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The showman, George Belmont, was far from an ordinary working…
The Rudge sisters, professionally known as Letty Lind, Millie Hylton,…
George Gorin was stabbed to death outside the Canterbury on…
In 1907, the burghers of Coventry commemorated the famous ride…
Satire is a hazardous business. In 1948, the Western Brothers…
As Eugene Stratton carved a career as a black-faced solo…
Although he starred in two landmark BBC series, Band Waggon…
Norman Long, who sang inoffensively comic songs to his own…
When Clive Dunn died two years ago, not even his…
Walter Sickert painted twelve pictures of music hall entertainers. His…
The first performers on the bill for the first Royal…
Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-Wow
Francis, Day and Hunter allowed an extraordinary error to appear…
For much of the twentieth century, the Henderson family was…
Paul Cinquevalli was a highly successful music hall performer of…
Tom Leamore had a keen sense of humour that could…
Terry’s Juveniles
Gus Elen once harboured a phobia about travelling over deep…
Many music hall enthusiasts will name Peggy Pryde as the…
Accounts of the careers of the songwriter, Frank Leo, and…
Although he sang more than 150 songs during the course…
The variety and dance band worlds frequently overlapped. Showmen running…
Hetty King was a remarkable performer, an unparalleled theatrical phenomenon.…
In a rare interview in 1952, Max Miller said: My…
The Lancashire comedian, George Bass, was praised by The Times…
From 1926 to 1942, Clapham and Dwyer were a highly…
Of all the great stars of music hall, none was…
Because of the length of the bill at the first…
The extent of the archive of the much-loved double act,…
One question we are always being asked is: What was…
The words and haunting melody of the chorus of Daisy…
Probably, one of the main reasons for the dislike by…
Little Tich, who was four feet six [137 cms], hated…
Traditional seaside entertainment has gone forever. No longer at the…
Maurice Winnick ran a highly successful 1930s dance band, but,…
George Elliott is among the best remembered of all music…
When Lily Morris died in 1952, The Times reported that…
She was a dear little dicky bird. “Chip, chip, chip”,…
Born in New York in 1900, Brown started his career…
The repertoire of G.H. Macdermott was more political than that…
Like the White Rabbit created by Lewis Carroll, the diminutive…
Back Your Fancy
The world of variety produced some tremendously talented entertainers, one…
Harry Rickards was the prime mover of the Tivoli Theatre…
In the annals of the variety theatre, the most famous…
Music hall songwriters were harsh in their treatment of the…
Hard working, hard drinking, Charles Godfrey was one of music…
The supreme eccentric dance act of the 1930s, 1940s and…
Mrs Laura Ormiston Chant is known above all else for…
Almost everyone has heard of Harry Clifton. They know Pretty…
Naomi Jacob wrote more than 70 books, including the first…
Harry Ford was without question a star of some magnitude…
Sam Cowell, one of the first stars of what was…
In the dying days of the reign of Queen Victoria,…
Daisy Bell is the best known song of music hall.…
In 1980, a curious paragraph appeared in The Stage. It…
Going to the theatre had become the top leisure time…
There were no female ventriloquists in variety. At least, there…
During a career lasting 23 years, George Leybourne had a…
Fred Coyne was a minor music hall singer about whom…
There is a dark side of popular music today. In…
Will Evans was not just a pioneering silent film comedian,…
There is little romance attached to the free-and-easy. Unlike the…
Jimmy Wheeler, the raucous Cockney comedian, bounded confidently out before…
Herbert Campbell was a colossus of music hall, the head…
Although Fred Karno’s mythical ragtime army never did conquer Berlin…