E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Martin Pettit, and the
Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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NIGHTS IN LONDON
by
THOMAS BURKE
Author of "Limehouse Nights."
[Illustration]
New York
Henry Holt and Company
1918
First published in 1915
Popular Edition . 1918
[Illustration: ROUND THE HALLS]
_CITY DUSK_
_The day dies in a wrath of cloud,
Flecking her roofs with pallid rain,
And dies its music, harsh and loud,
Struck from the tiresome strings of pain._
_Her highways leap to festal bloom,
And swallow-swift the traffic skims
O'er sudden shoals of light and gloom,
Made lovelier where the distance dims._
_Robed by her tiring-maid, the dusk,
The town lies in a silvered bower,
As, from a miserable husk,
The lily robes herself with flower._
_And all her tangled streets are gay,
And all her rudenesses are gone;
For, howso pitiless the day,
The evening brings delight alone._
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
LIMEHOUSE NIGHTS: TALES OF CHINATOWN
TWINKLETOES.
TO
MY MOTHER
WHO STILL ENJOYS A NIGHT IN TOWN
_NOTE_
_These chapters on London life deal almost exclusively with the
period before war, when the citizen was permitted to live in
freedom, to develop himself to his finest possibilities, and to
pursue happiness as he was meant to do. Since the delights of these
happy times have been taken from us, perhaps never to be restored,
it is well that they should be recorded before they are forgotten._
_T. B._
CONTENTS
PAGE
NOCTURNAL 11
AN ENTERTAINMENT NIGHT (_Round the Halls_) 27
A CHINESE NIGHT (_Limehouse_) 57
A DOMESTIC NIGHT (_Clapham Common_) 73
A LONELY NIGHT (_Kingsland Road_) 83
A MUSICAL NIGHT (_The Opera, the Promenades_) 95
A JEWISH NIGHT (_Whitechapel_) 109
A HAPPY NIGHT (_Surbiton and Battersea_) 119
A WORKER'S NIGHT (_The Isle of Dogs_) 135
A CHARITABLE NIGHT (_East, West, North, South_) 157
A FRENCH NIGHT (_Old Compton Street_) 175
AN ITALIAN NIGHT (_Clerkenwell_) 185
A BASHER'S NIGHT (_Hoxton_) 197
A DOWN-STREAM NIGHT (_Blackwall_) 207
AN ART NIGHT (_Chelsea_) 215
A RUSSIAN NIGHT (_Stepney_) 225
A SCANDINAVIAN NIGHT (_Shadwell_) 237
A SUNDAY NIGHT (_Anywhere_) 249
AT RANDOM 259
NOCTURNAL
_EVENING_
_From the Circus to The Square
There's an avenue of light;
Golden lamps are everywhere
From the Circus to The Square;
And the rose-winged hours there
Pass like lovely birds in flight.
From The Circus to The Square
There's an avenue of light._
_London yields herself to men
With the dying of the day.
Let the twilight come, and then
London yields herself to men.
Lords of wealth or slaves of pen,
We, her lovers, all will say:
London yields herself to men
With the dying of the day._
NIGHTS IN LONDON
NOCTURNAL
For the few who have an eye for the beauty of townscapes, London by
night is the loveliest thing in the world. Only in the London night may
the connoisseur find so many vistas of sudden beauty, because London was
never made: she has "growed." Paris affords no townscapes: everything
there is too perfectly arranged; its artificiality is at once apparent.
In London alone he finds those fantastic groupings, those monstrous
masses of light and shade and substance.
Take London from whatever point you will and she will satisfy. For the
rustic the fields of corn, the craggy mountain, the blossomy lane, or
the rush of water through the greenwood. But for your good Cockney the
shoals of gloom, the dusky tracery of chimney-stack and gaswork, the
torn waste of tiles, and the subtle tones of dawn and dark in lurking
court and alley. Was there ever a lovelier piece of colour than Cannon
Street Station at night? Entering by train, you see it as a huge vault
of lilac shadow, pierced by innumerable pallid arclights. The roof
flings itself against the sky, a mountain of glass and interlacing
girders, and about it play a hundred indefinite and ever-changing tones.
Each platform seems a lane through a dim forest, where the trees are of
iron and steel and the leaves are sullen windows. Or where shall you
find a sweeter pastoral than that field of lights that thrills the
midnight sojourner in lower Piccadilly? Or where a more rapturous
river-piece than that to be glimpsed from Hungerford footbridge as the
Embankment lights and stones surge east and west towards Blackfriars and
Chelsea? Or where a panorama like those that sweep before you from
Highgate Archway or the Islington Angel?
