Category: blogpost

To mark forthcoming International Women’s Day, and as a nod to my friends at Folk the Patriarchy, here is the first in what might become an occasional series on “Women of the Halls.”

Music Hall allowed a very small number of working class men and women to escape the relative drudgery of their lives and become independently wealthy. It was one of the few ways in which Victorian women from a poor background could achieve any degree of wealth and independence. But life in the halls was not all sweetness and light, and by the early 20th century there were thousands of Halls operating in an increasingly exploitative way.

The industrialisation of the halls led to the formation of a trade union, the Variety Artists Federation, which took its first industrial action in 1906. Managers tried to ban the union, but there was a major strike in 1907. Many of the great women stars of the day were active supporters of the strike. Marie Lloyd explained why they supported the strike:

“We the stars can dictate our own terms. We are fighting not for ourselves, but for the poorer members of the profession, earning thirty shillings to £3 a week. For this they have to do double turns, and now matinées have been added as well. These poor things have been compelled to submit to unfair terms of employment, and I mean to back up the federation in whatever steps are taken.”

The strike lasted two weeks, and ended when the management caved and agreed a minimum wage and a maximum working week. The victory of the strike was in no small part due to the activity of Marie Lloyd and the other women in the union.

On a different note, women had to be tough to work the Halls, and I can’t resist the story of Bessie Bellwood and how she dealt with hecklers…

Bessie Bellwood (1856 to 1896), born in Ireland, described as a strict Catholic, worked as a rabbit skinner as a child. At first her repertoire in the Halls consisted of serious ballads, but she quickly switched to comic material. Her most famous song was “What cheer ‘Ria” but she was perhaps more famous for her way of dealing with hecklers.

Her first appearance at the Star Bermondsey was recorded by comic writer Jerome K Jerome. I think it’s a wonderful piece of writing in its own right: it gives a beautiful picture of Bessie dealing with an aggressive heckler, winning over the audience, and destroying the man who was tormenting her. It’s a famous incident, and a number of books about Music Hall quote the article very selectively, but I think it’s worth quoting at some length. One thing I would say: the author’s obsession with Bessie’s tongue seems a bit strange to the modern reader (or to me at least!)

Bessie got her chance to debut at the Star due to the nonappearance of a popular local act. She was singing in character as the zither-playing Signorina Ballatino, and we pick up the story after the audience has spent several minutes expressing their disquiet at the absence of the local favourite. The master of ceremonies had completely failed to calm the crowd, and when Bessie finally stepped forward to play she:

.... was most un-gallantly greeted with a storm of groans and hisses. Her beloved instrument was unfairly alluded to as a pie-dish, and she was advised to take it back and get the penny on it. The chairman, addressed by his Christian name of “Jimmy” was told to lie down and let us sing him to sleep. Every time she attempted to start playing, shouts were raised for Joss.

 At length the chairman, overcoming his evident disinclination to take any sort of hand whatever in the game, rose and gently hinted at the desirability of silence. The suggestion not to meeting with any support, he proceeded to adopt sterner measures. He addressed himself personally to the ringleader of the rioters, the man who had first championed the cause of the absent Joss. This person was a brawny individual, who judging from appearance, followed in his business hours the calling of Coalheaver. “Yes, sir,” said the chairman, pointing a finger towards him, where he sat in the front row of the gallery; “You sir, in the flannel shirt. I can see you. Will you allow this lady to give her entertainment?”

 “No,” answered he of the coal heaving profession, in stentorian tones.

 “Then sir,” said the little chairman, working himself up into a state suggestive of Jove about to launch a thunderbolt “then sir all I can say is that you are no gentlemen.”

 This was a little too much, or rather a good deal too little, for the Signorina Ballatino. She had hitherto been standing in a meek attitude of pathetic appeal, wearing a fixed smile of ineffable sweetness; but she evidently felt that she could go a bit farther than that herself, even if she was a lady. Calling the chairman “an old messer” and telling him for……… sake to shut up if that was all he could do for his living, she came down to the front, and took the case into her own hands.

