Lambeth Music History. An Introduction. Part 4. Music Halls & Growing Diversity Of Music

 Music Halls

While music hall developed from pub house venues, the building of the Canterbury Hall attached to the Canterbury Pub in Upper Marsh represents the beginning of a new phase. Completed in 1858 by Charles Morton, the policy of letting the wives of male patrons in had a calming effect, a practice adopted elsewhere, and which helped music halls obtain an air of respectability. It seems that its customer basis was ‘a predominantly local audience of small tradesmen, shopkeepers, and their assistants, mechanics and labourers, as well as soldiers and sailors.’ A grand benefit concert was given for its proprietor William ‘Billy’ Holland in 1869. 

By the early 1890s music hall was the foremost institution of popular culture in London with 14m annual visits to 35 of its halls. From 1889 the Theatres and Music Hall Committee of the London County Council had the responsibility to licensing halls. In 1891 an inspector’s report on the Canterbury stated: 

‘The audience seemed to consist principally of mechanics and was generally rather rough and noisy, whistling, shouting, hissing, and joining in the songs. There was, however, no quarrelling or drunkenness. The women were not numerous and were on the same class as the men. I saw none that I should consider to be prostitutes. There were policemen and attendants in every part of the house … the audience were principal trades people, and their wives, working men, lads and girls, and considering the neighbourhood, well behaved/ I saw no disorder, and I did not observe any persons whose behaviour would make them as prostitutes, thought doubtless among such a large audience, there were many loose characters. I went in the fauteuils, stalls, pit, promenade and balcony.’

Kennington Theatre

In 1898 the Kennington Theatre on Kennington Rd, just north of the Park opened. It was closed c1934 and a block of flats was built on the site after the Second World War.

As the musical hall industry grew the artists and workers in them began to organise: the Music Hall Sick Fund and Provident Society (1862), the Music Hall Artistes Protection Society (1872), the Music Hall Artist Association (1885), the Sketch Artistes Association (1889), and the Music Artists Railway Association (1896). In 1906 the Variety Artistes Federation was set up as a trade union.

Joe Elvin

One of the driving forces behind the Federation’s formation was The Pals of the Water Rat, later The Select and then Grand Order of Water Rats. In 1889 the founders having gone by coach from the Canterbury to Sunbury. Its motto was ‘Philanthropy, Conviviality, and Social Intercourse’. The first Water Rat was ‘The Magpie’, a pony owned by music hall comedian Joe Elvin. He stabled the pony at the De Laune Stables in Kennington and was persuaded to enter it in the trotting races that ran from Thornton Heath to the William the Fourth public house on the Streatham/Norbury border. The Sunbury event was to celebrate his success. Over the years the Rats met at Joe Elvin’s in Effra Rd, Fred Griffith’s home and the White Horse in Brixton, the Horns, and the Kennington Social Club.

In December a strike began against the owner of several theatres in South London. The Federation was helped by the Brixton Trades and Labour Council. In January Variety Artists Federation went into a national alliance with the Amalgamated Musicians Union and the National Association of Theatrical Employees to demand among other things an extra twelfth of an entertainer's weekly salary to be paid for each matinee that was performed. The strike spread to 22 London halls for just over three weeks. 

Many music hall entertainers and others in the music industry lived for part of their lives in Lambeth, like George Leybourne known as Champagne Charlie. Edwin Jesse Lonnen (1861-1901), a vocalist and actor particularly associated with the Gaiety Theatre in London, lived at 43 Trent Rd off Brixton Hill.

Charlie Chaplin was born into poverty in April 1889. His first appearance in the music hall was in 1894, when he sang because his mother was taken hoarse. Later he composed music to accompany his silent films. Although his association with Lambeth ended when he was still growing up, his association with the area is much valued.

The music world had a wide range of specialist organisations. In his work surveying life and labour in London Charles Booth received information in 1896 from F. Orcherton of the British and Foreign Musicians Society, who lived at 89 Turret Grove in Clapham, about rates of remuneration received by members of orchestras in London, and Frank Hall, of 58 York Road, the Secretary of Music Hall Benevolent Fund. 

One of the popular specialist acts in the halls and in organisations’ concerts were the Minstrel shows in which whites blacked up were popular. One of the leading groups was the Christy, later named the Moore and Burgess, Minstrels. John Hobson was their musical director from about 1875. He died in 1887 at 8 Approach Rd in Brixton. There was a minstrel group based in Streatham in the early 1900, a group of amateurs, who were described as having ‘for so many years been a fruitful source of entertainment to Streathamites'.

Growing Diversity of Music

There were a variety of venues and ways in which a growing diversity of music genre took place. The Workhouse was the subject of many street ballads, like A Night's Repose in Lambeth Workhouse.

There were a number of composers and musicians of classical and light music associated with Lambeth in second half of the 19thC into the 20thC. 

