less well-appointed, more down-market venues. When discussing a visit to a dance hall in Manchester, one woman recalls, ‘My father would have killed me if he’d known. It was a right dive.’

  Such is the magnitude of the shift in what’s deemed respectable, it’s hard to imagine the formalities and strictures that governed behaviour in public dance halls seventy or eighty years ago. Even with the Mecca codes of conduct in place, the morally uptight could still be taken aback by activities we’d consider the height of innocence. In the 1930s, the Mass Observation initiative encouraged ‘ordinary’ people to record diaries and thoughts. One middle-class contributor to Mass Observation reported on a visit to Streatham Locarno: ‘I was surprised at the amount of open intimacy, the numbers of arms round shoulders and the number of people holding hands quite openly.’

  People were accustomed to doing all their living, working and leisure close to home – school, work, cinema, pubs and dance hall all within a few streets of their front door – but the palais de danse often drew their audience from a number of districts, bringing people together. This cultural opening-up of life was in part possible thanks to the improving transport infrastructure in the early 1920s, especially the freedom to explore the city by omnibus. Dance halls like Hammersmith Palais were considered social levellers; compared to the strict demarcations of music halls, the mix was conspicuous. Ciro’s prided itself on its exclusivity – the likes of Hammersmith Palais, on the other hand, gloried in their openness.

  With neither the popular touch of mainstream venue operators, nor the criminal connections most Soho club owners enjoyed, one club owner was something of an anomaly: Frida Strindberg, the divorced second wife of August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright. Frida founded the Cave of the Golden Calf in the low-ceilinged basement of a warehouse on Heddon Street (off Regent Street) motivated by high ideals; she hoped to create an avant-garde hangout in the middle of London offering artistic and challenging cabaret entertainments of the kind that could be found at her inspiration, the Kabarett Fledermaus in Vienna. In the run-up to the opening of her club, Mrs Strindberg told the press that the venue was to be ‘a place given up to gaiety’, and that its interior decorations would be ‘brazenly expressive of the libertarian pleasure principle’.

  She employed the painter Spencer Gore to create and commission artworks and decorative items from talented young British artists, including Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill and Wyndham Lewis. But the weeks prior to a nightclub launch are always fraught, and this was no exception. Gore struggled with Mrs St
rindberg over the decorative scheme, telling his friend J.D. Turner, ‘Days and days I have spent arguing about the colour of the walls and ceiling. Most irritating thing I ever had to do with.’

  The Cave of the Golden Calf opened in June 1912. Eric Gill made a statue of a golden calf for the foyer, Gore contributed a Gauguin-esque triptych, but the contribution towards the stage decoration from Wyndham Lewis was possibly not what Mrs Strindberg had in mind; he painted a drop curtain depicting raw meat. Syncopated musical entertainment was provided on a small stage by a fierce-looking pianist and his wife, a singer. There would be cabaret and poetry recitals through until dawn. Frida struggled to keep on top of the paperwork. The audiences seemed happy listening and dancing to ragtime and drinking all night, but found the entertainments a little too much of a challenge. Many young aristocrats ventured in, however, and a fair proportion of them were homosexual, or so it’s said (the Cave is mentioned in Philip Hoare’s 1997 book Wilde’s Last Stand). The pink pound wasn’t as strong as it would be a hundred years later, and the Cave went bankrupt and closed in 1914.

  From 1914 onwards, the opportunities for American musicians to work in London clubs increased. That occasion when Henry Mayhew visited a pub on Ratcliff Highway and described the shaggy-haired German musicians rocking an East End music hall wasn’t a one-off; for decades, clubs and venues had called upon the services of German musicians. From the outbreak of the First World War, for obvious reasons, this was no longer possible. In addition, many young British musicians were joining the armed forces. It fell to American musicians to fill the jobs gap.

  African-American musicians schooled in the jazz clubs of New York were soon in Britain, many of them thanks to the organisational skills of Will Cook, who formed the Clef Club in 1912, a booking agency for black musicians that became a point of contact for European promoters. Murray’s had led the way by hiring Gus Haston, and the next musician to make the transatlantic crossing was Dan Kildare, drafted in from New York to provide the music at Ciro’s. In March 1915 he assembled some fellow Clef Club musicians, sailed for England and began rehearsals for the Ciro’s opening in May. There were seven people in the band: three banjos, string bass, drums, piano and vocals.

  The band were invited to play at several private parties and charity events, attended by the likes of the Prince of Wales, Winston Churchill and various dukes and earls. At an open-air concert for convalescing soldiers in the summer of 1915, a columnist at the high-society magazine Tatler, signing herself ‘Eve’, reported the band were raucously received: ‘The men simply loved it, of course, shrieked the ragtime choruses and revelled in the fearful din and encored everything, and altogether were a much more appreciative audience than the usual Ciro’s ones, who are generally busy eating, of course.’

  Despite those good works, the decision to open Ciro’s in May 1915 while the country was at war was its undoing, as popular opinion began to build against upper-class hedonists who were dining, dancing and philandering the night away while thousands of ordinary young British men were being killed on the battlefields of northern France. In the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act the government introduced new regulations cutting liquor licence hours. As a result, in Soho in particular, late-night drinking and dancing went underground, and clandestine establishments opened. Beyond the law in respect of late-night drinking, other illegal activities tended to swirl around these establishments, including gambling and prostitution. The heat stayed on Ciro’s; when MPs began to lodge complaints about the activities of the club and its clientele, the police were forced to act. In April 1917, the club was shut down.