 She did not waste time and the rest of the audience. She went direct for that coalheaver, and thereupon ensued a slanging match the memory of which sends a thrill of admiration through me even to this day. It was a battle worthy of the gods. He was a heaver of coals, quick and ready beyond his kind. During many years sojourn East and South, in the course of many wanderings from Billingsgate to Limehouse Hole, from Petticoat Lane to Whitechapel Road; out of eel pie shop and penny gaffs; out of tavern and street, and court and doss-house, he had gathered together slang words and terms and phrases, and they came back to him now and he stood up against her manfully.

 But as well might the lamb stand up against the eagle, when the shadow of its wings falls across the green pastures, and the wind flies before it’s dark oncoming. At the end of two minutes he lay gasping, dazed and speechless. 

 Then she began.

 She announced her intention of “wiping down the bloomin’ ‘all” with him and making it respectable; and, metaphorically speaking, that is what she did. Her tongue hit him between the eyes, and knocked him down and trampled on him. It curled round and round him like a whip, and then it uncurled and wound the other way. It seized him by the scruff of the neck, and tossed him up into the air, and caught him as he descended, and flung him to the ground, and rolled him on it. It played around him like forked lightning, and blinded him. It danced and shrieked about him like a host of whirling fiends, and he tried to remember a prayer, and could not. It touched him lightly on the sole of his foot and the crown of his head, and his hair stood up straight and his limbs grew stiff. The people sitting near him drew away, not feeling it safe to be near, and left him alone, surrounded by space and language.

 It was the most artistic piece of work of its kind that I have ever heard. Every phrase she flung at him seemed to have been woven on purpose to entangle him and to embrace in its choking folds his people and his gods, to strangle with its threads his every hope, ambition, and belief. Each term she put upon him clung to him like a garment, and fitted him without a crease. The last name she called him one felt to be, until one heard the next, the one name that he ought to have been christened by. 

 For five and three quarter minutes by the clock she spoke, and never for one instant did she pause or falter….

 At the end, she gathered herself together for one supreme effort, and hurled at him and insult so bitter with scorn, so sharp with insight into his career and character, so heavy with prophetic curse, that strong men drew and held their breath while it passed over them, and women hid their faces and shivered.

 Then she folded her arms, and stood silent; and the house, from floor-to-ceiling, rose and cheered her until there was no more breath in its lungs. 

Jerome, K Jerome.The Idler ; an illustrated magazine, Feb. 1892-Jan. 1899; London (Mar 1892): [119]-135.

My list of songs written by Geoghegan which have entered the folk tradition now include (songs where I have completed my research have links, Roud number in brackets):

1. 10,000 miles away (1778)
2. A Drop of Good Beer (1502)
3. Down in a coal mine (3502)
4. Glossop Road (13158)
5. John Barleycorn is a hero bold (2141)
6. Johnny we hardly knew ye (3137)
7. Merry men of England (13658)
8. Old Adam was Father of all (12875)
9. Pat works on the railway (208)
10. Rock the Cradle John (357 and 7278)
11. Roger Ruff (2145)
12. The Hallelujah Band (V10010)
13. The Lancashire Witches (V8371)
14. They all have a mate but me (1140)

I know that I’m not alone in feeling that many of the songs feel very “traditional” and not like songs that come from the Halls. Indeed, there are others who wrote for the Halls, like Harry Clifton, who have many more songs appearing in the Roud index (my searches show 37 for Clifton, 13 for Geoghegan). But many more of Clifton songs have the feel that we might expect of a “Music Hall Song”, like Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green or Isabella with the Gingham Umbrella.

(I maybe being unfair to Harry Clifton, and I’ll have to investigate some of his songs more thoroughly).

My initial posting about Geoghegan now feels a little too suspicious. I think I was perhaps a little hasty in accusing him of doing an “AP Carter” and claiming authorship of traditional songs he didn’t write.

Investigating the songs above, so far, I can find no evidence of them appearing before the 1860/70s when Geoghegan was writing. I can find no evidence in the pages of the Music Hall paper The Era, challenging claims to authorship – and writers and performers seemed very quick to use those pages to challenge misuse or wrong authorship of their songs!

