[Press Cuttings.] (1907)

From the March 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Child Labour on Farms.

It passes one’s comprehension that after 100 years’ legislation on behalf of factory children, the farmer and other individuals may yet employ younger children than were ever dragged into cotton mills, and may work them for longer hours than were ever known in the history of the factory system ! 

Co-operative News.

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Street bookmaking is practically dead ; but its place has been taken by bookmaking through the post. This—according to a prominent member of the Metropolitan Police force, who has been engaged for twenty-five years in the prosecution of street bookmakers—is the main result of the new Betting Act increasing the penalties for street betting, which came into operation at the beginning of the year.

So that in getting rid of one evil it is questionable whether a greater evil is not being created. Street betting has probably disappeared, but the betting will be carried on just as much as before. 

Daily Chronicle

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Of all the Western industries introduced into Japan, the one which has made the most rapid progress is, says Engineering, that of cotton-spinning and manufacturing. Its products are also those which compete most directly with the corresponding British manufactures. Some of the most enterprising men of the Japanese Empire control the factories; and behind the young industry is the whole force of the paternal Government urging it on. There are 49 cotton-spinning companies in Japan, operating eighty-five mills. At present Japanese mills are making profits, not because of any special skill of their operatives, but simply on account of the difference in price between the raw materials and the simplest forms of manufactures therefrom. It is simply a question of keeping the belt on the tight pulley ; and that they are doing this to the fullest extent is shown by the fact that for the last six months of the period covered by this report, 81 out of 85 mills ran both night and day, and averaged over 22 hours a day.

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The Law Journal, referring to the question raised in the music hall strike whether pickets, whose proceedings lead to the gathering of crowds in the streets can be fined under the provisions of the Highway Act, 1835, having regard to the fact that peaceful picketing is legal under the provisions of the Trades Disputes Act, says it should have supposed that the section was intended to take away doubts as to the legality of picketing itself, and not to make the pickets entitled to over-ride public rights as well as molest individuals in the course of a trade dispute. If Mr. Atherley Jones’s reading of the Trades Disputes Act is correct, pickets would be entitled to trespass on private property in furtherance of their trade dispute.

Blogger's Note:

Llewellyn Atherley-Jones was the son of the famous Chartist, Ernest Jones.

Old Time Music Hall (1963)

From the March 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

A gulf of time separates the original working class entertainer who amused his fellows with rough song and dance, from the plushy, awed restraint of the present- day Command Performance. The Music Hall of yesteryear is gone, never to return. Its roots were in the unsettled, lucre-mad savagery of the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century. All that then remained of the abundant regional folk song and music of the English countryside went into the melting pots of the industrial towns to emerge in a uniform pattern of urban culture.

The rural culture, smothered in the slums of the towns, managed to find an outlet for fragmented skills and techniques in the drink-sodden atmosphere of the “pub.” In those days, the public house was new and quite distinct from the ancient inn. It had cut glass, fine woodwork and gas lighting, and offered more comfort and social contact than the home. It was to the early Victorian worker what the coffee bar is now to the Earls Court bed-sitter.

As industrialisation increased, the skilled worker obtained some change in living standards. Some of his wages remained after his basic needs had been met and the brewing trade had a fairly free field in mopping up this surplus. In time, the larger public houses had halls where beer, food and tobacco were helped down by the mixed talents of the entertainers, with the very necessary chairman in control.

It should be remembered that prior to the Theatre Emancipation Act of 1843, straight dramas were allowed only in Crown-chartered theatres of which there were but two in London. This law was evaded by wedging musical comic and acrobatic turns between drama and sketches—“Variety,” in other words. By the time the theatre was freed of restriction, the prolonged effects of State control had already funnelled variety into some form of theatre or hall, and here its ultimate flowering took place. The halls, along with the theatres, were the principal suppliers of performers in growing numbers. In the very poor areas a much lower standard existed in the form of the gin shops, where the “penny gaff” provided crude doggerel, larded with a hefty helping of bad language.

In the early days, the main halls charged admission, which was repaid in food and drink (wet money). This was an encouragement to spend more as the evening wore on. The entertainers were often employed on the premises in some other capacity and received a supplement for their extra efforts. Hence the development of such people as singing waiters. Many publicans were themselves capable performers, such as Collins of Collins Music Hall fame.

