by Dave Haslam
The rising popularity of dance music venues and dancing as a pastime fuelled activity in the fashion industry. The majority of men owned a good enough suit, but for young women in their search for a perfect outfit, the choice was better than it had been pre-war, with the wider use of glamorous material like rayon and mass-produced clothing. The excitement of planning and shopping and getting ready would remain part of the ritual of going out. In 1939, one of Mass Observation’s contributors, a 23-year-old typist, described the joys of her going-out rituals like this: ‘Preparing for a dance is half the fun to my mind. Getting one’s frock ready. Wondering whether you shall have your hair done.’
A passion for dancing reflected or reinforced the change in the status of women after the First World War; it was as if going dancing was the defining feature of the liberated, independent woman. Newspaper columns and letters pages were filled with analysis on the ‘modern woman’, who was reckoned to be a ‘dancing girl’, a ‘jazz-mad dancing girl’ or a ‘flapper’. The self-confidence of the flappers, with their fashionable short haircuts and higher hemlines, was striking. The lighter fabrics and loose fit of the flapper dresses were specifically designed with dancing in mind.
Flappers were conspicuous only in cosmopolitan pockets in major cities, but the sense that jazz and dance halls were fuelling female liberation was nationwide. It was a modern development that seemed to cause consternation among older men who feared the shifts in gender relations. One article in the Manchester Evening News in February 1920 described flappers as ‘social butterflies’, and condemned the ‘frivolous, scantily-clad, jazzing flapper, irresponsible and undisciplined’.
Some newspaper correspondents yearned for a return to old-fashioned values and an end to women taking up masculine habits like smoking in public, and expressed disillusionment with the frivolous, flirty females of the 1920s. One male letter writer to the Daily Express was moved to share this theory: ‘The majority of men much prefer a girl of modest disposition – that is, one who does not smoke, flirt, or jazz.’
In her 1932 novel Women of the Aftermath, writer Helen Zenna Smith expresses her vexation that the men who a few years earlier had ‘called on women when the man-power supply gave out unexpectedly’ were now advising women after the war to ‘get back to your dust-pans and your kitchens’. In the novel, Hettie, the wife of a former soldier, is terrorised by him and escapes into a decadent, bohemian life, taking a job as a professional dancer.
Many of the larger dance halls employed professional dancers. These were the so-called ‘sixpenny dancers’ who would congregate in designated areas and who customers could hire by the dance during the evening. These professionals were not only potential dance partners, but they also engaged in exhibition dancing at intervals throughout the evening. Female customers were likely to be as assertive as the men. If they were keen to dance with a man and a professional was available, women wouldn’t be expected to hold back: ‘If partners are slow in coming forward, we go to the “pen” and pick our own professional dancing men at so much a dance.’
Hettie, in Women of the Aftermath, finds the job sleazy and exploitative. It certainly wasn’t always so, but there were definitely issues surrounding the sixpenny dancers. In 1933 three managers at the Kosmo Club on Swinton Row in Edinburgh were found guilty of living wholly or in part on the earnings of prostitution of dance partners or instructresses. Witnesses came forward to allege that men who were ‘desirous of having immoral relations’ could pay thirty shillings for a dance partner for the evening with the understanding the dancer would also leave the Kosmo with the customer (twenty of the thirty shillings were retained by the club’s management, the rest went to the young woman). Several of the women involved, including a ‘dance instructress’ from Manchester, admitted that they went on to indulge in sexual activity.
However, the dance music business provided many other employment opportunities for women, from cigarette girls and waitresses to venue managers. Betty Lyons ran the Hammersmith Palais in the 1930s. She had a reputation in the industry for being forward-thinking and proactive. In August 1937 she visited dance halls in America and Canada to find ideas and inspiration and make new contacts.
Women were employed as instructors, some at the dance schools set up by venues, Streatham Locarno among them. Lessons were crucial. Women and men who were skilful dancers were well regarded (according to one chap interviewed by historian Judith R. Walkowitz: ‘A woman’s dancing skills trumped her looks at the dance hall’). Freestyling and improvisation weren’t considered appropriate and there were numerous reports of untrained dancers causing havoc, much to the annoyance of professionals like Phyllis Haylor and Alec Miller, who described a scene at a dance hall minutes after exhibition dancers had performed a Charleston: ‘Hundreds of wild youths endeavoured to copy their kicking and stamping steps and to adapt them to the ballroom, with disastrous results. It was positively unsafe to go within two yards of any couple performing these ridiculous antics.’