So on balance maybe Geoghegan did write all these songs…

21/02/20

Music Hall saw the beginning of the profession of songwriter and came along around the same time as the first attempts to copyright or otherwise protect written music and lyrics.  The 19^th century saw the publication of tens of thousands of sheet music songs based on the popular songs of the day. A number of very prolific songwriters feature in these,  including JB Goeghegan: Joseph Bryan (Jack) Geoghegan.

The interesting thing about this person is that many of his songs appear to have entered the folk tradition, including:

• 10,000 miles away
• Glossop Road
• Johnny we hardly knew ye
• John Barleycorn (Roud 2141 not the other one)
• Down in a coal mine
• Pat works on the railway

Until recently not a great deal was known about this man. But recent research by his descendants and various folkies have revealed more of the story.

He was he was born in Barton-upon-Irwell (part of Salford) in 1816, son of a fustian cutter from Dublin, his mother was from Manchester. Allegedly “before he reached manhood [he] took to writing songs upon current events”.   He left home at an early age and was married to Elizabeth (a ‘vocalist’) before he was 19.

Geoghegan later became the chairman of ceremonies at the Bolton Museum and Star Music Hall in the 1860s and 1870s. He left the Star for a while to run Pullan’s Theatre of Varieties, a wooden construction on Bolton’s wholesale market, but later returned to the Star and Museum as manager.

[The temperance movement in Bolton saw the Star as “the means of sending more souls to hell than the Sunday schools of Bolton are the means of preventing from going thither”]

GJ Mellor tells us gives us a description from the Bolton Guardian:

The Star Music Hall had a plain stage, and to the left stood the Chairman’s box. Mr Geoghegan, the manager, acted as Chairman, and he had a mallet and called out the names of the performers.

Performances began at 7:30 each night, and the curtain was wound up by hand. A well-known character called “Museum Jack” lit the lamps and footlights with a taper, and also played the piano. If a turn failed to please, Mr Geoghegan said “You’re no good!” and ejected the hapless performer.

Geoghegan also appears at other times as the Chairman of the Old Gaiety in New Street, Hanley, Stoke. There is some indication that he may have spent some time in Sheffield as the Chairman at the Surrey Music Hall (I am unable to confirm this).

Our friend JW ‘Over’ Rowley, the Leeds comedian  wrote a letter to the editor of the music Hall newspaper The Era Magazine,  on Saturday August 21, 1897:

OLD SONGS

Sir – I was very much pleased and interested by the remarks of a correspondent in your last week’s issue under the above heading. It affords a singer much gratification to read, after half a century has gone by, that his songs are still alive and of the class that are likely to live forever.

But your correspondent need not go to the British Museum for information about any of the songs he cites. If he refers to a file of The Era from 1871 to 1874, he will find that ‘Down in a coal mine’ and ‘Out in the green fields’ are both my songs, the former being written and composed for me by Joseph Bryan Geoghegan, author of ‘Men of merry England’, ‘John Barleycorn’, ‘Lancashire Witches’ etc. It was published by H.D’Alcorn, each title page bearing my picture.

I sang the song for many months at every music hall in London, at Drury Lane Theatre, the Princess’s, and at Evans’s for four years. Mr.Tony Pastor made the song popular in America, and personally thanked me for permission to use it when we met at Mr.G.W.Moore’s garden party when Tony paid his first visit to England – about 1884.

Yours faithfully,
J.W. Rowley

It’s interesting that Rowley sees the songs as belonging to him rather than the person who wrote them for him. This seems to reflect the practice of Music Hall Performers fiercely protecting their rights to perform certain songs on certain stages -Rowley clearly saw himself as owning the songs in Britain but not in America.

Did Geoghegan really write all the songs? According to Stan Hugill, the doyen of shanty experts, the song 10,000 Miles Away, published under Geoghegan’s authorship in 1870,  appeared to have been sung by street singers in Ireland in the early part of the 19^th century under the name Botany Bay and only later became a favourite song in the Music Halls of the 50s and 60s.  

