by Andrew Marr
The parallels with pop culture are intriguing, going beyond the impact of technology. The subjects of the music-hall songs – love and heartbreak – were not so different, though sentiment ruled, rather than personal rebellion. The structure of the songs, with simple lyrics and pounding chorus, was not so different either. Nor were the temptations. There were plenty of teenage stars tearing their way towards ruin through drink, promiscuity and even drugs. Despair was felt as keenly. Mark Sheridan, the man who had a huge hit with ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ in 1909 but later saw his career on the slide, was so depressed by being booed at the Glasgow Coliseum that he went to the city’s Kelvingrove Park and shot himself. If modern celebrity culture depends on stunts, then again this was nothing new to the music-hall performers. Harry Houdini made a practice of getting himself locked in the local jail wherever he was booked to perform, and then escaping – including from the triple-locked condemned cell in Sheffield, even after the police had added a further seven-lever lock to the cell block. Singers would arrive with pipers or carriages and make grand civic entrances. The rewards could be spectacular, particularly for the singers who were prepared to go on tour to Australia, South Africa, Paris and New York. Though only in her twenties, Marie Lloyd kept a huge establishment of carriages, servants and hangers-on. Recklessly generous, she would shower lesser artists with cash, bought her parents a pub each in Soho and travelled everywhere in high style. Fred Barnes, a gay singer who got his first break at the London Pavilion, was soon earning a fortune, splashing out thousands of pounds a night in Monte Carlo, keeping four cars when they were very expensive toys, and a substantial staff of servants. Florrie Forde, the Australian singer whose hits included ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ and ‘Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?’ – which in 1909 seems to have been as ubiquitous as a Beatles hit sixty years later – became a very wealthy woman. Several music-hall singers married into the aristocracy. Harry Lauder was knighted.
But for most music-hall performers, like most rock singers, life was an endless trail from provincial date to date, always on the road, sleeping in lousy rooms and dreaming of a real hit. The music-hall singer had no records and therefore no way of knowing what might be a hit, other than by the immediate reaction in the hall. The advantage was that, in the pre-recording age, a star only needed a handful of hit songs to continue his or her career for years. In between the live performances, nobody heard you. This also meant that established performers could continue for as long as their strength held out. The easiest way of gauging success was simply to see what the theatre manager would pay. Harry Lauder first realized he was a star when offered an American tour. Not wanting to go, he asked for a fee he thought ludicrous, and got it. Another way was to chart sheet-music sales. ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, written by a composer and a semi-professional singer who ran a fish stall, was a sheet-music hit when it came out in 1912 and two years later, towards the end of the first year of the war, was selling an astonishing 10,000 copies every day. But most music-hall stars simply listened. If the audience was joining in the chorus after a week or two, the song was a hit. If not, it would be dropped. Katie Lawrence, who sang ‘Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do’, said that having sung it for several weeks and found it was not catching on, she was about to drop it. Then, back in London after a provincial tour, she heard someone humming it at the station: ‘A few minutes later, I heard it again and found that it was all over London. I was completely surprised and, as you may imagine, I did not drop the song.’21 But the random nature of the business meant there was a voracious demand for ever more songs. Harry Dacre, who wrote ‘Daisy’, said that in his first two years as a songwriter he had penned 700, and sold 600 of them.
We must beware golden-ageism. Most music-hall songs, inevitably, were unmemorable. The 1960s novelist Colin MacInnes, a lover of music-hall tradition, concluded that they were not as strong as older folk songs, or the blues: ‘They’re too inhibited emotionally, too limited intellectually, too frankly commercial in their intentions. I think the highest one can claim for them is that they are a sort of bastard folk song of an industrial-commercial-imperial age.’22 Yet they were also, as he acknowledged, the voice of working-class Britain through more than half a century of fast change. Almost every simple assertion about them can be contradicted. They were jingoistic? Yes – the very word ‘jingo’ came from a music-hall song about the Russo-Turkish war. But the other point of view was heard as well. ‘We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do . . .’ was soon countered by another singer proclaiming: ‘I don’t want to fight, I’ll be slaughtered if I do, I’ll change my togs, I’ll sell my kit and pop my rifle too. I don’t like war. I ain’t a Briton true. And I’ll let the Russians have Constantinople.’ Were the songs sentimental? Many were, but others were hard-boiled cynical. Were they dirty? Well . . . that takes us back to the great Marie Lloyd.
