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

its ideas and improving on them. At first the paintings were lent to Morton by art dealers, but as profits rose he bought some of them. The gallery was not a personal indulgence, it was good business. Morton bought fine paintings in such quantity – including Gainsboroughs and Hogarths – that by 1856 he needed an annexe to house them all. This was celebrated in Punch as ‘the Royal Academy over the Water’, and the publicity was a further boost to Morton’s reputation.

      It was in fact much more than a picture gallery, containing a reading room with books, periodicals and newspapers. Oysters, chops, baked potatoes, and bread and butter were among the refreshments that were eagerly consumed for the price of a sixpenny refreshment ticket. The gallery was open seven days a week, including Sunday night – a privilege granted to Morton, presumably because of his reputation, that caused resentment among other theatre managers denied the same indulgence.

      Morton continually sought to widen the entertainment he offered. To the usual fare of ballads, comic songs, madrigals and glees, Morton – who had a great admiration for the celebrated Swedish soprano Jenny Lind – added selections from opera. Popular arias from Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Lucia de Lammermoor and Un Ballo in Maschera became a regular part of the evening’s entertainment, sung by Augustus Braham, Signor Tivoli and Miss Russell, an excellent dramatic soprano and a favourite of the audiences. Gounod’s Faust, premiered in Paris in 1859, had never been heard in England, and proved to be a popular sensation when Miss Russell sang excerpts from it. Contemporary rumour suggested that Colonel Mapleson, manager of Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket, brought the celebrated German prima donna Thérèse Tietjens to the Canterbury to see if Faust was worthy of his stage. An opera making its British debut in a music hall added to Morton’s reputation, and helped lure fashionable and wealthy patrons across the river to the dank location of the Canterbury.

      Morton was an influential figure in music hall for the rest of his long life. He was probably the first to offer the complete music hall experience, although others were not far behind. His reputation was built on his early work, and enhanced by charitable hindsight. He was a kindly man, bow-tied, long-jawed and with muttonchop whiskers framing his friendly face. On his eightieth birthday in 1899, many prominent members of the profession paid warm tributes to him. An ode recited by Mrs Beerbohm Tree gives the flavour:

      His Harbour Light was a vista view of things as they ought to be,

      The pleasures of England should be pure and Art, it must be free

      He took with pluck this parable up, at Duty’s bugle call

      And swore he would lead to paths of peace the dangerous Music Hall!

      This depicts Morton as a cross between Sir Galahad and Mr Valiant-for-Truth. He was a good and honourable man, but above all he was an astute businessman with an eye on the main chance and the bottom line. His virtues were real, but were puffed up in a rose-tinted biography by his friend and admirer H. Chance Newton, which was published in 1905, just after his death. In it, Morton is celebrated as the ‘Father of the Halls’. The appellation stuck. Morton’s record was remarkable, and he has an honoured role among the founders of music hall.

5

       Explosion

      ‘I have seen the future, and it works.’

      LINCOLN STEFFENS, JOURNALIST (1866–1936)

      The opening of the new Canterbury was the moment when music hall put down firm commercial roots, even though its golden age lay over a quarter of a century ahead. In the early 1850s the greatest names of music hall were either children or not yet born. The road from the Canterbury to the popular memories they would engender, and to the great empires of Moss, Stoll and Thornton, was long and thorny, but at the end of it lay stars still fondly remembered, and songs that have endured.

      Music hall was a new industry that needed a support structure. New theatres were built in every part of the country, requiring architects, builders and designers. Singers, musicians and songwriters were needed for these theatres. Lawyers were employed to advise on the awkward legal division between legitimate theatre and music hall. Disputes over matinées and Sunday performances had to be settled. Health and safety regulations had to be met.

      Taverns, concert halls and song and supper clubs were converted into music halls, and Charles Morton soon had rivals. The most formidable was Edward Weston, owner of the quaintly named Six Cans and Punch Bowl tavern in Holborn, who purchased two adjacent properties and in November 1857 opened the purpose-built Weston’s Music Hall on the site. It was launched amid huge publicity, with an elegant dinner for three hundred guests and a little theatrical larceny: Weston engaged the former chairman of the Canterbury, John Caulfield, as his musical director, and Sam Collins as his star attraction. Contemporary advertisements suggest the setting was sumptuous, with high-quality fixtures, fittings, food and drink, all for an entrance fee of sixpence. It was a none-too-subtle declaration of war, and Morton was swift to respond.

      Being at Holborn, Weston’s was on the threshold of the West End, where music hall had not yet penetrated. The challenge was irresistible for Morton. In partnership with his brother-in-law Frederick Stanley he bought a seventeenth-century inn, the Boar and Castle, on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. Despite a legal challenge from Weston, whose music hall was only a few hundred yards away, Morton built the Oxford Music Hall on the site, and opened it in March 1861. Constructed in the Italian style and reputedly costing £35,000, it was the most glamorous music hall yet, described by the early music hall historians Charles Stuart and A.J. Park as ‘a point of architectural beauty’. One of the chief features was the lighting, with twenty-eight brilliant ‘crystal’ stars. Its huge capital cost notwithstanding, the Oxford was a highly commercial proposition, with a restaurant area in the auditorium offering sufficient space for 1,800 customers to eat and drink in relays until 1 a.m., served by attractive barmaids. This was typical Morton: the best artistes packaged in an environment with fringe attractions.

      At the Canterbury, the additional lure had been an art gallery and library; at the Oxford it was attractive barmaids and bars decorated with flowers. The Oxford also offered Morton an important revenue saving: from the outset he employed the same stars to sing opera selections for both the working-class audience at the Canterbury and the more cosmopolitan customers at the Oxford, transporting them between the two venues in broughams. As at any one time they might include a tenor (Mr St Aubyn), a bass (Mr Green), a soprano (Miss Russell), a contralto (Miss Walmisley) and a mezzo (Miss Fitzhenry), it is evident that a great deal of serious music was juxtaposed with more familiar music hall fare. John Caulfield was recaptured from Weston’s as resident chairman, and his son Johnny was one of the pianists. Miss Fitzhenry enjoyed early success singing ‘Up the Alma Heights’, which delighted every soldier in London, and ‘Launch the Lifeboat’, which enchanted the naval men. With other performers including George Leybourne, Tom Maclagan, Nelly Power and ‘Jolly’ John Nash, all tastes were met.

      One of Morton’s innovations at the Oxford was foiled by the magistrates. When he tried to stage matinée performances on Saturdays, he was warned that his licence permitted him to open only after 6 p.m. He had to drop the idea, only to see it become common practice a few years later.

      Although the Canterbury, Weston’s and above all the Oxford remained pre-eminent, competition was growing as music halls of every size were opening all around them. In 1860 the South London Palace, designed internally to resemble a Roman villa, opened at the Elephant and Castle, with the black-faced E.W. (‘the Great’) Mackney topping the bill. Harry Hart’s Lord Raglan at Bloomsbury also made its debut, followed swiftly by John Deacon’s Music Hall at Islington, with Fred Williams as chairman.

      The former chimney sweep Sam Collins, one of the early stars at the Canterbury and the top of the bill at Weston’s, opened establishments of his own: the Rose of Normandy public house in Edgware Road, alongside which he built the Marylebone Music Hall. At the beginning of his musical career Sam had earned a few shillings a night as a pub singer; in 1863, at the age of thirty-five, he became the respected and much-loved owner of the newly built Collins’ Music Hall in Islington,