Could it be that Geoghegan was claiming authorship of songs he didn’t write? It’s certainly a possibility, as sheet music for many of the songs he and others wrote can be found in slightly different forms with other individuals claiming authorship.

Claiming authorship of folk material is certainly a common feature in 20^th century traditional music… AP Carter famously claimed to have written virtually every traditional song that the Carter family ever sang :-).

JB Geoghegan will feature on these pages again..

Sources

Mudcat thread on Joseph Bryan Geoghegan

Geoghegan genealogical research:

Yorkshire Garland group research on Glossop Road song

Obituary in The Era

Harold Scott Early Doors

Robert Poole Music Hall in Bolton

GJ Mellor The Northern Music Hall

I’m reasonably hopeful that many of my posts will be light-hearted, but perhaps not this one… As a socialist and sometime activist in the peace movement, I have to face the fact that extreme, uncritical, flag-waving nationalism will always be associated with Music Hall, if for no other reason than that the word “jingoism” actually comes from the Halls.

According to the Oxford English dictionary, “jingo” was originally a word used by magicians, equivalent to something like “Hey presto!”. In the early 19^th century “by jingo” became a jokey alternative to swearing in the Halls and elsewhere. It is in this sense that jingo was used in MacDermott’s War Song (aka “The Jingo Song”) with its chorus:

 We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do,
 We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.
 We fought the bear before, and while we’re Britain’s true,
 The Russians will not have Constantinople. 

This was a song written by GW Hunt and first sung by MacDermott to great acclaim in 1877. Russia had declared war on Turkey, and Disraeli’s Conservatives were backing the Turkish and threatening to launch a war against Russia.

The Tories, staunch defenders of the British Empire, backed the Turks hoping to block Russian attempts at imperial expansion. The Liberal Party and most of the organised left, opposed any military action, and tended to be anti-Turkish as a result of “the Bulgarian atrocities of 1876” in which thousands of Bulgarian Christians were massacred by Turkish troops.

This was the context in which The Jingo Song was hugely successful – it was one of a number of patriotic, pro Empire songs that featured heavily in Music Hall repertoire from the 1870s on and off until the First World War (to get a flavour of pro-war songs in the lead up to 1914, take a look at the film Oh What a Lovely War!).

“Jingoism” became a by-word  for extreme nationalism – William Morris and others who opposed the war were attacked on the streets by right-wingers who were described by people from both sides of the argument as “jingoists”.

It would be going too far, as some authors do, to say that the Music Halls backed the Tories and their war-mongering in the 1870s. However, the fact that so many songs of this type were written in this period must mean that they were reasonably popular with the largely working-class and lower-middle-class audiences in the Halls.

That said, we need to be careful: we don’t always know how the songs were sung, and how audiences responded to them, and we can’t assume that these jingoistic songs represent in a straightforward way the views of the audiences. If you look at the repertoire of MacDermott and other “pro Empire” singers, jingoistic songs formed only a small part of their repertoire – people were not descending on the Halls to listen to entire evenings of pro Empire, pro-war songs.

The owners of the music halls were always desperate to appear respectable, and there is evidence that they consciously encouraged the singing of such songs with that in mind. (Reflecting an ongoing battle with respectable mainstream theatre and the censors).

Many figures on the left at the time, and in the Liberal anti-war movement, saw the Music Hall as downright reactionary. JE Hobson, a Liberal writer whose analysis of imperialism was highly influential at the time, provided a neat summary of this view in the introduction to his book The Psychology of Jingoism:

Among large sections of the middle and labouring classes, the Music Halls are a more potent educator than the church, the school, the political meeting, or even than the press. The [music hall] artiste conveys by song or recitation crude notions upon morals and politics, appealing by coarse humour or exaggerated pathos to the animal lusts of an audience stimulated by alcohol … The glorification of brute force and an ignorant contempt for foreigners … make the music hall a very serviceable engine for generating military passion.

The language here (crude notions … coarse humour … Animal lusts ..stimulated by alcohol … glorification of brute force … ignorant)  no doubt reflects a  deeply held snobbishness about the lower classes, but it’s important not to ignore that for some on the left of the political spectrum as it existed at the time, there was an equally deeply held suspicion that Halls were a mechanism for whipping up war fever amongst the lower classes.