But it was Charles Morton who took a big step in the establishment of the music hall. In the 1850’s he enlarged his hall at The Canterbury by demolishing an American skittle alley and created what was for those days a super-modern theatre. Women were eventually allowed in—a good box office draw—and “wet money” was abolished in favour of set admission prices. This meant that artists could now be paid salaries and become specialised—an important change.

Morton himself was very conscious of the need to improve working class taste. Capitalism, after all, needed something more than just a mass of degenerate proletarians. So The Canterbury even sported a picture gallery and selections of opera and ballet were included in the programme; in fact, the first performance in Britain of Gounod’s Faust was performed at The Canterbury. Nor should we forget that in the I860's such halls as Turnham’s White Lion and the famous ’’Met” in Edgware Road, London, had their full-time ballets. Workers who frequented these places did not regard such art form as being above them or effeminate, and although one must allow that standards then were much lower than those of modern choreography, working class acceptance of ballet in its introductory form doubtless played a fair part in its subsequent development.

In the next few years, the halls separated from their public house origin and only the names continued to bear trace of the site of their birth. Laws were passed in 1870 ordering the closing of places of entertainment by midnight and prohibiting the sale of food and drink in the auditorium. This put paid to the Chairman, and correct theatre procedure took his place. But by then capital was flowing into this expanding business and a whole army of song writers, costumiers and small timers were earning their living at it. The audiences still sung, cried and thrilled with the performer, and the personal contact was still a factor, even though it was getting more remote.

By the I930’s, the music halls were in decline. A devastating world war and generally changing conditions saw to that, and it was not to be long before memories were all that remained.

It is interesting now to look back over the years of their heyday and compare them with the present. The most outstanding change is in the type of popular songs) Almost exclusively modern lyrics lean on a theme of sexual love and centre on the young, whereas the old music halls produced songs about almost every human emotion and experience. Love, bravery, misfortune, poverty, snobbishness, death and patriotism they were all there. Workers were still closely knit, even in the large towns, and the isolation behind the lace curtains of suburbia had yet to come. Personal misfortune was eased by the direct mutual aid of one’s neighbours. Today, the state has moved into this field.

As industry develops, every aspect of our lives becomes affected by it, and no field of human activity is left unscrutinised in the search for profit. So the trend in modern songs is not surprising. Who is much bothered if the fervour of young love is aroused by pop singers who, even by general standards, are poor, so long as the money keeps rolling in? Anyway, the ruling class are probably thankful that their young workers spend so much of their spare time shuffling and mooning about broken hearts and frustrated passions. Their minds will not then so readily turn to more awkward aspects of the system.

But modern capitalism has produced something else the quite untenable assumption on the part of many teenagers that we have moved into an era of slickness and high-toned quality in song production. A comparison of the pop songs of today with those of the old music halls will show the falsity of this. There is a difference between the two, yes, but a subtle, one; both are reflections of poverty not only in wealth itself but in the understanding of the capitalist world.

Private property society has divorced its workers from the means of wealthy production and has reduced many of our tasks to simple manipulation. It has also brought about a uniformity of taste, ideas and general behaviour which social reformers may wail about but which none of them can alter. We hope we have said enough by now to show that only a classless, property-less society will make any radical change in this state of affairs. It will be then that we can express ourselves fully and encourage variety in the truest sense of the word. But it is only the working class who can ring up the curtain on this new world.

Jack Law

Let's put the kybosh on . . . (1964)

From the August 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

People who were alive in the Twenties and Thirties will recall the "Songs that won the war." They will remember the song sheets given away by the newspapers, and the gramophone records with singers struggling against a background of phoney battle noises.

Every November brought its Armistice rallies when the same old stuff was ground out once again. The mixture was usually unvaried, the sugary ballads of the Home Front mixed with cleaned up versions of the songs actually sung by the front line soldiers. The impression was always of men going light-heartedly into battle. The memoirs have been published, with their revelations and recriminations, and charges and countercharges have been flung backwards and forwards. More important still, time has removed many of the participants from the scene. You cannot libel the dead; bitter attacks can now be made which, true or false, would have been dangerous during their lifetime.