Of all the jobs in music venues and dance halls in the 1920s and 1930s, the most prestigious was that of band leaders. Venues would vie for the services of popular band leaders, but the most powerful of them would resist being tied down if more lucrative work was offered to them elsewhere. Hammersmith Palais was regarded as the top of the tree for dance band leaders. Lou Preager became a household name when he took the job at the Palais, from where the BBC regularly broadcast his orchestra’s performances.
Another favourite BBC band leader was the violinist Bert Ambrose, who was born in the East End of London but served his apprenticeship in New York, working alongside Emil Coleman at Reisenweber’s restaurant. Back in London in the early 1920s he featured at the Embassy Club on Bond Street, but his ambitions were hampered by the Embassy’s policy banning radio broadcasts from the venue. Ambrose knew the profile garnered from radio was key to gaining a recording contract and moved on to the May Fair Hotel on Stratton Street, from where he made multiple broadcasts for six years. In 1937, in partnership with the American band leader Jack Harris, he took over ownership of Ciro’s. For a short while they employed the gifted pianist Art Tatum at the venue, but the Ambrose and Harris partnership didn’t last.
As we’ll see, a downturn in the economy in the second half of the 1970s had a deleterious effect on some venues, but didn’t bring a halt to nightlife. If anything it boosted activity, as evidenced by the rise of disco and punk in the last years of that decade. The years of economic depression in the 1930s were similarly buoyant. Even in areas badly hit by job losses, nightlife thrived. In Glasgow, the Barrowland Ballroom was founded by Margaret McIver, a widow bringing up nine children. She’d built up the Barrowland Market (known locally as the Barras), and the ballroom was an extension of that business, opening on Christmas Eve 1934 with a dance for all the stallholders. Stylish throughout, the front of the building was graced with a sign in the shape of a man pushing a barrow suspended above the front door. Mrs McIver approached drummer Billy McGregor and he formed a resident dance band, Billy McGregor and the Gaybirds.
The 1930s also witnessed the emergence of Britain’s most powerful dance hall brand – Mecca. Mecca was headed by C.L. Heimann, a native of Denmark who came to Britain as a teenager and worked for a catering company called Ye Mecca Cafes. Heimann persuaded his bosses to buy their first dance hall, Sherry’s in Brighton, and to appoint him manager. This was 1927. He made a roaring success of the venture and Mecca took ownership of other dance halls all around the country, including the Ritz in Manchester and the Tottenham Palais (renamed the Tottenham Royal by Mecca), and within a few years Heimann had control of Mecca’s dance hall operation. Working alongside the Scottish entrepreneur Alan Fairley – who owned the Locarno Ballroom on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow – Heimann continued to build the empire, rolling out more Locarnos nationwide, including the one in Streatham. Ruth Ellis worked there in 1948; she was the last woman in the UK to be hanged, after killing her lover David Blakely in 1955.
F
rom the outset, Heimann concentrated on incorporating set standards of customer service, and homogenised the entertainment offered at every Mecca venue. Among other activities, Mecca established the magazine Dance News, which promoted the activities in their halls and discussed dances and reported on special events. In a later chapter we’ll meet a generation of club promoters in the 1990s – the likes of Darren Hughes and James Barton at Cream – who built brands and were credited with not just reflecting but moulding public tastes. C.L. Heimann was probably an even more powerful figure in nightlife history. In 1938 he was described as one of ‘the cultural directors of the nation’.
The boom in leisure enjoyed by the working class and lower-middle class included a passion for the cinema, with many of the bigger picture houses benefitting from investment from individual entrepreneurs and national chains. There was plenty of jazz and dancing in films of the era. Academic Catherine Feely has made a study of a diary kept by Frank Forster. Frank visited a cinema almost every night throughout 1934 and 1935 (‘first and foremost in order to leave the house’ says Feely).
