by Suggs
What makes Wilton’s such an astonishing time capsule is the fact that if you call in today to have a nose around, you can still see the evidence of how the great man realised his vision. Stepping out of the bar, you head back across the entrance lobby and into the rooms on the other side. These were once ground-floor shops run by Wilton’s neighbours and later his tenants. They remained operational even after he began to knock the terraces around. Records show that back in the 1850s a bootmaker plied his trade in one of them, a baker in another. I don’t know if Wilton bled them dry with the rent he charged but, if not, the proprietor of the other shop - an importer of leeches - could have done the job for him.
Upstairs there’s even more evidence of how he must have re-jigged the buildings in order to realise his glittering vision. The upper floors are labyrinthine and somewhat disconcerting, not least because, at first sight, the windows which once gave a view out on to the back gardens appear to have been painted black. Closer up, I realise this was an optical illusion - a result of Wilton’s eagerness not to waste an inch of space when he built the hall across the back yards of the terrace. The blank, black space seen from the back windows is actually the side wall of the hall itself and, because the window frames have lost their glass, you can actually reach out your hand and touch it.
Deprived of access to their rear yards, the only route out of the building for the tenants who rented these rooms above the ground-floor shops was through the front door of the bar. The cumulative comings and goings of shopkeepers, tenants and customers must have been something to behold.
But that’s enough about the rest of the building. Top of the bill at Wilton’s is the music hall itself, which you enter through a doorway no bigger than an average-sized front door in the downstairs lobby. The minute you walk into the auditorium itself, prepare for your socks to be blown off - not a risk that future generations entering the ExCeL arena in Docklands are going to have to guard against, I suspect. The place needs a fair bit of TLC, and some serious structural work to boot, but to see it in its faded grandeur somehow makes it all the more special and gives you a real and delightfully eerie feel of what it was like in its heyday. I’m not going to bamboozle you with technical data relating to the interior such as the balcony’s ‘bombe carton Pierre front, supported on unusual helical-twist cast-iron columns’ or its ‘elliptical vaulted ceiling with ornamental fretted ribs’ because that would make it sound like I knew what I was talking about. Seeing is believing in my book, and if you haven’t seen Wilton’s yet, then you’d better have a word with yourself and resolve to pay it a visit.
Of course a music hall is much more than bricks, mortar and some impressive plasterwork. It’s a place to perform. So it was a great pleasure to take a turn around the place in the company of the president of the Music Hall Society and fabulous entertainer, the irrepressibly iridescent, indefatigable, irresistible, individual and indispensable Mr Roy Hudd, who reckoned playing Wilton’s would’ve been rather like performing in the working men’s clubs up north during the 70s (i.e. tough).
The majority of the audience would’ve been made up of sailors who, back on dry land after months at sea, turned up for the show with pockets full of money ready to spend on birds, booze and banter. Rumour has it, according to the venerable Mr Hudd, that there was once a trap door beneath a bench at the back of the hall from which some ‘heavy’ would intermittently pull a lever, sending a group of well-oiled jolly jack tars into the cellar, where they would be relieved of their chattels, via the cosh, and the next thing they knew upon waking was that they were back aboard ship.
Those who managed to avoid a coshing had the chance to see stars of a different kind because many of the brightest lights of early music hall would have played Wilton’s - such legendary names as Sam Cowell, the comic vocalist who’s considered to be one of the country’s first singer-songwriters. As far as I know, Cowell was no relation to he of the high-hitched trousers and centre parting, although by all accounts he very much had the ‘X’ factor back in his day and was renowned for folksy ballads such as the perennial crowd-pleaser ‘The Ratcatcher’s Daughter’.
Another man who graced the stage at Wilton’s on many occasions was ‘the idol of the barmaids’ himself, George Leybourne, the nattily dressed swell also known as ‘Champagne Charlie’, because of the song that made him famous:Champagne Charlie is my name.