Recently there have been radio programmes on the Great War songs, and, of course, the much discussed Theatre Workshop show Oh! What a Lovely War, with its witty and savage denunciation of the murder of a generation. They have brought back to life the real war songs. These songs, a product of the ordeal through which so many men passed, sound as fresh and real today as if fifty years had never been. The others are, at their best, museum pieces and, at their worst, nauseating.

All modern wars have one great need; the active support of the proletariat. The time is past when war could be declared without the knowledge and backing of the working class. Pro-war feeling must be whipped up, and then kept at fever- pitch. One of the means of doing this is the popular song—songs that appeal to the emotions not the intellect. The American Civil War first saw the mass-produced war song. Throughout the Victorian era many forces were at work —the growth of the Music Hall, the spread of literacy, and the sheet music that poured from the presses by the ton to feed the pianos that stood in every front room.

Pianos passed down the social scale, second hand or tenth hand until in the end, like the motor car today, you had a job to get rid of them. Songs had become big business and a profitable war song could not be wasted. When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, patriotic songs were churned out for the occasion, but it was over too soon for them to be used. So as the South African war was brewing up they unloaded them in Britain. The famous "Goodbye Dolly Grey" was written in New York for the Spanish-American War, but it served very well as a morale booster in Britain.

When war broke out in 1914 it was much vaster and grimmer than anything the Victorians had seen, something for which people were totally unprepared. One can follow its progress by studying the popular songs that it produced. They began with pure Jingoism, that belonged to a world in which little campaigns against inferior forces had been fought on the other side of the world. Idiotic jingles like “Belgium put the Kybosh on the Kaiser," “We don’t want to lose you," with its references to cricket and football, and "Are we downhearted? No!” show a complete ignorance of the real situation, of the gigantic military machine that was rolling into France, to crash into another equally gigantic army. Those songs rapidly disappeared, to be replaced by the recruiting songs.

Great Britain was completely unprepared for this type of war. The standing army was small, conscription was unknown and extensively opposed, and so vast numbers of volunteers were needed. The upsurge of nationalist feeling that accompanied the declaration of war had brought many recruits, but the unparalleled slaughter called for ever more men. Men had to be bullied, cajoled or shamed into uniform. With the white feathers and every kind of pressure came such songs as “Make a Man of Any One of You" and “The Army of Today's Alright.” This kind of thing was not needed in 1939; by then conscription and total organisation for war were accepted. It was realised that modern war calls for a large labour force outside of the armed forces, and that people must do what they are told, and go where they are needed. Heroics were not welcome. Such feeble efforts as “He was a handsome Territorial” were ridiculed, even in the national press.

As the 1914/18 war progressed, and things got really bad, people turned to sentimental stuff like Novello's “Keep the Home Fires Burning’’ and “There's a Long, Long, Trail Awinding.” Later still they tried to escape the ever-growing horror, with its war weariness; they retreated into the pure escapism of musical comedy, like “Chu Chin Chow” and "The Maid of the Mountains."

But for the soldiers in the never-ending nightmare at the front, there was no escape. Divorced from the normal world in their own private hell, with a front line that never really moved, they wrote and sang songs that had nothing of patriotism or glory in them. Some of them were light-hearted, such as - 

Send for the boys of the Old Brigade
    To keep Old England free,
Send for me father and me sister and me brother
     But for Gawd’s sake don’t send for me.

But most of them were bitter and paint a terrible picture. The continual bombardments. the crazy offensives in which men were flung in their thousands to certain death, the gas attacks, the discomfort of the trenches and the barbed wire, recur again and again. The dreaded whizz-bangs, the stench of corpses, shortages, contempt for Staff officers, and, above all, a longing for peace, are in ditties usually sung to a hymn tune or popular song. One of the most famous. “Far, Far from Wipers," has the refrain:—

Sing me to sleep, the shadows fall
 Let me forget the war and all
Damp is my dugout, cold are my feet
 Nothing but biscuits and bully to eat.
Over the sandbags helmets you’ll find
 Corpses in front and corpses behind.
Damp is my dugout
Cold are my feet
Waiting for whizz-bangs
To put me to sleep.

Perhaps the most ironic was the savage “I Don’t Want to be a Soldier,” sung to the tune of the recruiting song “Make a Man of Anyone of You.’’