So finally, back to the middle-class, Fabian folksong collectors of the late 19^th and early 20^th century that were so keen to keep Music Hall songs out of their collections. Is it possible that it didn’t just represent a snobbishness about the musical tastes of the urban working class, but additionally reflected a dislike of crude Jingoism?? [I hope to investigate further..]

Sources:

• Russell: Popular Music
• EP Thompson: William Morris
• JE Hobson: Psychology of Jingoism

Why folk and Music Hall?

I am not seeped in British folk music from birth, my early exposure  to folk songs of the British Isles  (in the 1970s) consisted of one or two songs vaguely remembered from primary school, and an overplayed copy of the LP The Spinners In Performance.

So I’m not an expert in folk music…

Neither am I an expert in British Music Hall, though I do have vague memories of intensely disliking the TV programme The Good Old Days. From memory, I think my dislike was probably just that I thought it was very old-fashioned, not punk enough!

So that’s two good reasons not to start a website about folk song and music hall....

Despite this...
I've been struck by my experience that it seems whenever people join together to sing folk songs, someone invariably will chip in a Music Hall song (not always me!).  Starting to read a bit of the social history of Music Hall, its become apparent that some songs thought of as traditional have sneaked in from the Halls, another songs appear to have “traditional” lyrics set to a tune derived from Music Hall.

This despite the fact that the early folksong collectors worked very hard to ignore any songs that traditional singers took from the Halls. I initially assumed that reluctance to acknowledge Music Hall songs in the repertoires of source singers was simple snobbishness on the part of the folksong collectors, particularly but not exclusively, the rather middle-class collectors of the late 19th and early 20th century. I am currently wondering whether this is the whole story, and I'm likely to return to it in a later post.

I think it’s worth saying from the outset that both “folksongs” and “Music Hall” songs are slippery categories. 

Music Hall has its roots in the early 19th century, and arguably was still hanging on by its fingernails in the 1950s, though it was well past its heyday. The high point of the halls was probably between around 1860 and 1920.  “Music Hall Songs” are usually taken to be broadly humorous songs, often sung in a Cockney accent, familiar examples being Henery the Eighth, With her head tucked underneath her arm, et cetera.

“Music Hall Songs”  of this type perhaps predominated in the high Victorian and Edwardian heyday of the Halls, but it’s important to be aware that even in those days songs wouldn’t always be sung in Cockney accents and the repertoire was not limited to these humorous songs. Even then, you would hear sentimental songs, snatches of opera, show songs and even political ditties in the halls. In the early days of the Halls the style of singing was very different, and what we now think of folk songs formed important part of the repertoire. So already, I’m wondering if I need to distinguish between “Music Hall Songs” and songs sung that were in the “Music Hall”.
  
British?
I appreciate that using the term “British” in relation folk music is likely to be incendiary to certain readers. I will try to avoid using the term because I don't think there is one essential “British” tradition of folk music and folk music however defined is likely to have varied in different parts of what are now rather arbitrarily defined as the four nations of the UK. So if I do slip into using terminology like "British folk song" please understand that what I really mean is "one or other of the various types of traditional songs found within the British Isles and related songs that may have been found in other parts of the world as a result of the British imperial tradition".
 The term “British” music hall might be less problematic. There are certainly differences between how Music Hall developed in different parts of the British Isles and between that and how it developed elsewhere in the world. I will no doubt be writing later posts about how Music Hall might be seen as the first truly national popular culture in the British Isles, and some have argued that it was instrumental in the development of British nationalism, but more of that later.

The stories of the songs and the people who sang them. 
There are lots of websites devoted to folk music, there are a smaller number devoted to Music Hall, and rather a larger number of books about the Halls. When looking for songs to sing, I've tended to try to find out who sang them first, who wrote them: the stories of the songs and the places they were sung. I find the stories fascinating, but in order to find them, I've had to search across a wide range of different sources. As I was doing this I wondered whether other people would be interested in the stories, and that's what this site is about...