Marie Lloyd was a star for thirty-odd years, even though she died at fifty-two. Born Matilda Wood in the East End of London to parents whose job was to make artificial flowers, she made her debut at fifteen under the name Bella Delmere. Her stage surname was taken from a popular newspaper of the time and her private life was catastrophic: three husbands, two of them violent bullies. She was loved for her famously sharp wit and cheek and the sense that she never left her class. On an ocean voyage, snubbed by the posh travellers, she refused to sing for the first-class deck, but only for the second and the people in steerage. In the 1907 theatre strike she was on the picket line supporting lesser-paid performers. What many people thought about first, though, when they heard her name, was that she was somehow improper. Genuinely filthy jokes were repeated as if from her mouth. Although she had a famously sharp wit, this seems hard to understand. If you read the lyrics to her best-known songs, such as ‘Oh Mr Porter, what shall I do? I wanted to go to Birmingham, but they’ve carried me on to Crewe’, they seem innocent enough, though there is plenty of innuendo of a gentle, winking nature and many of her songs were meltingly romantic. Clearly, though, Lloyd’s style, her corrupted-girl knowingness, could send audiences of the day into squirming paroxysms. Summoned by the London County Council licensing committee during a major inquiry into indecency in the music halls, she sang her way through three songs with a butter-wouldn’t-melt little-girl innocence which had them completely perplexed. They expressed their bemusement. Marie then chose another song, Lord Tennyson’s ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’, about as proper a poem as any middle-class parent could wish for. But she sang it in a way that made it seem instantly filthy, looked them in the eye and then – as with any audience – laughed at them as they blushed. That story probably tells as much about the nature of music hall as a dozen treatises.
Here was another secret of Edwardian public behaviour. Innuendo can be more subversive than outright smut, because to acknowledge that you understand the meaning is to show you understand the hidden world of pre-Freudian rhyming slang and body-part images. To blush is to admit. The LCC let Lloyd alone and their campaign focused instead on the Empire theatre in Leicester Square which, like many music halls, had a considerable number of prostitutes openly working the back of the large horseshoe ‘promenade’ at the back of the auditorium. The prospect of this being closed caused protests by theatre workers and London cabmen – who passed a motion ‘to prevent those persons who were taking such a great interest in the morals of Londoners ruining, not only public places of amusement, but the cab industry’. It provoked a great argument between libertarians and those they called ‘prudes’, particularly once a decision was made to place a large screen round the back of the theatre, effectively destroying the boozy, smoky, libidinous promenade. Among those who were outraged was the young Winston Churchill, then a Sandhurst cadet, who came to London to protest and produced his first ever letter to a newspaper, telling the Westminster Gazette that ‘in England we have too long obeyed the voice of the prude’. He was then, by his own account, at the head of a mob of several hundred people w
ho stormed the screen, or barricade, and tore it down, boasting to his brother, ‘It was I who led the rioters’. He then made his first public speech, appealing to the crowd from the top of the debris: ‘You have seen us tear down these barricades tonight; see that you pull down those responsible for them at the coming election.’23
Yet if the LCC was briefly confounded by this unlikely seeming alliance of young Churchill of the hussars and Marie Lloyd of the wiggles and winks, the steady smothering of the spirit of the old music hall continued – death by patronage and respectability as much as death by cinema. Though the ‘bioscope’, or early films, were offered to music-hall audiences from 1900 onwards, they were little regarded by the performers and certainly no match for the colour and noise of the live acts. As the writer J. B. Priestley, who saw these things first from the perspective of Bradford and the industrial north, put it: ‘What began in Coketown finally triumphed close to Piccadilly Circus’; but though the middle classes began to pour in, ‘Variety came from the industrial working class and never really moved a long way from it.’24 Almost everywhere we look in Edwardian Britain, we find a surge of democracy sweeping round the old order. But wherever we look, we also see British society incorporating, and calming, the popular tide. That is true of the early Labour Party, to a lesser extent of trade unionism . . . and it is certainly true of music hall too. West End audiences meant self-censorship, not bawdy, and even short plays. Music hall would continue well into the 1920s, but become a sugary, sanitized mimicry of its earlier self. Those roses had fatal thorns.