One must not, however, read loo much into the sentiments of the soldiers’ songs. Victims of the world in which they lived, and lacking the knowledge to change it, many of the survivors, on return to normal life, joined ex-service associations like the British Legion. They spent subsequent years parading with flags and medals, and some, who were young enough, were even ready for another dose 20 years later.

Les Dale

The Decline of the Music Hall (1956)

From the February 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his boyhood, this writer went often to the Palace. No royal residence this; it was in the High Street, and men sold hot potatoes and chestnuts outside. Inside, it was all plush and pilasters. cherubs and chandeliers, with three gold-painted balconies receding one above another into the incredibly high domed roof. The higher you went the cheaper it was, from two shillings in the front stalls to fourpence in the gallery, where the seats were wooden steps and the tickets metal discs. There, his young blood chilled at "Sweeney Todd"; heard and saw Harry Champion, Kate Carney and Vesta Victoria, and joined in choruses which now are almost folk-songs—“Any Old Iron," “Waiting at the Church.” and “Nellie Dean."

The Palace was a roaring music-hall in the days before the wireless and the talkies. Now it is near-derelict. By itself, that might mean little: there are derelict churches, but-the mumbo-jumbery goes on. In this case, however, a minor epoch in social life has come to an end. Indeed, it had ended before the last few unsuccessful attempts to keep the Palace open with repertory, bands and nude shows. Along with the Palace, fifty others in London are boarded-up or become cinemas now: the music-hall, once the great working-class entertainment, is dead.

Fifty years ago there were seventy of them in London, and a comparable number in the big provincial cities and in Paris and New York. In addition, there were a good many local theatres providing stuff which had a clear relationship to the music-hall—domestic comedy, melodrama, and such pieces de resistance as Lawson’s “Humanity," in which an entire room (furniture, doors, pictures, and, of course, piles of crockery) was smashed nightly. Today there are not more than a dozen variety theatres in London, and the decline has been similar elsewhere.

Chief among the immediate causes is, of course, the rise of the cinema. In 1914 moving pictures were a novelty, but by the end of the war they were an American industry with a ready market in Britain. That in itself was not catastrophic to the music-hall, however. In the nineteen-twenties most cinemas were small and anything but Regal, Majestic or Super (at one bearing the last name you sat on wooden forms, and the pictures blurred when trains went by), films flourished. undoubtedly, but older people were prejudiced against them and the higher-income groups looked down on them.

The catastrophe was the coming of talking pictures. Within a year of their arrival, bigger and better cinemas were going up all over Britain; the first victims of the talkies, in fact, were the small picture-houses—either gobbled up or pushed out of business by the syndicates. The new cinemas’ splendour, in every architectural style from Byzantine to Classical Revival, put the old Palace in the shade. And admission was cheap: bear in mind that talkies arrived in Britain in 1929, at the beginning of the slump. Mass unemployment may have contributed a great deal to cinema-addiction. For threepence or fourpence you could not merely buy a dream; you could sit for several hours in warmth and comfort (some cinemas even gave cups of tea in the afternoons).

The reasons for the music-hall's decay go deeper, however. The appearance of a new social pursuit does not necessarily mean the decline of another. It may be an addition, not an alternative. The rise of television, for example, has not ousted the cinema, which in 1955 showed increases in admissions and takings over previous years. What has passed is not a form of entertainment but the social pattern of which it was part—the sort of life which produced music-halls and the social consciousness which was expressed in them.

The music-hall was not an off-shoot of the theatre: it had different roots and a different function. It originated simply as tavern entertainment, the singing of cheerful songs with choruses for everyone to join in. Because public houses were centres of social life, popular entertainment remained in them; the more so since the upper class made “serious” music and the theatre its own amusements. Thus developed the “free-and-easy,” where a chairman gave order to the proceedings but they remained an accompaniment to eating and drinking.

The music-hall as such began when public houses made special accommodation for entertainment—"saloon theatres,” where the audience ate, drank and smoked through it all. In the mid-nineteenth century there were frequent prosecutions for presenting bits of drama and opera, those being outside the licensed province of the saloons; when the restrictions and prosecutions ended, music-halls on the theatre pattern began to be built. Most music-hall buildings date from between 1880 and 1900.

