The Good Old Days

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In the spring of 1962, the young John Major sat at the bedside of a dying man. “He was barely conscious, with familiar half-smiles dancing across his well-worn and gentle face, but I knew where he was in his imagination,” Major writes. “The lights were bright. A boisterous audience was cheering.” In the dying man’s imagination, Major knew, he was back on the music-hall stage, pouring out the familiar songs and sketches before a delighted crowd. It was a world that had long since disappeared, but for those who had made it their livelihood, it had been everything. Major knew that better than anyone: the old man was his father, Tom.

Many years later, when John Major reached Number 10, journalists loved to mock Tom Major’s background in the halls. But as the former prime minister shows in this brisk, unpretentious and enjoyably evocative history, music hall’s importance in British culture is often underestimated. It evolved from the taverns, penny gaffs and supper clubs of the early 19th century, but the first true hall, which opened at the Canterbury Arms in Lambeth in 1852, broke new ground by charging on the door, offering a wide variety of acts and catering explicitly for women and men alike. Soon music hall was the urban masses’ favourite entertainment, a world of sketch artists, comic ballads, gaslights and prostitutes, of double entendres and cross-dressers, of cheeky cockneys and blackface minstrels. It was killed off after the First World War by the cinema and the radio but its legacy endures. Next time you wince at Bruce Forsyth’s patter in Strictly Come Dancing, it is worth remembering that you’re watching the last heir to the music-hall tradition.

Given his reputation for Pooterish greyness, Major seems a very implausible guide to the larger-than-life world of the Victorian halls. But he writes about its extraordinary characters with real affection; like his previous book, a history of cricket, this feels like a labour of love. As he points out, at their peak the biggest stars were international celebrities: in 1911 the Scottish performer Harry Lauder, much in demand on both sides of the Atlantic, was making $5,000 every week, the equivalent of perhaps £100,000 a week today. Yet life in the halls, even for the stars, could be nasty, brutish and short. Marie Lloyd, “Queen of the Halls”, with her cheeky grin and saucy lyrics, died at the age of 52 after collapsing at the Edmonton Empire, while Dan Leno, the biggest comic star of the late Victorian period, toured continuously for 20 years before dropping dead at just 43. Perhaps most tragically, Little Tich, who topped the bills well into the 1920s, died after a routine went wrong and he was hit on the head by a mop, triggering a stroke from which he never recovered.

The real hero of Major’s book, though, is his father, Tom, who was born in 1879, first appeared on bills at the turn of the century, and fathered the future PM when he was 64. At the end of his life, when he was ill, strange, eccentric characters used to turn up at his bedside, wiping away tears of laughter as they remembered the good old days. Even then, Tom could never have imagined that one day his career would be celebrated in a book by a future prime minister. He would surely have been proud of his son. What is really touching, though, is how proud his son clearly is of him

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