Arthur Sullivan 

Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert & Sullivan who composed operattas like Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, was born in 8 Bolwell St in May 1842. His Irish Symphony was performed at Crystal Palace in March 1866. In November 1876 he conducted the Brixton Choral Society in his Light of the World.

In the 1890s a number of musicians died at their homes in Lambeth. 

1891: Dr William Alexander Barrett, vocalist, organist and music critic. 39 Angell Rd

1892: Catherine Lucette,  singer,  actor, manager; had  lived at 37 Hanover Gdns Kennington 1881. Died 388 Kennington Rd

1894: Alfred Gwyllym Crowe, military and then commercial bandmaster/conductor born Bermuda 1835, served in the Crimea. 11 Leston Rd, Clapham

1895: Mrs Mary Jane Worrell/Miss Duval,  singer  56 Arlingford Rd, Tulse Hill  

1897: Dr Jacob Bradford, organist, conductor and composer, 157 Kennington Park Rd

Streatham had the Philharmonic and Symphony Orchestras which held their concerts at Streatham Town Hall, conducted by Frederick C. Haggis, Director of the Streatham School of Music at Malvern House, 245 Streatham High Rd. Jessie Coleridge-Taylor, the widow of the Croydon based black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a Vice-President of the Philharmonic. That orchestra’s concert in February 1921 included Coleridge-Taylor’s A Tale of Old Japan. Coleridge had been a member of the Cremona Society which studied stringed musical instruments. Its Secretary had been F. Marchant of 106 Pathfield Rd.  

The diversity grew in the 1920s and 1930s with the popularity of jazz and big band music. Organisations continued to foster music like the Lambeth Mission with its Life Boys band.

Locarno Race Bar 1929

In October 1929 H.S. Kingdon the proprietor of the Locarno Dance Hall (which later changed its name to The Cat’s Whiskers in 1970) on Streatham Hill imposed a colour bar against black people using the premises, and asked a number of West Indians to leave. They included a postgraduate student at the London School of Tropical Medicine, a member of the Middle Temple, and a solicitor of the Supreme Court of Grenada. Norwood News initiated letters from readers objecting to the ban.

Liza of Lambeth And The Lambeth Walk

The musical play Liza of Lambeth by William Rushton and Berny Stingle with music by Cliff Adams, which ran at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London from June 1976 was loosely based on the first novel by W Somerset Maugham, a young doctor at St. Thomas’s. Before he died he instructed his agent not to allow Liza to be presented as a straight play, as it had potential to become a stage musical. 

Dance also became popular. Between 1930 and 1940 the Locarno had its own Dance Band, and bands were contracted to play, including the one led by Billy Cotton. 

Lambeth achieved national and international fame as a result of the Lambeth Walk song written by Noel Gay, a Church organist, for the show Me and My Girl first performed in 1937. The show tells the tale of a Lambeth Cockney who becomes heir to an earldom. One of the executors tries to transform him into a proper gentleman, but matters are complicated by his love for the Cockney Sally Smith. The songs in the show include: Me and My Girl, The Lambeth Walk, The Sun Has Got His Hat On and Leaning on a Lamp-post.

In October 1938 The Times Leader commented: 'While dictators rage and statesmen talk, all Europe dances - to The Lambeth Walk.' As the craze swept Germany, Noel Gay was asked to sign a declaration that he had no Jewish blood. He refused.’

The show’s star Lupino Lane, ‘belted out Noel Gay's song to a swaggering walk’. The tune, but not the walk, caught the imagination of Adele England, a dance teacher. She choreographed the song leading to over 350,000 music sheets of The Lambeth Walk being sold in just six months.

Cockney Suite by Albert Ketelbey in 1924 includes Lambeth Walk.

In 1939 E. T. and Yebuah Mensah’s Accra Rhythmic Orchestra won the Lambeth Walk Dance Competition at the King George Memorial Hall, today's Parliament House. E.T. went on to pioneer the West African swing-jazz dance-bands in the 1950s and 60s.

Michael Tippett

The composer Michael Tippet became Director of Music at Morley College in the autumn of 1940. He built up the Choir into a major force in London music – despite the dangers of going to and from rehearsals in the air raids. While singing contemporary music, there was an emphasis on English music, particularly from earlier periods. In March 1948 the BBC Radio Third Programme  broadcast them performing Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium, and Tippett’s Child of Our Time from Central Hall, Westminster. 

Child of Our Time included four negro spirituals: Steal Away; Nobody Knows the Trouble I see; O by and by; and Deep River.They went on to record the Tallis work. They also sang it in the newly opened Royal Festival Hall as part of the 1951 Festival of Britain. Tippett resigned shortly afterwards to concentrate on composing. 

Lambeth Boys 

Further diversity was added from the 1950s with the waves of popularity in jazz, skiffle and folk music.

In 1958 the jazz musician Johnny Dankworth wrote We Are The Lambeth Boys, which involved the young people who used Alford House youth Centre in Kennington.