In one sense, the decline of the music-hall could be said to have begun then, with the setting-up of the foot-light barrier and the performers becoming highly-paid artistes. In fact, however, the old traditions persisted. There was still a lot of drinking in music-halls, though it had to be done outside the auditorium (according to accounts, the appearance of a weak turn would provoke a wholesale exodus to the bars); conviviality remained the keynote, and performers used the same material for years, knowing that their audiences expected and wanted to join in long-familiar songs.

The essence of the music-hall was what the modern entertainments industry calls “audience participation.” That was not merely a matter of singing choruses and shouting responses; it involved the whole of the music-hall’s material. The performers had the same working-class background as the audiences (respectable people 60 years ago would rarely let their sons and daughters go on the ordinary stage, let alone the music-halls): Harry Champion was not a man who “did” Cockney songs but a real, raucous, Cockney-speaking Cockney. Their humour was less devised than distilled from everyday life in pub, street and kitchen; so, too, their sentiment.

Neither the humour nor the sentiment goes down today, of course. Both came from a recognition of common (often earthy) joys and misfortunes. Albert Chevalier personating the old man rescued from the workhouse and singing “My Old Dutch ” brought tears to the eyes of strong men—because the separation of husband from wife in the workhouse was all too often the fate of the old. Something similar can be said of almost every music-hall song. They celebrated food and drink, made wry humour out of nagging wives and perfidious husbands, were sentimental over illness, absence and death.

For various reasons, that background faded and when it had happened the music-hall was dead. The State assumed more and more responsibility for children, the ill and the old. Popular newspapers and magazines pushed ideas of genteelness at the newly board-school taught public; the man who had met his doom at Trinity Church kept quiet about it. And beer-drinking diminished, as public houses ceased to be centres of social life; with it, the scenes and episodes which were its consequences.

The decline of the music-hall is part of the disintegration of community life which has taken place in this century. There is nothing communal about the cinema: everybodv comes in and goes out at a different time from everybody else, appreciation is individual, and the performance goes on regardless of the audience's response. A good many people, in fact, scarcely go to see the film at all (at least one cinema in East London before the war had double seats for the amorously inclined). The cinema is entertainment for a society congested with lonely individuals, where life is too split-up and “private" to allow either the communal enjovment or the common recognition of poverty and misfortune from which the music-hall drew its vigour.

Mention is often made of a seeming loss of vitality from everyday life in the last 25 or 30 years. George Orwell, in “The Road to Wigan Pier,” refers to a “Punch” cartoon of the nineteenth century in which a bunch of street-boys are saying: “ 'Ere comes a swell! Let's frighten 'is ’oss!” and comments that nowadays “they would be much likelier to hang round in vague hopes of a tip.” The music-hall of not so many years ago would provide much more food for that contention, when the audiences were uninhibited in their reactions to performers. The writer once heard a character actor break off a Shakespeare declamation to say: “Yes, and if I come up there you won’t be so — clever, my lad!”

The real point, however, is that so much of former communal activity and responsibility for living has now been handed over to authority-bearing specialists. It used to be the poor that helped the poor: now it is the State. Similarly, former objects of common concern, sentiment and indignation are now the subjects of State ministration. “Standing up for one’s rights” nowadays means writing letters of complaint to the right quarters.

It is too easily taken for granted that the days of the music-hall were “bad old days” (except by those who assume the very opposite because “a pound was a pound,” as if everyone really did have five times as much money before 1914). Obviously there is not much to be said for drunkenness, street fights and so on that were common sights, and still less to be said for the workhouse system of those days. What is overlooked is that the breaking-up of community life has created different sorts of problems. A good deal is heard today about the increase in incidence of mental and nervous diseases, but few people ask why it is happening.

One reason, at least, is that the atomizing of social life frustrates one of man’s greatest needs—for recognition and acceptance by his fellows. Twentieth-century civilization is an unsatisfactory world for most of the people in it, largely for that reason. In spite of the mechanization of work and leisure, neither gives much satisfaction to most men and women: the mass frustration and lack of fulfilment implicit in 99 out of a 100 films and novels is itself a condemnation of modem civilization.

The first object of social organization is the satisfaction of people’s needs: that is what first brought men out of caves and trees to form tribes and communities. Our society does not do that. Indeed, it does not aim at doing it: it places sale and profit above all other things, and makes commodities of the means of satisfying needs. The world represented by the music-hall had many undesirable features: because ours is in some ways different, that does not mean it is in many ways better.

Robert Barltrop