Champagne drinking is my game.
There’s no drink as good as fizz! fizz! fizz!
I’ll drink ev’ry drop there is, is, is!
All round the town it is the same.
By Pop! Pop! Pop! I rose to fame.
I’m the idol of the barmaids
And Champagne Charlie is my name.
Leybourne was supposedly in the pocket of Moët et Chandon who paid him to promote their champagne, although I’m not certain if this was on a ‘drink-as-much-as-you-like’ basis. I’d have quite fancied the job myself if this was the deal, though I doubt whether Moët would have been able to afford me! Having said that, apparently champagne was more of a working man’s drink back then, and was even available on draught at music halls. Can you imagine the devastation? ‘I’m just off for a pint at the local, dear. See you in three days!’
Wilton’s also became home to a new breed of singing performers from the 1860s to the 1880s, like Harry Clifton who became famous for his ‘motto’ songs, offering advice to audiences whose lives had altered dramatically through industrialisation and urbanisation. Roy Hudd told me that Clifton was paid by factory owners to come up with songs that would reconcile workers in the audience to their lot and at the same time induce them to put in maximum effort at the workplace. Now there’s a cue for a verse of one of Clifton’s finest!
Work, boys, work and be contented.
So long as you’ve enough to buy a meal.
For if you will but try, you’ll be wealthy by and by,
If you’ll only put your shoulder to the wheel.
Talking to Roy while soaking up the wonderful atmosphere of this unique survivor makes me reflect on Madness songs and connections with the repertoire of the music hall. Although I am not one to blow our own 76 trombones like the Victorian showmen, we’ve always had an interest in singing about the woes of the common man and have never been averse to a spot of ribaldry or entering into the vernacular, which is all part and parcel of the songs of the music hall. And what a parcel it is. In his great book, London: A Literary Companion, Peter Vansittart describes what he sees as being the stuff of music-hall songwriting:songs about beer, the lodger, about being up before the beak, about the missus, outsize wives, and timid or erring husbands, the rent collector, mothers in law, in a smoky boozy haze, with rumbustious double-entendres, sly winks, robust sexuality, gallows humour, with the incongruous and absurd demolishing the stuffy and rigid.
Well, that sounds just about the perfect description of all the things I look for in a well-constructed pop song.
It’s not only us who’ve been influenced by that tradition. Though the music halls may have disappeared, the ‘lowbrow’ street music which they nurtured has adapted and survived, and what a lively little beggar it turned out to be. In my opinion, some of the more bawdy current crop of young artists would have no problem plying their trade in the music halls.
John Wilton died in 1880, at the age of 60, by which time the hall was under new management, having been rebuilt following a serious fire three years earlier. But its days as an entertainment venue were numbered. By now, many of the smaller halls were struggling to survive. They had become infamous for the rowdy, drunken behaviour of audiences and the bawdy songs and ‘provocative dancing’ they had come to enjoy. That all sounds bloody marvellous to me, but it obviously didn’t go down too well with the temperance movement, whose path I keep crossing as I wander through stories of disappearing Victorian London and who blamed society’s ills on excessive alcohol consumption.
They brought pressure to bear on the authorities to clean up the halls
and new health and safety laws were passed which squeezed out the smaller venues, whose proprietors couldn’t afford to comply with them. Many simply returned to being pubs, others were demolished. Those that decided to soldier on soon found themselves under threat from fresh competitors as new-style ‘deluxe’ music halls or ‘variety’ theatres started going up in the 1880s, mainly in the West End to begin with, such as the Tivoli in the Strand and the London Pavilion on Piccadilly Circus.