But your good Cockney finds his joy not merely in the opulent masses of
gloom and glare. For him London holds infinite delicacies. There is a
short street in Walworth Road--East Street--which is as perfect as any
nightscape ever conceived by any artist. At day or dark it is
incomparably subtle. By day it is a lane of crazy meat and vegetable
stalls and tumbling houses, whose colours chime softly with their
background. By night it is a dainty riot of flame and tousled stone, the
gentle dusk of the near distance deepening imperceptibly to purple, and
finally to haunting chaos. And--it is a beautiful thought--there are
thousands and thousands of streets in London where similar ecstasy
awaits the evening wanderer. There is Edgware Road, with its clamorous
by-streets, alluring at all times, but strangely so at twilight. To dash
down the great road on a motor-'bus is to take a joy-ride through a
fairyland of common things newly revealed, and to look back from Dollis
Hill is to look back, not on Kilburn or Paddington or Marylebone, but on
the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
Moreover, London wears always new beauties for the faithful--new
aspects, sudden revelations. What was beautiful yesterday is gone, and a
new splendour is presented. Building operations are begun here,
house-breaking is in progress there, the gaunt scaffolding making its
own beauty against the night sky. Always, throughout the seasons, her
townscapes are there to cheer, to entrance, to satisfy. At dawn or noon
or dusk she stands superb; but perhaps most superb when the day is done,
and her lights, the amazing whites and yellows and golds, blossom on
every hand in their tangled garden and her lovers cluster thicker and
thicker to worship at her shrine and spend a night in town.
* * * * *
Nights in town! If you are a good Cockney that phrase will sting your
blood and set your heart racing back to--well, to those nights in town,
gay or sad, glorious or desperate, but ever sweet to linger upon. There
is no night in all the world so rich in delicate delights as the London
night. You cannot have a bad night in London unless you are a bad
Cockney--or a tourist; for the difference between the London night and
the continental night is just the difference between making a cult of
pleasure and a passion of it. The Paris night, the Berlin night, the
Viennese night--how dreary and clangy and obvious! But the London night
is spontaneous, always expressive of your mood. Your gaieties, your
little escapades are never ready-made here. You must go out for them and
stumble upon them, wondrously, in dark places, being sure that whatever
you may want London will give you. She asks nothing; she gives
everything. You need bring nothing but love. Only to very few of us is
she the stony-hearted stepmother. We, who are all her lovers, active or
passive, know that she loves each one of us. The passive lover loves her
as he loves his mother, not knowing his love, not knowing if she be
beautiful, not caring, but knowing that she is there, has always been
there, to listen, to help, to solace. But the others who love her
consciously, love her as mistress or wife. For them she is more perfect
than perfection, adorable in every mood, season, or attire. They love
her in velvet, they love her in silk; she is marvellous in broadcloth,
shoddy, or corduroy. But, like a woman, her deepest beauty she holds for
the soft hours when the brute day is ended and all mankind sighs for
rest and warmth. Then she is her very self. Beauty she has by day, but
it is the cold, incomplete beauty of a woman before she has given
herself. With the lyric evening she surrenders all the wealth and wonder
of her person to her lover: beauty in full flower.
As a born Londoner, I cannot remember a time when London was not part of
me and I part of London. Things that happen to London happen to me.
Changes in London are changes in me, and changes in my affairs and
circumstances have again and again changed the entire face of London.
Whatever the mood or the occasion, London is behind it. I can never say
that I am happy or downcast. London and I are happy, London and I are
having a good time, or are lost in the deeps. Always she has fallen to
my mood, caught the temper of the hour; always is waiting, the fond
mother or the gracious mistress, with stretched hand, to succour and
sympathize in sorrow, to rejoice in good fortune.
And always it is London by lamplight which I vision when I think of her,
for it was the London of lamplight that first called to me, as a child.
She hardly exists for me in any other mood or dress. It was London by
night that awoke me to a sense of that terrible spirit which we call
Beauty, to be possessed by which is as unsettling and as sweetly
frightful as to be possessed by Love. London, of course, is always
calling us, if we have ears to hear, sometimes in a soft, caressing
voice, as difficult to hear as the fairies' song, sometimes in a deep,
impelling chant. Open your window when you will in the gloating evening,
whether you live in town, in the near suburbs, or in the far
suburbs--open your window and listen. You will hear London singing to
you; and if you are one of her chosen you will have no sleep that night
until you have answered her. There is nothing for it but to slip out and
be abroad in the grey, furtive streets, or in the streets loud with
lamps and loafers, and jostle the gay men and girls, or mingle with the
chaste silences.
It is the Call not only of London, but of Beauty, of Life. Beauty calls
in many voices; but to me and to six million others she calls in the
voice of Cockaigne, and it shall go hard with any man who hears the Call
and does not answer. To every man, young or old, comes, once in his
life, this Call of Beauty. At that moment he awakens to a realization of
better things than himself and his foolish little life. To that vague
abstraction which we call the average man it comes mostly with first
love or religion, sometimes with last love. But come it does to each one
of us, and it behoves us all to hearken. So many of us hear, and let it
pass. The gleam pauses in our path for an instant, but we turn our backs
and plod the road of materialism, and we fade and grow old and die
without ever having lived. Only in the pursuit of beauty is youth
retained; and beauty is no respecter of person, place, or time.
Everywhere it manifests itself.
In the young man of the leisured classes this sense only awakens late in
life. He is educated to consider only himself, to regard himself as, in
the Broadway phrase, a serious proposition; and some time must pass
before he discovers, with a pained surprise, that there are other people
in the world, and that his little life matters not at all in the eternal
scheme. Then, one day, something happens. He falls in love, perhaps;
and under the shock of the blow he discovers that he wants
something--something he has not known before, something he cannot name:
God, Beauty, Prayer, call it what you will. He discovers a thousand
subtle essences of life which his clumsy taste had hitherto passed. He
discovers that there is a life of ideas, that principles and ideals are
something more than mere fooling for dry-minded people, that thoughts
are as important as things. In a word, he has heard the Call of Beauty.
