My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall. John Major

day of 1850, when he thanks the Almighty for carrying him through undisclosed ‘difficulties’ and adds the plaintive plea that ‘things may be looking up by this time in 1851’. So far as we know, they never did.

      The heyday of the free and easies ended when music hall proper began to mushroom. Even so, many continued to thrive: the King’s Head, Knightsbridge; the King and Queen, Paddington Green; the Swan, Hungerford Market; the Salmon and Compass, Pentonville; the Salmon and the New Inn, both in Borough. But they were swimming against the tide. In the hierarchy of entertainment the downmarket free and easies were near the bottom, outclassing only the lowest of the low – the penny gaffs.

      It is likely that the penny gaffs were given their name by the costermongers who formed a large portion of their audience. The name was not haphazard: the price of entry was a penny, and while ‘gaff’ has many meanings, one being a cockney term for ‘place’, another is a slang term for a cockfighting pit, which in its crudeness and brutality is an apt description of the barbarous behaviour that was typical of a penny gaff.

      Costermongers play a significant role in the story of music hall. Colourful, definitively working-class and instantly recognisable in their short jackets, neckerchiefs, bell-bottomed trousers and peaked caps, they were a large, close-knit community of street traders who became one of music hall’s most enduring stage personas. Entrepreneurial, resilient and streetwise, they earned their living selling fruit and vegetables, fish and shellfish in the formal and informal markets from which most working-class Londoners obtained their food. Their very name was a nod to the ‘costard’ variety of apples. Many walked the streets, selling their wares from barrows or rickety carts, earning perhaps no more than a few shillings a week.

      In the 1840s it was estimated that there were about 40,000 costers in London. The social investigator Henry Mayhew gives a vivid account of a Saturday-evening market in November. The brightness was the first thing he noticed: naphtha flares, candles, gas jets, grease lamps, the fires of the chestnut-roasters. Then the noise – hundreds of traders at hundreds of stalls calling out their wares: ‘Chestnuts, a penny a score,’ ‘Three a penny, Yarmouth bloaters,’ ‘Beautiful whelks a penny a lot,’ ‘Penny a lot, fine russets,’ ‘Ho! Ho! Hi-i-i. Here’s your turnips.’ Everything cheap and of use to the poor was there: saucepans, crockery, old shoes, trays, handkerchiefs, umbrellas, shirts. ‘Go to whatever corner of the Metropolis you please,’ Mayhew noted, ‘and there is the same struggling to get a penny profit out of the poor man’s Sunday dinner.’

      It is not hard to see why costers became such powerful stereotypes. They lived their lives on the streets, and were transparently masculine in their habits. Beer shops were their natural haunts: Mayhew claimed that nearly four hundred of them catered directly for costers. Gambling was endemic, and they frequently bet their stock money against a tray of pies as they waited for the wholesale markets to open. They boxed for beer and placed side bets. Bouts were short, since the winner was the first man to draw blood. Although illegal, dog fights in beer shops were also common. Ratting was popular, as was pigeon-keeping. Many of these activities found their way into the music halls and their portrayal of the coster idiom.

      Dances – tup’nny hops – were also popular, particularly with women. These too were held in the beer shops, organised exclusively for costers. Music was provided by a fiddle, a harp and a cornopean – a kind of hooped trumpet, not unlike a French horn. They danced hornpipes, jigs, polkas and a kind of sword dance with tobacco pipes (presumably churchwardens) in place of swords. These dances acted as a kind of coster marriage bureau, where couples as young as fourteen could meet and decide to set up house together, sometimes on the same evening.

      Marriage was rare; 90 per cent of costers cohabited. Men were free to do what they pleased, but women were expected to be faithful, and could be beaten up for even talking to the wrong man – or, it seems, for almost anything. Many women regretted the choices they made as girls. One eighteen-year-old woman had very strong opinions about coster men. ‘They’ll never go to heaven,’ she told Mayhew. ‘The lads is very insinivating, and after leaving them places [penny gaffs] will give a gal a drop of beer, and make her half tipsy, and then they makes their arrangements. I’ve often heerd the boys boasting of having ruined gals, for all the world as if they was the first noblemen in the land.’ The girls’ precarious existence at the hands of their male counterparts would be the inspiration for many a lovelorn ‘coster girl’ song.