In 1935 Frank Forster was in his mid-twenties, living in Chester with his parents and working on a building site. He espoused various left-wing causes and ideas, had no girlfriend and not much contact with women at all. And it’s likely his unhappiness was compounded by being a young man of the left adrift in Chester, a small city that insisted on electing Tory MPs all through the 1930s. While sitting on his own in darkened cinemas watching the likes of Fred Astaire, he hatched a plan which he confided in his diary in September 1935: ‘It has now become imperative that I should take up dancing if I am to feel at home in the company of women.’ And not just the company but the proximity: ‘I must get some experience of sexual association, in the form of dances.’
A few weeks later he invited a woman whom he had met at a Workers’ Educational Association class to accompany him to a few dances. Aware that being a good dancer was a much-prized accomplishment, he’d imagined himself an Astaire-esque expert, but after these visits his diary records he had proved ‘not much of a success’. There was also no improvement to his love life. Frank resorted to desperate measures, including signing up to a Communist summer school in the hope of meeting young women there.
Hesitant and a little too unworldly even for the Chester singles scene, we can only imagine what Frank would have made of some of the shenanigans away from the tightly controlled and respectable venues. In all cities there were opportunities for sharp or illegal practices. Down south, in Soho, moral codes were malleable. At the Falstaff on Oxford Street, one of the bar staff, Mark Benney (real name Henry Degras), wrote a memoir of his days there (Low Company, 1936): ‘All the thieves and prostitutes of London came there to spend their money, and they demanded licence. Women for ten shillings a bet walked naked through the rooms. Men walked openly from group to group vending stolen articles. And on the dancefloor men lifted the skirts of girls as they passed and smacked their bare buttocks.’
Through the 1920s and 1930s, Ham Yard and its immediate environs featured bohemian hangouts, sometimes attracting a mix of the upper-class party set and hard-core villains, including the Blue Lantern (next door to the Hambone, and identified by journalist and writer D.J. Taylor and others as a key venue for the Bright Young Things) and the New Avenue. The New Avenue, owned by Freddy Ford, was the site of numerous gang battles. In 1927 Ford was jailed for receiving stolen goods, by which time he’d changed the name of the New Avenue to the Havinoo, apparently to mimic the way cockneys affecting a posh accent liked to pronounce the word. At his trial, a police officer claimed Ford’s Havinoo was nothing more than a room full of thieves, male and female.
The determination of the authorities to clamp down waxed and waned, but during the watch of Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks in the second half of the 1920s there was something approaching a ‘war on clubs’, and the likes of Kate Meyrick found her venues under police pressure. Even before he initiated a more authoritarian approach, Meyrick’s venue at 43 Gerrard Street was raided at least twice in 1924 and at the end of that year she was sentenced to six months for selling liquor without a licence. In 1928 she was arrested again, this time as part of an investigation into ‘C’ Division’s Sergeant George Goddard, a corrupt policeman who’d been operating a protection racket for nearly a decade. The various court fines and the payments to bent coppers barely dented Kate Meyrick’s profits, though; she claimed she’d made half a million pounds running clubs, lived a carefree life, and sent her children to expensive public schools. One of them, her second daughter Dorothy Evelyn, married Edward Russell, 26th Baron de Clifford, a friend and follower of the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley.
The press rarely failed to report on salacious goings-on in clubs. Although homosexuality was illegal at the time, colourful characters like Stephen Tennant were usually indulged by the press. But at other times, the press and the public were openly hostile to gay men. Court cases were routinely brought against men hosting cross-dressing parties or importuning on the street. In 1926, after two men were charged in connection with activities at a dance hall in Marylebone, the Daily Mail reported on some of the evidence against them: ‘Acts of the grossest nature were witnessed.’
The Running Horse on East Chapel Street, Mayfair, was a venue frequented by gay men and lesbians and was placed under police surveillance in 1936. Officers later reported that ‘two youths in the bar had their hair waved and their faces and lips made up’, and there were present ‘three women of masculine appearance. Their hair was cut short in manly fashion, and they wore costumes of collars and ties and no hats.’