Just as a man may live in the same house with a girl for years, and then
one day will discover that she is beautiful, that she is adorable, that
he cannot lose her from his life, so we live surrounded by unregarded
beauty, until we awake. So for seven years I was surrounded by the glory
of London before I knew that I loved her....
When I was a small child I was as other children of our set. I played
their games in the street. I talked their language. I shared their
ambitions. I worshipped their gods. Life was a business of Board
School, breakfast, dinner, tea, struggled for and eaten casually, either
at the table or at the door or other convenient spot. I should grow up.
I should be, I hoped, a City clerk. I should wear stand-up collars. I
might have a moustache. For Sunday I might have a frock-coat and silk
hat, and, if I were very clever and got on well, a white waistcoat. I
should have a house--six rooms and a garden, and I might be able to go
to West End theatres sometimes, and sit in the pit instead of the
gallery. And some day I might even ride in a hansom-cab, though I should
have to succeed wonderfully to do that. I hoped I should succeed
wonderfully, because then the other boys at the Board School would look
up to me.
Thus I lived for ten years. A primrose by the river's brim was no more
to me than to Peter Bell, or, since I had never seen a primrose growing,
shall I say that the fried-fish shop at the corner of the High Street
was but a fried-fish shop, visited once a week rapturously. But after
the awakening, everything was changed. Things assumed a hitherto hidden
significance. Beauty broke her blossoms everywhere about the grey
streets and the sordid interiors that were my environment.
And my moment was given to me by London. The call came to me in a dirty
street at night. The street was short and narrow, its ugliness softened
here and there by the liquid lights of shops, the most beautiful of all
standing at the corner. This was the fried-fish shop. It was a great
night, because I was celebrating my seventh birthday, and I was proud
and everything seemed to be sharing in my pride. Then, as I strutted, an
organ, lost in strange lands about five streets away, broke into music.
I had heard organs many times, and I loved them. But I had never heard
an organ play "Suwanee River," in the dusk of an October night, with a
fried-fish shop ministering to my nose and flinging clouds of golden
glory about me, and myself seven years old. Momentarily, it struck me
silly--so silly that some big boy pointed a derisive finger. It somehow
... I don't know.... It....
Well, as the organ choked and gurgled through the outrageous
sentimentality of that song, I awoke. Something had happened to me.
Through the silver evening a host of little dreams and desires came
tripping down the street, beckoning and bobbing in rhythm to the old
tune; and as the last of the luscious phrases trickled over the roofs I
found myself half-laughing, half-crying, thrilled and tickled as never
before. It made me want to die for some one. I think it was for London I
wanted to die, or for the fried-fish shop and the stout lady and
gentleman who kept it. I had never noticed that street before, except to
remark that it wasn't half low and common. But now it had suffered a
change. I could no longer sniff at it. I would as soon have said
something disrespectful about Hymns Ancient and Modern.
I walked home by myself, and everything answered this wonderful new
mood. I knew that life was rapture, and, as I looked back at the
fried-fish shop, swimming out of the drab murk, it seemed to me that
there could never be anything of such sheer lyrical loveliness outside
heaven. I could have screamed for joy of it. I said softly to myself
that it was Lovely, Lovely, Lovely; and I danced home, and I danced to
bed, and my heart so danced that it was many hours before I slept.
From that day London has been my mistress. I knew this a few days later,
when, as a birthday treat, I was taken to see the illuminations in our
district--we were living near the Langham Hotel then--for the marriage
of some princess or the birth of some royal baby. Whenever I am away
from London--never more than ten days at a time--and think of her, she
comes to me as I saw her then from a height of three-foot-five: huge
black streets rent with loud traffic and ablaze with light from roof to
pavement; shop-fronts full of magical things, drowned in the lemon light
which served the town at that time; and crowds of wonderful people whom
I had never met before and longed deeply to meet again. I wondered where
they were all going, what they would do next, what they would have for
supper, and why they didn't seem superlatively joyful at their good
fortune in being able to ride at will in cabs and omnibuses and take
their meals at restaurants. There were jolly fellows, graceful little
girls, all better clad than I, enjoying the sights, and at last, like
me, disappearing down side-streets to go to mysterious, distant homes.
HOMES. Yes, I think that phrase sums up my London: the City of Homes. To
lie down at night to sleep among six million homes, to know that all
about you, in high garret or sumptuous bedchamber, six million people
are sleeping, or suffering, or loving, is to me the most impressive
event of my daily life.
Have you ever, when walking home very late at night, looked down the
grey suburban streets, with their hundred monotonous-faced houses, and
thought that there sleep men, women, and children, free for a few hours
from lust and hate and fear, all of them romantic, all of them striving,
in their separate ways, to be happy, all of them passionate for their
little span of life; and then thought that that street is but one of
thousands and thousands which radiate to every point, and that all the
night air of one city is holding the passions of those millions of
creatures? I suppose I have a trite mind, but there is, to me, something
stupendous in that thought, something that makes one despair of ever
saying anything illuminative about London.