Captains and Kings
One of the things that must strike anyone reading Edwardian political memoirs is just how important were the views of the monarch. The papers of Churchill, Asquith and many others are scattered with royal telegrams and accounts of difficult meetings with Edward VII and George V. Both men were natural reactionaries, tempered by more Liberal-leaning advisers and, in Edward’s case, by a pro-Liberal mistress. Though this is the beginning of the democratic age, the old web of royal marriages still spread across Europe, making diplomacy familial. Since both ‘Edwardian’ kings were not merely monarchs at home but enjoyed the fine title King-Emperor, they followed imperial affairs very closely. Edward VII was, as we have seen, highly suspicious of his cousin the Kaiser. He much preferred France to Germany. His wildly successful visit to Paris in 1903, which came when Britain was unpopular there, was followed by the momentous entente cordiale of the following year. It was the last ever significant diplomatic act by a British monarch and helped pull Britain into the Great War. Edward knew Paris very well, having sowed enough wild oats there as Prince of Wales to feed most of Europe. He was a great frequenter of Parisian brothels and knew many of the most famous whores, appearing in Belle Epoque naughtiness like a figure in a Toulouse-Lautrec poster, with top hat and bulging belly. This Falstaffian side of Edward also helped make him popular at home, where his many mistresses ranged from cockney girls to one Mrs Keppel.
Of the regiment of strong women that populated Edwardian life, Alice Keppel is worth remembering. Of all Edward’s mistresses, none was as important as she, none better known, none more politically significant. She was by Edwardian standards rather on the left, an opponent of Chamberlain and a moderate supporter of Lloyd George. She was present at the Liberal dinner when Edward was reconciled to the idea of the anti-war Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman becoming prime minister. When Edward died Queen Alexandra invited Mrs Keppel to his death-bed in 1910. Something of her fame can be surmised by the tale of her getting into a hansom cab and announcing, ‘King’s Cross’. The cabbie turned round. He was sorry to hear it, he said – but never mind, she’d win him round in due course. (Cabbies featured in many Edward stories. Another had his bawdier cockney mistress Rosa Lewis and the future King enjoying a wild time in a closed hackney coach. The Prince of Wales handed over a miserable payment, leading to the angry cabbie protesting until Rosa gave him two sovereigns. ‘I knowed you was a lady as soon as I seen you,’ said the cabbie, ‘but where did you pick ’im up?’)
Campbell-Bannerman would become the Great Caresser’s great reassurer. Frequently going for spa treatments at the German resort of Marienbad, where he met Edward both as Prince of Wales and King, the politician worried about ‘the extraordinary number of tainted ladies’ around the royal person. If Edward VII had been concerned about having to put up with a government of damned Liberals and radicals then owlish, mustachioed ‘C-B’ was the very man to calm him down. His most famous moment of radicalism had happened during the Boer War, which he vehemently opposed, when he attacked British ‘methods of barbarism’. Yet within a few years this was forgotten by all except the military commanders against whom the comment was aimed and Campbell-Bannerman seemed the ultimate safe pair of hands. He memorably said of his health regime, perhaps alluding to his political philosophy too: ‘Personally I am an immense believer in bed, in constantly keeping horizontal: the heart and everything else goes slower, and the whole system is refreshed.’ Not refreshed enough, however, for in 1908 he became ill, resigned and died three weeks later in Downing Street – the only prime minister to do so.
