The Project Gutenberg eBook, Nights in London, by Thomas Burke This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Nights in London Author: Thomas Burke Release Date: November 24, 2007 [eBook #23605] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIGHTS IN LONDON*** E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Martin Pettit, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) NIGHTS IN LONDON BY THOMAS BURKE Author of "Limehouse Nights." logo NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1918 [Pg i] Round the halls First published in 1915 Popular Edition . 1918 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. [Pg ii] [Pg iii] 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 CITY DUSK NOTE [Pg iv] [Pg v] [Pg vi] [Pg vii] Nocturnal EVENING An Entertainment Night (Round the Halls) MUSIC-HALL BALLET A Chinese Night (Limehouse) AT LIMEHOUSE A Domestic Night (Clapham Common) THE LAMPLIT HOUR A Lonely Night (Kingsland Road) A LONELY NIGHT A Musical Night (The Opera, the Promenades) AT THE PIANO A Jewish Night (Whitechapel) LONDON ROSES A Happy Night (Surbiton and Battersea) A SUBURBAN NIGHT A Worker's Night (The Isle of Dogs) THE WORK CHILD A Charitable Night (East, West, North, South) POOR A French Night (Old Compton Street) OLD COMPTON STREET An Italian Night (Clerkenwell) CLERKENWELL A Basher's Night (Hoxton) LONDON JUNE A Down-Stream Night (Blackwall) WEST INDIA DOCK ROAD An Art Night (Chelsea) A LONDON MOMENT A Russian Night (Stepney) STEPNEY CAUSEWAY A Scandinavian Night (Shadwell) AT SHADWELL [Pg viii] A Sunday Night (Anywhere) SUNDAY TEA-TIME At Random TWO IN A TAXI 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 [Pg 9] [Pg 10] [Pg 11] 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 [Pg 12] [Pg 13] [Pg 14] [Pg 15] 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 [Pg 16] [Pg 17] [Pg 18] 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 [Pg 19] [Pg 20] [Pg 21] 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, [Pg 22] [Pg 23] [Pg 25] [Pg 26] 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 [Pg 27] [Pg 28] [Pg 29] 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 naïvely, 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 £200 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 [Pg 30] [Pg 31] [Pg 32] 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 matinées 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 [Pg 33] [Pg 34] [Pg 35] [Pg 36] 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. There is always an acrobat turn in the Oxford bill, and always a cheery cross-talk item. The old combination of knockabouts or of swell and clown has for the most part disappeared; the Poluskis, The Terry Twins, and Dale and O'Malley are perhaps the last survivors. The modern idea is the foolish fellow and the dainty lady, who are not, I think, so attractive as the old style. Personally, I am always drawn to a hall where Dale and O'Malley are billed. "The somewhat different comedians" is their own description of themselves, and the wonder is that they should have worked so long in partnership and yet succeeded in remaining "somewhat different." But each has so welded his mood to the other that their joint humour is, as it were, a bond as spiritually indissoluble as matrimony. You...