Often, when I have been returning to London from the country, I have
been moved almost to tears, as the train seemed to fly through clouds
and clouds of homes and through torrents of windows. Along the miserable
countryside it roars, and comes not too soon to the far suburbs and the
first homes. Slowly, softly, the grey incertitude begins to flower with
their lights, each window a little silent prayer. Nearer and nearer to
town you race, and the warm windows multiply, they draw closer
together, seeming to creep into one another's arms for snugness; and, as
you roll into the misty sparkle of Euston or Paddington, you experience
an ineffable sense of comfort and security among those multitudinous
homes. It is, I think, the essential homeliness of London that draws the
Cockney's heart to her when five thousand miles away, under blazing suns
or hurricanes of hail; for your Cockney, travel and wander as he will,
is at heart a purely domestic animal, and dreams ever of the lighted
windows of London.
Those windows! I wish some one with the right mind would write an essay
for me on this theme. Why should a lighted window call with so subtle a
message? They all have their messages--sometimes sweet, sometimes
sinister, sometimes terrible, sometimes pathetic, always irresistible.
They haunt me. Indeed, when a lighted window claims me, I have sometimes
hung about outside, impelled almost to knock at the door, and find out
what is happening behind that yellow oblong of mystery.
Some one published a few years ago a book entitled "The Soul of London,"
but I cannot think that any one has ever read the soul of London. London
is not one place, but many places; she has not one soul, but many souls.
The people of Brondesbury are of markedly different character and clime
from those of Hammersmith. They of Balham know naught of those of
Walthamstow, and Bayswater is oblivious to Barking. The smell, the
sound, and the dress of Finsbury Park are as different from the smell,
the sound, and the dress of Wandsworth Common as though one were England
and the other Nicaragua. London is all things to all men. Day by day she
changes, not only in external beauty, but in temperament.
As each season recurs, so one feels that London can never be more
beautiful, never better express her inmost spirit. I write these lines
in September, when we have mornings of pearly mist, all the city a
Whistler pastel, the air bland but stung with sharp points, and the
squares dressed in many-tinted garments; and I feel that this is the
month of months for the Londoner. Yet in April, when every parish, from
Bloomsbury to Ilford, and from Haggerston to Cricklewood, is a dream of
lilac and may, and when laburnum and jasmine are showering their petals
over Shoreditch and Bermondsey Wall, when even Cherry Gardens Pier has
lost its heart in a tangle of apple-blossom, and when the statue of
James II is wreathed about with stars and boughs of hawthorn as fair as
a young girl's arms, when Kensington Gardens, Brockwell Park, and the
Tunnel Gardens of Blackwell are ablaze with colour and song, and when
life riots in the sap of the trees as in the blood of the children who
throng their walks, then, I say, London is herself. But I know that when
November brings the profound fogs and glamorous lights, and I walk
perilously in the safest streets, knowing by sound that I am
accompanied, but seeing no one, scarce knowing whether I am in Oxford
Street or the Barking Road, or in Stamboul, then I shall feel: "This is
the real old London." The pallid pomp of the white lilac seems to be
London in essence. The rich-scented winter fog seems to be London in
essence. The hot, reeking dusk of July seems to be London in essence.
London, I repeat, is all things to all men. Whatsoever you may find in
the uttermost corners of the earth, that you shall find in London. It is
the city of the world. You may stand in Piccadilly Circus at midnight
and fingerpost yourself to the country of your dreams. A penny or
twopenny omnibus will land you in the heart of France, Switzerland,
Italy, Germany, Russia, Palestine, China, the Malay Peninsula, Norway,
Sweden, Holland, and Hooligania; to all of which places I propose to
take you, for food and drink, laughter and chatter, in the pages that
follow. I shall show you London by night: not the popular melodramatic
divisions of London rich and London poor, but many Londons that you
never dreamed of and may curious nights.
London by night. Somehow, the pen stops there. Having written that, I
feel that the book is done. I realize my impotence. My pen boggles at
the task of adding another word or another hundred thousand words which
shall light up those thunderous syllables. For to write about London
Nights is to write a book about _Everything_. Philosophy, humanism,
religion, love, and death, and delight--all these things must crowd upon
one's pages. And once I am started, they will crowd--tiresomely,
chaotically, tumbling out in that white heat of enthusiasm which, as a
famous divine has said, makes such damned hard reading.
For the whole of my life, with brief breaks, has been spent in London,
sometimes working by day and playing by night, sometimes idling by day
and toiling through long midnights, either in streets, clubs, bars, and
strange houses, or in the heat and fume of Fleet Street offices. But
what nights they were! What things have we seen done--not at The
Mermaid--but in every tiny street and alley of nocturnal London!
There were nights of delirium when the pulses hammered hot in rhythm to
the old song of Carnival, when one seemed to have reached the very apex
of living, to have grasped in one evening the message of this revolving
world. There were nights, festive with hoof and harness bell. There were
cheery nights of homeward walks from the City office at six o'clock,
under those sudden Octobral dusks, when, almost at a wink, London is
transformed into one long lake of light. There were nights of elusive
fog and bashful lamp when one made casual acquaintance on the way home
with some darling little work-girl, Ethel, or Katie, or Mabel,
brown-haired or golden, and walked with her and perhaps were allowed to
kiss her Good-night at this or that crossing.