  Ironically, aside from its patrons’ hunger for all-night dancing, Ciro’s was probably one of the least criminally minded of the private clubs in London at the time. Vice and drug-dealing in Soho and the West End before and during the war wasn’t confined to clubs or music venues. For a time, a sandwich shop at 89 Shaftesbury Avenue – said by police to be patronised by ‘prostitutes and Continental undesirables’ – was the centre of a drug-dealing operation. It was masterminded by a Swiss man, Georges Wagnière, who was arrested at a raid on the shop and deported.

  As well as mounting surveillance operations, the police would also receive letters and anonymous tip-offs, but were also involved in taking bribes. Jack May was often mentioned in correspondence, including in a letter sent by Eton-educated Captain Ernest Schiff. In December 1915 he wrote directly to the Attorney General, Sir John Simon: ‘A very bad fellow, Jack May, is the proprietor of Murray’s Club in Beak Street – a quite amusing place. But for vice or money or both he induces girls to smoke opium in some foul place. He is an American and does a good deal of harm.’

  Despite allegations aplenty, May, whose real name was Gerald Walter, evaded prison, possibly because he really was an innocent abroad or perhaps because he had friends in high places (politicians and top military personnel frequented his club, and it’s said that plans for the first British tanks were signed off there late one night in 1915), or because he had the money to pay off the right policemen and to engage effective but expensive lawyers. On the other hand, his accuser, Captain Schiff, was a shady character, an inveterate gambler, a pimp and a blackmailer. His days were numbered. In March 1919 he was killed by the father of a young woman he was attempting to entice to work for him as a prostitute on the streets of the West End.

  When politicians, newspaper editorials and the likes of Lord Rochester fulminated against jazz and dance halls, it was clear they were out of step with the general public. When Leyton’s urban district council in east London made attempts to ban jazz dances at local venues, including the baths, describing such dancing as ‘morally bad’, the local populace defended the dances and the prohibition didn’t work. Nevertheless, controversies continued to be stirred up. There were fundamental objections to live jazz (other than distaste at a dancer wiggling round like a filleted eel); musical experts, for example, denounced jazz as ‘rhythm without melody’. Various moral guardians objected to the ‘negro’ origins of the music. Priestley’s use of ‘jungle haunted’ was one of the less derogatory examples of the word ‘jungle’ attached to jazz.

  Popular culture, however, embraced American influence generally: the excitement of jazz, the enchantments of Hollywood, the dirty realism of James Cagney films. It also absorbed culture from further afield; soon, dancers would be attempting the Argentine tango and the Brazilian samba. Popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century was at odds with that strand of British culture that’s always been wary of foreign ways and imported ideas.

  There are many examples of how the developments and excitement surrounding taking to the dancefloor for a couple of hours on a Saturday night reflected or created deeper cultural trends. When traditionalists listed regrettable changes in British society, jazz was always mentioned. In 1926 the Manchester Guardian declared, ‘Short skirts, lipsticks, vulgar films, sex novels, jazz. There is almost no end to the list of abominations.’ The Times said that jazz was ‘one of the many American peculiarities that threaten to make life a nightmare’.

  Not only was there resistance in some quarters to anything un-British, which by definition and implication was a bad thing, but the very act of listening and dancing to jazz – unbuttoned, raucous ragtime – was a clear break from tradition, from ‘old-time’ dances like the Lancers and the waltz. There was now a desire for dances that were less formal than they had been in the Victorian era. To social commentators of the time, this seemed symbolic of a loosening of pre-war conventions, a development which some regretted, but others enjoyed.

  Perhaps this rebellion on the dancefloor was leading to a more modern world, less despotic and hierarchical? Or, in the words of another newspaper, ‘In the ballroom the up-to-date dances are the antithesis of the mechanical rule-bound movements insisted upon by the dancing masters of the late Victorian period.’ It’s appropriate that the journalist uses the word ‘masters’. Finding some freedom from male control was one of the attractions for w
omen of dance halls. The chance of a dalliance with some lad was also possible, particularly at certain venues, like the Palais (later named the Princess) on Barlow Moor Road in Chorlton, Manchester, as one woman remembers: ‘My sister met her future husband at the dance hall in Chorlton. Oh! It was the picking-up place, yes.’

  The new opportunities and excitements afforded by the public dance halls were bound up with other signs of female emancipation during and after the First World War, including steps towards granting women the vote and, in 1921, Marie Stopes opening Britain’s first family planning clinic. Powering this changing status was the role women had played during the war; it’s reckoned a million women were added to the British workforce between 1914 and 1918, taking up multiple trades in industry, transport and munitions.

  It’s noticeable how enthusiastic women were about dancing in the 1920s, enrolling in dance schools, tuning into radio, being first in the queue at dance events hosted by workplaces or churches, embracing more than just the music, more than the dance steps, and much more than close encounters with men. Indeed many women were happy to go out dancing without any expectation of dancing with men; given that a generation of men had been decimated by the war, women were used to being surrounded by other women, and at the dance hall it was perfectly acceptable for women to be seen dancing together.