Gay men found imaginative ways to socialise, including regularly infiltrating a ball at the Albert Hall. Lady Jeanne Malcolm was a socialite and the hostess of the annual Servants’ Ball at the Albert Hall from 1930 onwards. Her aim was to provide the opportunity for servants to enjoy the kind of lavish nights out the upper classes were accustomed to. The ticket prices were low and, to avoid embarrassment of any servants unable to afford formal evening wear, the balls were fancy dress. Within a few years, the cross-dressing community had begun to frequent the Servants’ Ball. They weren’t servants; they just liked dressing up as women, in coloured silk blouses and tight-hipped trousers, with rouged lips and painted faces.
There was disquiet among some social commentators and writers of anonymous letters to MPs and the police. Some of the attendees were described as ‘degenerate boys’, ‘male prostitutes’ and ‘sexual perverts’. For a few years the drag outfits were allowed to add to the gaiety of the occasion, but then the Servants’ Ball organisers banned cross-dressing men. ‘No Man Impersonating a Woman Will be Admitted’ the tickets read.
Cost was often a deciding factor when it came to picking a hall to visit on a Saturday night, and location too, of course. In the 1930s different styles of music had developed. There would be dance bands who would play in a sweet style, perhaps characterised by the lilting sound of a violin section, but others would play in a more raucous, ‘hot’, stomping fashion in which the saxophone or the muted trumpet were signature instruments. A correspondent in Melody Maker regretted the hot style, describing it as ‘loud and quick, unharmonious and cacophonous’. Of a similar mindset, Jack Hylton was one of a number of high-profile band leaders who considered it worth eliminating ‘crudeness’ to ensure jazz was more commercially palatable and he openly talked of the need to neutralise its ‘jungle’ origins.
There’s plenty of evidence, though, that by 1937 music lovers and thrill seekers in London looking beyond the lilting rhythms of dance orchestras had several clubs to choose from, among them Jig’s on St Anne’s Court (an alley between Wardour Street and Dean Street), the Nest on Kingly Street, and Jack Isow’s Shim Sham Club at 37 Wardour Street (later the Rainbow Roof and, later still, part of the venue that would go on to house the Flamingo). These clubs were noisy, tough and interracial. Ideally they would have featured African-American musicians but there were legal restrict
ions on work visas for American musicians imposed by the Musicians’ Union. The black British (mostly West Indian) musicians who took the stage did their best to channel the rhythms and attitudes of Harlem in their playing. The band at the Shim Sham was directed by George ‘Happy’ Blake, from Trinidad. He and his brother Cyril had a profound influence on British jazz, helping to introduce calypso and Latin American influences.
If some halls were known for ‘hot jazz’ no doubt there were others noted for ‘hot girls’. Almost all of the halls were dominated by the young but in most towns there was a hall or two where older customers congregated. Tony’s Ballroom next door to the Birmingham Hippodrome on Hurst Street was always said to be multi-generational.
Some clubs catered for a specific clientele. According to researcher Allison Abra, the Royal dance hall in north London was known for being a ‘Jewish hall’. Young men and women with an Irish Catholic background were often committed members of the Gaelic League, who would hold regular ceilidh dances, often on a Sunday. In Manchester in the 1930s there were two very active branches: the Craobh na Laimbe Deirge and the Craobh Oisin. The city had a number of thriving venues in the 1930s, including the Ritz on Whitworth Street, with its sprung dancefloor. In 1937 the George & Dragon on Swan Street in Manchester began a new phase in its development when the stage was moved from one end of the hall to jutting out halfway up a wall. It was a question of economics; by putting the stage up there the then owner Ernie Tyson freed more floor space to pack in drinkers. The bands accessed the stage up a ladder. That’s how the venue got a new name: Band on the Wall.
Whatever the music and the type of club, all venues faced disruption in September 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War. Towns and cities were blitzed by German bombers. Between September 1940 and May 1941 there were nearly 150 full-scale raids on the UK. During the Blitz some dance venues were used as air-raid shelters (including Thimblemill Baths in Smethwick) but some took direct hits and a number were destroyed (including Tony’s Ballroom in Birmingham).