What romantic charm those little London work-girls have, with their
short, tossing frocks and tumbling hair! There are no other work-girls
in the world to compare with them for sheer witchery of face and
character. The New York work-girl is a holy terror. The Parisian
grisette has a trim figure and a doughy face. The Berlin work-girl knows
more about viciousness, and looks more like a suet dumpling than any one
else. But, though her figure may not be perfect, the London work-girl
takes the palm by winsomeness and grace. At seven o'clock every evening
you may meet her in thousands in Oxford Street, Villiers Street,
Tottenham Court Road, or London Bridge, where the pavements lisp in
reply to the chatter of her little light feet. The factory girl of
twenty years ago has, I am glad to say, entirely disappeared. She was
not a success. She screwed her hair into sausages and rolled them around
her ears. She wore a straw hat tilted at an absurd angle over her nose.
She snarled. Her skin was coarse, her hands brutal, and she took no care
with herself. But the younger generation came along, the flapper--and
behold, a change! The factory girl or work-girl of fourteen or fifteen
would surprise the ladies of the old school. She is neat. She knows
enough about things to take care of herself, without being coarsened by
the knowledge. And she has a zest for life and a respect for her dear
little person which give her undisputed title to all that I have claimed
for her. Long may she reign as one of London's beauties!
Then there were other nights of maddening pace, when music and wine,
voice and laughter harnessed themselves to the chariot of youth and
dashed us hither and thither. There were nights of melancholy, of
anguish even, nights of failure and solitariness, when the last word
seemed to be spoken, and the leaves and the lamps and all the little
dear things seemed emptied of their glory. There were the nights of
labour: dull nights of stress and struggle, under the hard white lights,
the crashing of the presses, and the infuriating buzz of the tape
machine. There were nights of....
It is these nights that I pretend to show you in this book, in a little
series of cinematographic pictures. If you will come with me, we will
slip through the foreign quarters. We will have a bloodthirsty night in
the athletic saloons of Bethnal Green. We will have a bitter night in
the dock-side saloons. We will have a sickening night in sinister places
of no name and no locality, where the proper people do not venture. We
will have a glittering night in the Hoxton bars. We will have, too, a
night among the sweet lights of the Cockney home, and among pleasant
working-class interiors. And we will----
But let us get started.
AN ENTERTAINMENT NIGHT
ROUND THE HALLS
_MUSIC-HALL BALLET_
_Through the sad billowing base of grey and rose,
Stung with sharp lamps in its most velvet gloom;
Drowsy with smoke, and loud with voice and glass,
Where wine-whipped animations pass and pass--
Beauty breaks sudden blossoms all around
In happy riot of rhythm, colour, and pose.
The radiant hands, the swift, delighted limbs
Move as in pools of dream the dancer swims,
Holding our bruted sense to fragrance bound._
_Lily and clover and the white May-flowers,
And lucid lane afire with honeyed blooms,
And songs that time nor tears can ever fade,
Hold not the grace for which my heart has prayed.
But in this garden of gilt loveliness,
Lapped by the muffled pulse of hectic hours,
Something in me awoke to happiness;
And through the streets of plunging hoof and horn,
I walked with Beauty to the dim-starred morn._
AN ENTERTAINMENT NIGHT
ROUND THE HALLS
Of course, every night spent in London is an entertainment night, for
London has more blood and pace and devil than any city I know. Thick as
the physical atmosphere is with smoke and fog, its moral atmosphere is
yet charged with a sparkle as of light wine. It is more effervescent
than any continental city. It is the city of cities for learning, art,
wit, and--Carnival. Go where you please at nightfall and Carnival slips
into the blood, lighting even Bond Street--the dreariest street in
town--with a little flame of gaiety. I have assisted at carnivals and
feasts in various foreign parts--carnivals of students and also of the
theatrically desperate apaches in the crawling underworlds. But, oh,
what bilious affairs! You simply flogged yourself into it. You said, as
it were: "I am in Vienna, or Berlin, or Paris, or Brussels, or
Marseilles, or Trieste; therefore, I am gay. Of course I am gay." But
you were not. You were only bored, and the show only became endurable
after you had swallowed various absinthes, vermuths, and other rot-gut.
All the time you were--or I was--aching for Camden Town High Street, and
a good old London music-hall. I cannot understand those folk who sniff
at the English music-hall and belaud the Parisian shows. These latter
are to me the most dismal, lifeless form of entertainment that a public
ever suffered. Give me the Oxford, the Pavilion, or the Alhambra, or
even a suburban Palace of Varieties. Ever since the age of eight the
music-hall has been a kind of background for me. Long before that age I
can remember being rushed through strange streets and tossed,
breathless, into an overheated theatre roaring with colour. The show was
then either the Moore and Burgess Minstrels or the Egyptian Hall,
followed by that chief of all child-life entertainments--tea at a
tea-shop. But at eight I was initiated into the mysteries of the Halls,
for a gracious _chef d'orchestre_ permitted me to sit in the orchestra
of an outlying hall, by the side of a cousin who sawed the double bass.