Wilton’s finally went dark in the late 1880s. But miraculously, unlike all the other original London music halls bar Hoxton, it survived against all the odds. There were several reasons why it managed to dodge the wrecking ball. As with Hoxton Hall, the first is to do with having a bit of help from above. In 1888, the hall became a Methodist mission and remained so until 1956. Apparently, during the first dock strike of 1889, 2,000 meals a day were served at the hall to striking dockers - that’s an awful lot of covers. The fact that the hall was fulfilling an important role in what was now an extremely run-down and impoverished area of the East End probably saved it from demolition. It was also lucky to survive the Blitz, somehow managing to keep its head down when many other buildings in the district were losing theirs. After Wilton’s days as a mission came to an end in 1956, it became a rag warehouse and was earmarked for slum clearance, but it received an eleventh hour reprieve in 1964, thanks to a campaign led by the former Poet Laureate and all-round good egg John Betjeman.
I wish I could say that things turned sunnier for the place after 1964, but sadly the future of this unique and incredibly atmospheric old place is still not fully secure. Despite the sterling efforts of the charity which currently runs Wilton’s, this Victorian monument to music, merriment and mirth still awaits restoration and requires urgent repairs to prevent it from collapse. There is hope though: Wilton’s cultural and architectural importance was recently identified by the World Monuments Fund, who added the building to their list of the world’s 100 most endangered sites, alongside such exotic places as the Inca city of Machu Picchu.
The variety theatres themselves were later edged out by the arrival of cinema, and cinema - for a period - was then edged out by TV, but for a few glorious decades variety theatres ruled the roost in London. It was this transfer of music hall into deluxe theatres that ushered in the ‘golden age of variety’. This was essentially an exercise in rebranding, to make the genre appear more respectable, as the entertainment on offer changed very little. The requirement to secure licences from a magistrate and the pressure brought to bear by moral reform groups was behind this upmarket shift.
The layout of the new halls was more in keeping with traditional theatres, with fixed seating throughout, thus removing all evidence of variety’s pub origins. Eventually, drink was banned from the auditorium altogether and music hall’s acceptance as a respectable form of entertainment, albeit in a new guise, appeared to be sealed by the first Royal Variety Performance at the Palace Theatre on Cambridge Circus in 1912. It was a bit of a sham though, given that the biggest star of the day, Marie Lloyd, wasn’t invited to sing. Her material was deemed too saucy for royalty. A bit rich, considering the recently deceased Edward VII had given one or two actresses and singers more than his personal seal of approval during the course of his marriage.
The golden age of variety was a bit before my time, but I’ve heard plenty of stories about that period. Some of the best were told by my mother-in-law, Christina. She’s sadly no longer with us, but in their youth Christina and her two sisters used to have a dance act and appeared in many of London’s great variety theatres in the 40s and 50s, such as the London Hippodrome just by Leicester Square. It’s a place that has been knocked about a bit inside over the years but is currently undergoing an intensive programme of redevelopment as a casino. Restoration and preservation of the original features (many of which have been hidden for decades) of this Frank Matcham-designed building are planned.
Christina regaled me with wonderful stories about her time as one third of the Martin Sisters. Part of their routine involved performing Russian dances on roller skates, which was fraught with danger, given that all theatre stages are gently raked, so they had to really battle to stop themselves drifting helplessly towards the footlights. Their musical accompaniment was provided by a blind pianist whose skill on the ivories was matched by his highly developed sense of spatial awareness. This proved invaluable when it came to walking the girls to and from the theatre during wartime blackouts. The sisters performed six nights a week, including matinees on the weekends: bloody hard work. They often shared the bill with the Crazy Gang, a collection of comedy double acts whose most famous members were Bud Flanagan (aka Ruben Weintrop) and Chesney Allen, whose big number was ‘Underneath the Arches’.
As if the raked stages weren’t enough of a hazard, the Martin Sisters’ act was often made all the more dangerous and thrilling by interventions from members of the Crazy Gang. Serving that demanding mistress Comedy, they took to opening and closing the stage trap doors, or turning on the wind machine and sending the girls’ skirts flying as they tried to descend a flight of stairs - on roller-skates, mind you - during their entrance.
