Kennington News

In Household Words Charles Dickens wrote: “Last night I was in an immense theatre, capable of holding nearly 5,000 people. What theatre? Her Majesty’s? Far better. Royal Italian Opera? Far better. Infinitely superior to the latter for hearing in; infinitely superior to both, for seeing in.”

Dickens was speaking glowingly of the Britannia in Hoxton, East London, one of the new generation of “saloon theatres” that was taking music hall to ever bigger audiences in the 1850s. Dickens’s polemical defence of these halls – which he sees as temples of a new, popular folk-art form that was morally educative, self-regulating and uplifting – suggests that the music hall provided a secular form of the Mass in which the audience were themselves identified and uplifted as members of a general community.

One wonders which of the acts treading the boards in 1857 might have led him to these conclusions. Maybe it was the the banjo-playing blackface minstrel E. W. Mackney, the “bearded lady of Geneva” Josephine Clofullia, the tightrope walker Caicedo (“the King of the Wire”), or maybe Napoleon the Wizard Dog.

He may have seen a troupe of acrobats called the Chinese Brothers (“the original wonders of Pekin!” exclaimed one playbill), or Stolberg & Lawrence (the “Albanian minstrels”, who actually came from Hull), or J. H. Stead, whose USP was to wear a close-fitting striped suit and a dunce’s cap and execute a lengthy series of bizarre, stiff-legged jumps before leaving the stage.

While music hall was to enjoy its greatest success in the “golden age” between 1885 and 1914, the mid1850s was the critical point at which the phenomenon spilt out of the taverns into ever larger premises. The 1843 Theatres Act had, inadvertently, assisted this process. The main thrust of the act was to allow theatres around the country to present “legitimate dramas” such as Shakespeare that had previously been permissible only at the two “royal theatres” at Covent Garden and Drury Lane. But it also allowed unlicensed venues to operate as pubs while presenting music and variety turns.

Unlike legitimate theatres, music halls could supplement their entry price by selling food and drink. “Every publican,” wrote the music-hall historian Willson Disher of the 1850s, “would now try to lay violent hands on the building next door. No opera house was too grand for the purpose, no shanty too mean.”

By 1857 these ad-hoc extensions had become recognisable theatres, numbering about 50 in London alone. The Canterbury in Lambeth – the capital’s first proper music hall, originally built over a skittle alley next to a pub in 1852 – was upgrading its premises to hold 2,000 people, while Gatti’s Music Hall had just opened on the other side of Westminster Bridge Road. Other pub theatres were expanding: the Mahogany Rooms in Aldgate was being converted into a 1,000-capacity venue called Wilton’s Music Hall (it’s still there today), while the Britannia in Hoxton would reopen in 1858 capable of holding more than 4,500 people. The Shoreditch Theatre, holding 2,300 patrons, opened in 1857, as did the Surrey Music Hall in Kennington, with a Great Hall that held 10,000.

That was also the year that the music halls started to move out of the East End and southeast London slums and into the West End, with grand venues such as Weston’s Music Hall in Holborn.

Outside London, 1857 was also the opening year for the Britannia Music Hall on Trongate, Glasgow (later renamed the Panoptican and still standing today), showing that music hall had become a nationwide phenomenon.

Few of these venues were on the scale of the giant “variety halls” such as the Palace Theatre in Manchester and the Shepherds Bush Empire that were built around the turn of the century. Instead, these early music halls retained the ambience of the taverns that gave birth to them. “The audience would usually behave as if they were in a pub,” says John Evans, a music-hall historian, “talking, drinking, eating, smoking and wandering throughout the acts, often heckling, joining in the songs, retaining the drunken feel of the saloon-bar song clubs.”

These 1850s halls tended to have a similar layout. A chairman would sit in front of the orchestra pit, looking out at the audience but viewing the events on stage through a strategically placed mirror, drumming up enthusiasm as he announced each act and occasionally calling order by banging a gavel. The area in front of the stage would seat punters around half a dozen tables, with waiters serving pies, ham sandwiches, pigs’ trotters and pease pudding. The back half of the hall would have rows of benches, with shelves on the back of each to hold drinks and food. Flanking these seats would be the promenade areas, while the upstairs balcony and stairs would typically be filled with prostitutes, even though, by 1857, many men would have been visiting the music hall with their wives.

The shows would be leavened with “speciality acts” – strongmen, contortionists, acrobats, ventriloquists, bird acts, fire-eaters, conjurors and Derren Brown-style mind-readers, described at the time, rather delightfully, as “mentalists” – but the entertainment would have been largely musical. The playbills of the time proudly advertised sentimental ballads and popular operatic selections (“so badly sung and vulgarly accompanied,” said one contemporary critic, “that it would be better for the cause of art that they should be omitted”).

However, it was the innuendo-laden comic song that provided music hall with its signature style. By the 1850s this peculiarly British fusion of light opera, folk ballads, theatrical airs, drawing-room lyrics, bawdy topical humour and Stephen Foster-style negro songs from across the Atlantic had coalesced into a recognisable genre.

“The performances are all similar,” says one rather sceptical observer in a contemporary newspaper called The Tomahawk. “A man appears on the platform, dressed in outlandish clothes and ornamented with whiskers of ferocious length and hideous hue, and proceeds to sing verse after verse of pointless twaddle, interspersed with a blatant ‘chorus’, in which the audience is requested to join.”

“The great popularity of the songs,” says the historian Peter Bailey, “with their principal motifs of booze, romantic adventure, marriage and mothers-in-law, dear old pals and seaside holidays and so on, comes from the audience’s identification with the routine yet piquant exploits of a comic realism that validates the shared experience of a typically urbanised, class-bound world seen from below.”

In this elevation of the mundane, you can see the music hall’s resonance in much popular culture of today, from soap operas to reality TV. Its obvious influence is in stand-up comedy (a byproduct of the comic singer’s between-song banter) as well as the ever-popular behemoth that is the variety act.

Less obvious, perhaps, has been the spectral presence of the music hall throughout British pop music. After more than half a century of British singers trying to sound American, a host of contemporary vocalists – from Mike Skinner to Pete Doherty, from Arctic Monkeys to Dizzee Rascal, from Jamie T to Lily Allen – are developing an authentically British pop song, told in a defiantly urban vernacular. It might come as something of a shock to discover that East London’s music-hall stars were already doing this 150 years ago.

— Wilton’s Music Hall, Graces Alley, off Ensign Street, London E1 (020-7702 9555)

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