I have loved the music-hall ever since, and I still worship that _chef
d'orchestre_, and if I met him now I am sure I should bow, though I know
that he was nothing but a pillow stuffed with pose. But in those days,
what a man! Or no--not a man--what a demi-god! You should have seen him
enter the orchestra on the call: "Mr. Francioli, please!" Your ordinary
music-hall conductor ducks from below, slips into his chair, and his tap
has turned on the flow of his twenty instruments before you realize that
he is up. But not so Francioli. For him the old school, the old manners,
laddie. He never came into the orchestra. He "entered." He would bend
gracefully as he stepped from the narrow passage beneath the stage into
the orchestra. He would stand upright among his boys for a little minute
while he adjusted his white gloves. His evening dress would have turned
George Lashwood sick with envy. The perfect shirt of the perfect shape
of the hour, the tie in the correct mode, the collar of the moment, the
thick, well-oiled hair, profuse and yet well in hand, the right flower
in the buttonhole at just the right angle--so he would stand, with lips
pursed in histrionic manner, gazing quietly before him, smiling, to
casual friends, little smiles which were nothing more unbending than
dignified acknowledgment. Then he would stretch a godlike arm to the
rail, climb into his chair, and spend another half-minute in settling
himself, turning now and then to inspect the house from floor to
ceiling. At the tinkle of the stage-manager's bell the grand moment
would come. His hand would sail to the desk, and he would take the baton
as one might select a peach from the dessert-dish. He would look
benignly upon his boys, tap, raise both resplendent hands aloft, and
away he would go into the "Zampa" overture.
His attitude to the show was a study in holy detachment. He simply did
not see it. He would lean back in his chair at a comfortable angle, and
conduct from the score on his desk. But he never smiled at a joke, he
never beamed upon a clever turn, he never even exchanged glances with
the stars. He was Olympian. I think he must have met Irving as a young
man, and have modelled himself on his idiosyncrasies. Certainly every
pose that ever a musician or actor practised was doubled in him. I
believe he must have posed in his sleep and in his bath. Indeed, my
young mind used to play upon the delicate fancy that such a creature
could never do anything so common as eat or drink or pursue any of the
daily functions of us ordinary mortals. I shrank from conceiving him
undressed....
Once, I remember, he came down from his cloudy heights and stood my
cousin a drink and myself a lemonade. I didn't want to drink that
lemonade. I wanted to take it home and stand it under a glass shade. He
himself drank what I was told was a foreign drink in a tiny glass. He
lingered over it, untouched, while he discussed with us the exact
phrasing of the symphony for the star man's song; then, at the call,
with a sweep of his almighty arm he carried the glass to his lips with a
"To you, my boy!" held it poised for a moment, set it down, and strode
away, followed by rapt gazes from the barmaids.
A stout fellow. He took the conductor's chair with all the pomposity of
a provincial borough official. He tapped for the coda with the touch of
a king knighting an illustrious subject. And when he led the boys
through the National Anthem, standing up in his place and facing the
house, all lights up--well, there are literally no words for it....
At twelve years old I grew up, and sought out my own entertainment,
prowling, always alone, into strange places. I discovered halls that
nobody else seemed to know, such as the Star at Bermondsey, the Queen's
at Poplar, and the Cambridge in Commercial Street. I crawled around
queer bars, wonderfully lighted, into dusky refreshment-houses in the
Asiatic quarter, surely devised by Haroun al Raschid, and into softly
lit theatres and concert-halls. At eighteen I took my pleasures less
naively, and dined solemnly in town, and toured, solemn and critical,
the western halls, enjoying everything but regarding it with pale
detachment. Now, however, I am quite frank in my delight in this
institution, which has so crept into the life of the highest and the
lowest, the vulgar and the intellectual; and scarcely a week passes
without a couple of shows.
The mechanism of the modern hall is a marvellous thing. From the small
offices about Leicester Square, where the big circuits are registered,
men and women and children are sent thousands and thousands of miles to
sing, dance, act, or play the fool. The circuits often control thirty or
forty halls in London and the provinces, each of which is under the care
of a manager, who is responsible for its success. The turns are booked
by the central booking manager and allocated either to this or that
London hall, or to work the entire syndicate tour; and the bill of each
hall, near or far, is printed and stage-times fixed weeks in advance.
The local manager every Saturday night has to pay his entire staff, both
stage and house; that is, he not only pays programme girls,
chuckers-out, electricians, and so forth, but each artist, even the L200
a week man, is paid in cash at each hall he is working. When a new turn
is booked for any given hall, the manager of that hall must be "in
front" and watch that turn and its success or non-success with the
house; and, at the end of the week, a confidential report has to be
sent to headquarters in which the manager tells the cold truth: whether
the show is good, whether it "went," how much salary it is worth, and
whether it is worth a re-booking.
It is, like journalism, a hard, hard life and thankless for every one
concerned, from bill-topper to sweeper; yet there is a furious colour
about it, and I think no one connected with it would willingly quit. The
most hard-worked of all are the electricians. First in the hall of an
evening, they, with the band and the janitors, are the last to leave.