Asquith’s succession meant a steelier, tougher figure at the top, and a much harder time ahead for the monarch. Known to admiring cartoonists as ‘the Last of the Romans’ and later, to colleagues alarmed by his convivial habits, as ‘old Squiffy’, his deep learning awed other MPs just as much as his private life intrigued them. He had been happily married to Helen, a quiet, gentle woman who had produced five children; but in the same year he met Margot Tennant at a Commons dinner party, Helen caught typhoid and died on holiday in Scotland. Asquith was by then a rising political star and successful barrister, but Margot was slow to yield. It seemed a very strange match. Asquith had come from an austere middle-class Bible-reading family in Yorkshire and had propelled himself upwards through his academic brilliance and a formidable appetite for hard work. He was of the non-flashy, impassive, middle-class breed of Victorian Liberals, winning great plaudits as home secretary under Gladstone. Stocky, earnest and conventionally dressed, he was the opposite of the aristocrats with whom Margot had mingled. Yet she had always been a fervent Liberal, interested in politics, and had always admired high intelligence – which the Asquiths possessed in spades. Their marriage, which intrigued Westminster, did not prove as happy as either hoped.
Margot Asquith seems to have been a tremendously frightening woman. One of eight surviving children of a rich brewer, she had been brought up in a tempestuous, clever household living in a modern baronial mansion in the Scottish borders. Her great tragedy had been the death of her adored elder sister in childbirth. One of the ‘Souls’, those arch clever-clever aristos, among the statesmen she knew were Gladstone, Salisbury, Balfour and Rosebery. Her passion was hunting. In 1906 she reflected: ‘I ride better than most people . . . I have broken both collar-bones, my nose, my ribs and my kneecap; dislocated my jaw, fractured my skull, and had five concussions of the brain; but – though my horses are to be sold next week – I have not lost my nerve.’25 Her tongue was even more dangerous than her horse riding. She had some odd beliefs. Among them was that a full set of teeth was an invariable sign of insanity which would lead to early death – in later years her butler and footmen were encouraged to have all their teeth extracted. As one of the great hostesses, she was a friend of the King and part of the network of high society that kept Liberalism and the Palace in touch.
But by the time of Asquith’s arrival as prime minister, relations between Edward and his Liberal ministers were fast deteriorating. As we shall see, it was the great crisis over the Lords and the People’s Budget that really brought this to a head, but royal sniping over issues from taxes to the Czar to Ireland required careful attention, both before and after the accession of George V in 1910. Not all ministers reacted well. Churchill was always cheeky and particularly infuriated King George by some of his comments in the gossipy daily reports from Parliament that it was his dut
y to send to the Palace. In one, in February 1911, Churchill wrote that ‘tramps and wastrels’ should be sent to labour colonies to work, adding, ‘It must not however be forgotten that there are idlers and wastrels at both ends of the social scale.’ King George was so angry he instructed his secretary to write to 10 Downing Street: ‘The King thinks that Mr Churchill’s views, as contained in the enclosed, are very socialistic . . . HM considers it quite superfluous for Churchill in a letter of the description he was writing to him, to bring in about “idlers and wastrels at both ends of the social ladder”.’ Churchill wrote to the King apparently apologizing, but with perfect insolence suggesting that, if the King did not like his chatty style, he might try reading the parliamentary debates in the newspapers, and effectively resigning. The King’s secretary replied that ‘he regrets that your feelings should have been hurt’ and added: ‘The King directs me to add that your letters are always instructive and interesting and he would be sorry if he were to receive no further ones.’ Eventually the little dispute was smoothed over. But the Liberal politician’s disinclination to be browbeaten by the King is significant. It would not have happened that way in Berlin or St Petersburg; which may be why those monarchies went, and that of fat, wicked Edward and his son, the stamp-collecting, apologetic George, kept chugging forwards.