The ownership of many variety theatres in this period was concentrated in nationwide chains (although London was still very much the industry hub) and the Martin Sisters ended up touring the circuit of theatres owned by Moss Empires, having got the contract through their agent, the famous impresario and World Charleston Champion of 1926, Lew Grade. The sisters travelled around the country on trains specially commissioned by Moss Empires, with each compartment occupied by different acts. There was a hierarchy on the train which determined who travelled where. The band went in the first compartment, dancers in the second, the Crazy Gang next, followed by assorted compartments of snake charmers, magicians, and a fella whose act consisted of meticulously winding up a series of clocks, stitched inside his coat, which would go off simultaneously as he reached his punch line and threw his garment open. Presumably to illustrate the secret of good comedy: timing. The bigger solo performers would have a compartment to themselves. What a scene it must have been as that train pulled away from King’s Cross.
Years later, in 1978, our record company, Stiff Records, adopted a similar ‘package tour’ idea and sent artists like Wreckless Eric, Rachel Sweet and Lena Lovich around the country on the ‘Be Stiff’ tour train. Variety was clearly alive and kicking in the late 70s.
The larger variety halls which Anne’s mum and aunts played during the 1940s and 1950s were far removed from the original pub halls, but it didn’t make them less charismatic. By all accounts, most of them were pretty spectacular, which makes it all the more galling that nearly all of them had disappeared by the 1960s.
Variety entertainment began to die a slow death following the arrival of the talkies in the late 1920s and was finally finished off by TV in the 1950s. The main problem for music halls and variety was that in their heyday most of the acts had one signature turn, routine or song, for which they were synonymous, and so doing the rounds of all the venues meant performing in front of a new crowd each night. Unless, that is, the audience followed the act around, which some did. Victorian groupies, screaming and throwing their bloomers and long-johns on stage.
By the time an act came back round, it would have regained some of its novelty and audiences would turn up again. You see those old films of six fellas doing the most intricate dance routine, in complete unison, that they would have perfected over years up and down the country. Pre-TV there was always another town, always another crowd. In the TV era, if an act was showcasing its routine to the nation, that would be it. Everyone who had wanted to see the renowned bird imitator, for instance, just had. There was no new audience to reach out to the next evening. People no longer needed to go to the theatre to watch performers. Once the audiences stopped turning up, it was only a matter of time before the theatres themselves faced extinction. Some of them managed to survive by adapting to new uses. One of the most f
amous variety theatres outside the West End, which once wowed audiences, stood close to home in Camden.
The Bedford Theatre on Camden High Street was demolished in 1969 after standing empty for ten years, thus bringing to an end a colourful showbiz career which had begun 80 years earlier when the theatre was built on the site of a former music hall. The office building that today stands in its place is still called Bedford House and I used to hear people ask bus drivers to drop them off at ‘the Bedford’ up until a few years ago. It’s like a lot of London landmarks that become embedded in the psyche of the local community, even after they are gone. The Nag’s Head in Holloway, just around the corner from me, is another one - the area is still referred to as that even though the pub from which the name came has now disappeared.
Although the Bedford is long gone, and I never saw it in its pomp, for me it lives on for two reasons. The first is because it features in the pictures of Walter Sickert, who headed the so-called Camden Town Group of artists and immortalised Victorian and Edwardian Camden in his paintings. The second reason is that the Bedford appeared, just a couple of years before its demolition, in a cult 1967 documentary entitled The London Nobody Knows.
I first saw this 45-minute film on TV in the late 70s, and if it ever finds its way to an art-house cinema near you, I urge you to go and see it. It’s based on a book of the same name by the artist and art critic Geoffrey Scowcroft Fletcher, written in 1962. Fletcher had a particular penchant for what he termed ‘off-beat’ London, and his book is a celebration of the quirky, unusual and downright bizarre places which make the city so special. Sound familiar? The film, inspired by Fletcher’s example, attempts a similar job.