Following them, at about half-past five (in the case of the two-houses
halls), come programme girls, barmaids, call-boy, stage-manager,
shifters, and all other stage hands.
All are philosophers, in their way, and all seem to have caught the tang
of the profession and to be, subconsciously, of the mummer persuasion. I
once had a long, long talk with the chief electrician of a London hall,
or, to give him the name by which he is best known, the limelight man. I
climbed the straight iron ladder from the wings to his little platform,
with only sufficient foothold for two people, and there I stood with him
for two hours, while he waggled spots, floods, and focuses, and littered
the platform with the hastily scrawled lighting-plots of the performers.
The limes man is really the most important person in the show. Of
course, the manager doesn't think so, and the stage-manager doesn't
think so, and the carpenter doesn't think so, and the band doesn't think
so. But he is. Many of the music-hall favourites, such as La Milo and La
Loie Fuller, would have no existence but for him. Skilful lighting
effects and changes of colour are often all that carries a commonplace
turn to popularity; and just think of the power in that man's hands! He
could ruin any young turn he liked simply by "blacking her out"; and, if
he feels good, he can help many beginners with expert advice. The young
girl new to the boards, and getting her first show, has hardly the
slightest idea what she shall give him in the way of lighting-plot;
very generously she leaves it to him, and he sees her show and lights it
as he thinks most effective.
Long before the doors open he is moving from box to box, in wings and
flies, fixing this, altering that, and arranging the other; and cursing
his assistants--usually lads of sixteen--who have to work the colours
from wings, roof, circle, and side of the house. Lights are of three
kinds: spot, focus, and flood. The spot is used on a dark stage, and
lights only the singer's head and shoulders. The focus lights the
complete figure. The flood covers the stage. Each of these is worked in
conjunction with eight or nine shaded films placed before the arc light.
Here is a typical lighting-plot, used by a prominent star:--
First Song. Symph.; all up stage and house. Focus for my entrance.
White perches and battens for first chorus. Then black out, and
gallery green focus for dance, changing to ruby at cue, and white
floods at chord off.
The limelight man never sees the show. In his little cupboard, he hears
nothing but the hissing of his arcs and the tinkle of the
stage-manager's prompting bell at the switchboard which controls every
light in the theatre, before and behind. He has to watch every movement
of the artist who is on, but what he or she is doing or saying, he does
not know. He is, perhaps, the only man who has never laughed at Little
Tich.
John Davidson, I think, wrote a series of poems under the title of "In a
Music Hall," but these were mainly philosophical, and neither he nor
others seem to have appreciated the _colour_ of the music-hall. It is
the most delicate of all essences of pleasure, and we owe it to the free
hand that is given to the limelight man. You get, perhaps, a girl in
white, singing horribly or dancing idiotically, but she is dancing in
white against a deep blue curtain filigreed with silver, and the whole
flooded in amber light. And yet there are those who find the London
music-hall dull!
The modern music-hall band, too, is a hard-working and poorly
remunerated concern; and in many cases it really is a band and it does
make music. It is hard at it for the whole of the evening, with no break
for refreshment unless there be a sketch in the bill. There are, too,
the matinees and the rehearsal every Monday at noon. The boys must be
expert performers, and adaptable to any emergency. Often when a number
cannot turn up, a deputy has to be called in by 'phone. The band seldom
knows what the deputy will sing; there is no opportunity for rehearsal;
and sometimes they have not even an idea of the nature of the turn until
band parts are put in. This means that they must read at sight, that the
conductor must follow every movement of the artist, in order to catch
his spasmodic cues for band or patter, and that the boys must keep one
eye on music they have never seen before, and the other on their old
man's stick.
The conductor, too, works hard at rehearsals; not, as you might think,
with the stars, but, like the limelight man, with the youngsters. The
stars can look after themselves; they are always sure to go. But the
nervous beginner needs a lot of attention from the band, and it is
pleasant to know that in most London halls he gets it ungrudgingly. A
West End _chef d'orchestre_ said to me some time ago: "I never mind how
much trouble I take over them. If they don't go it means such a lot to
the poor dears. Harry Lauder can sing anything anyhow, and he's alright.
But I've often found that these girls and boys hand me out band parts
which are perfectly useless for the modern music-hall; and again and
again I've found that effective orchestration and a helping hand from us
pulls a poor show through and gets 'em a return booking. Half the day of
rehearsing is spent with the beginners."
An extraordinary improvement in the musical side of vaudeville has taken
place within the last fifteen years. Go to any hall any night, and you
will almost certainly hear something of Wagner, Mendelssohn, Weber,
Mozart. I think, too, that the songs are infinitely better than in the
old days; not only in the direction of melody but in orchestration,
which is often incomparably subtle. It is, what vaudeville music should
be, intensely funny, notably in the running chatter of the strings and
the cunning commentary of woodwind and drums. Pathetic as its passing
is, one cannot honestly regret the old school. I was looking last night
at the programme of my very first hall, and received a terrible shock to
my time-sense. Where are the snows of yesteryear? Where are the
entertainers of 1895? Not one of their names do I recognize, and yet
three of them are in heavy type. One by one they drop out, and their
places are never filled. The new man, the new style of humour, comes
along, and attracts its own votaries, who sniff, even as I sniff, at the
performers of past times. Who is there to replace that perilously
piquant _diseur_ Harry Fragson? None. But Frank Tinney comes along with
something fresh, and we forget the art of Fragson, and pay many golden
sovereigns to Frank to amuse us in the new way.