      In the process of looking at the costers and their way of life, both Henry Mayhew and his fellow social commentator J. Ewing Ritchie give us very reliable and detailed accounts of what a penny gaff would have been like. Mayhew attended one near Smithfield which he had heard was one of the least offensive. He was genuinely shocked by what he saw, even though he was more familiar than most outsiders with London’s underclass. Penny gaffs were not theatres or saloons, or even rooms in pubs, but simply shops, and usually tatty ones, that had been turned into seedy temporary theatres. Despite the shortage of space, hundreds of paying customers might be crammed into every performance, of which there could be several during a single day and evening. The audience, Mayhew reported, were ‘with few exceptions’ young people aged between eight and twenty. The front of the shop had been removed, and replaced by paintings of the performers. A band played coster tunes as the audience paid their pennies to enter under the watchful eye of a policeman detailed to keep order.

      The performance lasted barely an hour. A ‘comic singer’ sang a filthy song that had the boys ‘stamping their feet with delight’ and the girls ‘screaming with enjoyment’. Another song ‘coolly described the most obscene thoughts, the most disgusting scenes’, causing a child nearby to ‘wipe away the tears that rolled down her eyes with the enjoyment of the poison’. Each crude ditty was succeeded by another, every one being rapturously applauded and encored. The boys stamped, hollered, whistled, cat-called and sang. The dancing was no better. In a ballet featuring a man dressed as a woman, and a clown, ‘the most disgusting attitudes were struck, the most immoral acts represented … here were two ruffians degrading themselves each time they stirred a limb’. The audience upset Mayhew as much as the performance. They had ‘an overpowering stench’; some ‘danced grotesquely to the admiration of lookers-on, who expressed their approbation in obscene terms’; the girls acknowledged such comments ‘with smiles and coarse repartee’.

      J. Ewing Ritchie visited two penny gaffs in Shoreditch, an area rich in theatrical history. In Elizabethan times the Curtain Theatre had stood there, and public houses had staged comedies, tragedies and histories. Close by was the Britannia saloon, which still offered daily shows and would soon be converted to a full-scale music hall. In the midst of this long commitment to quality entertainment stood the penny gaff. Since the birth of the Curtain nearly three hundred years earlier, the area had changed. It was no longer open land with a view of working windmills, but crammed with squalid dwellings, public houses, pie shops, clothes marts, shoe depots and street markets. Its crowded streets provided a ready audience, but one which was able to afford only a penny for a show.

      Ritchie describes a mediocre evening of low wit and poor dancing before a grubby juvenile audience, chiefly boys, but with a sprinkling of the girls with babies in their arms who were so often present at such shows. The highlight was a pastiche of The Taming of the Shrew in which the henpecked husband turns on the shrew and threatens her with a cudgel as she lies cowering at his feet. This excited roars of approval from the young audience. Ritchie loathed it, believing that similar scenes would be re-enacted later in many Shoreditch homes.

      The penny gaffs did not die when music hall swept into fashion. As late as 1881, dirty and dark houses were still being used as makeshift theatres. The entertainment was still tawdry, although perhaps not as brutal or degrading as forty years earlier. The penny gaffs had little to commend them, and much that was reprehensible – but they were part of the making of music hall.

      By the 1840s, the ingredients for the emergence of music hall were all present. The public had a taste for community entertainment. Catch and glee clubs had popularised participatory enjoyment. Saloon theatre had offered refined singing and dancing. Song and supper clubs and taverns had familiarised audiences with risqué evenings conducted by a chairman. Food and drink had become a key component of the entertainment experience. Nevertheless, a further impetus was needed. It would