Where, too, are the song-writers? That seems to me one of the greatest
tragedies of the vaudeville world: that a man should compose a song that
puts a girdle round about the globe; a song that is sung on liners, on
troopships, at feasts in far-away Singapore or Mauritius; a song that
inspires men in battle and helps soldiers to die; a song that, like
"Tipperary," has been the slogan of an Empire; that a man should create
such a thing and live and die without one in ten thousand of his singers
knowing even his name. Who composed "Tipperary"? You don't know? I
thought not. Who composed "Let's all go down the Strand," a song that
surely should have been adopted as The Anthem of London? Who composed
"Hot Time in the Old Town to-night"--the song that led the Americans to
victory in Cuba and the Philippines? We know the names of hundreds of
finicky little poets and novelists and pianists; but their work never
shook a nation one inch, or cheered men in sickness and despair. Of the
men who really captured and interpreted the national soul we know
nothing and care less; and how much they get for their copyrights is a
matter that even themselves do not seem to take with sufficient
seriousness. Yet personally I have an infinite tenderness for these
unknowns, for they have done me more good than any other triflers with
art-forms. I should like to shake the composer of "La Maxixe" by the
hand, and I owe many a debt of gratitude to the creator of "Red Pepper"
and "Robert E. Lee." So many of these fugitive airs have been part of my
life, as they are part of every Cockney's life. They are, indeed, a
calendar. Events date themselves by the song that was popular at that
time. When, for instance, I hear "The Jonah Man" or "Valse Bleu," my
mind goes back to the days when a tired, pale office-boy worked in the
City and wrote stories for the cheap papers in his evenings. When I hear
"La Maxixe" I shiver with frightful joy. It recalls the hot summer of
1906, when I had money and wine and possession and love. When I hear
"Beautiful Doll," I become old and sad; I want to run away and hide
myself. When I hear "Hiawatha" or "Bill Bailey," I get back the mood of
that year--a mood murderously bitter. Verily, the street organ and its
composers are things to be remembered in our prayers and toasts.
* * * * *
Every London hall has its own character and its own audience. The
Pavilion programme is temperamentally distinct from the Oxford bill; the
Alhambra is equally marked from the Empire; and the Poplar Hippodrome,
in patrons and performers, is widely severed from the Euston. The same
turns are, of course, seen eventually at every hall, but never the same
group of turns, collectively. As for the Hippodrome and the
Coliseum--non-licensed houses--their show and their audience are what
one would expect: a first-class show, and an audience decorous and
Streathamish. I think we will not visit either, nor will we visit the
hall with its world-famous promenade, about which our bishops seem to
know more than I do.
Let us try the Oxford, where you are always sure of a pleasant crowd, a
good all-round show, and alcoholic refreshment if you require it. There
are certain residentials, if I may so term them, of the Oxford, whom you
may always be sure of meeting here, and who will always delight you.
Mark Sheridan, for example, is pretty certain to be there, with Wilkie
Bard, Clarice Mayne, Phil Ray, Sam Mayo, Beattie and Babs, T. E.
Dunville, George Formby, and those veterans, Joe Elvin and George
Chirgwin.
There is a good overture, and the house is comfortable without being
gorgeous. There is a sense of intimacy about it. The audience, too, is
always on form. Audiences, by the way, have a great deal to do with the
success of any particular show, quite apart from its merits. There is
one famous West End hall, which I dare not name, whose audience is
always "bad"--i.e. cold and inappreciative; the best of all good turns
never "goes" at that house, and artists dread the week when they are
booked there. I have seen turns which have sent other houses into one
convulsive fit, but at this hall the audience has sat immovable and
colourless while the performers wasted themselves in furious efforts to
get over the footlights. At the Oxford, however, the audience is always
"with you," and this atmosphere gets behind and puts the artists, in
their turn, on the top of their form. The result is a sparkling evening
which satisfies everybody.
It is a compact little place, as the music-hall should be. In those new
caravanserai of colossal proportions and capacity, it is impossible for
a man to develop that sense of good-fellowship which is inseparable from
the traditions of the London hall. Intimacy is its very essence, and
how can a man be intimate on a stage measuring something like seventy
feet in length, a hundred feet in depth, with a proscenium over sixty
feet high, facing an auditorium seating three thousand persons, and
separated from them by a marbled orchestra enclosure four or five times
as wide as it should be. It is pathetic to see George Mozart or George
Robey trying to adapt his essentially miniature art to these vasty
proportions. Physically and mentally he is dwarfed, and his effects
hardly ever get beyond the orchestra. These new halls, with their
circles, and upper circles, and third circles, and Louis XV Salons and
Palm Courts, have been builded over the bones of old English humour.
They are good for nothing except ballet, one-act plays with large
effects, and tabloid grand opera. But apparently the public like them,
for the old halls are going. The Tivoli site is to bear a Y.M.C.A. home,
and the merriment of the Strand will be still further frowned upon.