Music hall and musical inspiration

Music hall and other old songs can provide musical clues in historical fiction — clues which carry even deeper meaning than the remembered snatches of tunes themselves do. Sarah Rayne, who took inspiration from such songs for her latest book, Chalice of Darkness, explains how it works.

Old songs and fragments of faded music can be a gift to an author. Rather than sprinkling a crime scene with conveniently dropped, helpfully initialled, handkerchiefs, partially burned letters or hidden keys to secret passageways, a song from years gone by can allow a discerning or inquisitive character to slip back into the past.

Songs can even contain clues about long-ago plans for an assassination – or the truth about a government scandal – or plots to unseat reigning monarchs and install pretenders. Or robberies and forgeries and deceptions…

And, as most authors know, if a suitable song doesn’t exist, you can simply write one of your own – which can be great fun anyway.

The Victorian and Edwardian music halls provide rich hunting ground for old songs with unexpected meanings and messages.

Places such as The Canterbury in Lambeth, Wilton’s in Tower Hamlets, Collins’ in Islington, the Cider Cellars, the Middlesex in Drury Lane (the famous ‘Old Mo’), and many more, all resonated with music and songs.

So much of that music and those songs contained astonishing comments and opinions, and sometimes sly messages. And if propaganda was intended in any of them, (which often it was, of course), it was usually laced with lively, sometimes-bawdy humour, and with domestic settings that were familiar to the audiences.

When the former costermonger and barrow-boy, Gus Elen – known to his many followers as the ‘coster comedian’ – belted out the bitter humour of his song about overcrowding, his audiences delightedly shouted the chorus with him:

“Oh, it really is a very pretty garden
And Chingford to the Eastward could be seen.
With a ladder and some glasses
You could see to ‘Ackney Marshes
If it wasn’t for the ‘ouses in between.”

They sympathised, too, when, in the 1890s, Albert Chevalier sang My Old Dutch. Most people today probably know the famous line: ‘We’ve been together now for forty years/And it don’t seem a day too much’.

But perhaps not too many people know the song was written as a lament. That it’s the husband’s farewell to his wife as they trudge up the hill to the workhouse, knowing that, once there, they’ll be separated for the first time in all their 40 years.

That’s deeply moving, but it’s something Victorian and Edwardian audiences would have identified with. They knew all about the workhouse – that bleak fate that was the terror of so many.

They knew, as well, that when Marie Lloyd sang cheerfully about following the van, she was singing about eviction, about not being able to pay the rent, about having to move to another house after dark to escape bailiffs, tally men, the shame… They could sympathise with the singer who followed the van, then was unable to find her way home because she had called at the pub for a drink or two…

“My old man said, ‘Follow the van – don’t dilly dally on the way.
Off went the van, with the home packed in it,
I walked behind with me old cock linnet.
But I dillied and dallied, dallied and dillied,
Lost me way and don’t know where to roam.
For I stopped off on the way to have the old half quartern
Now I can’t find my way home.”

There were much darker songs, though – songs sometimes called execution ballads. One of the most famous was probably the lugubrious Ballad of Sam Hall – the lament of the condemned, unrepentant man waiting to be hanged, with each verse ending in an angry shout of “Damn your eyes”.

The song was regularly performed in the Cider Cellars in Maiden Lane. Punch reported that audiences were often convinced that the singer was actually bound for Tyburn, adding that the performances were “popular not only among tavern haunters and frequenters of the night houses, but also with the gentry and aristocracy, who do vote it a thing to be heard, although a blackguard…”

Reading that, it’s impossible not to recall the grisly practice of attending public hangings, which to many people represented a day out – a chance to meet up with old friends and make new ones. You’d take a few sandwiches and a bottle of beer to pass the time until the condemned man was brought out. In France, of course, you might even take along your knitting, as well…

There was, though, the reverse side of the coin, and it was a much brighter side. There was the Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo and who walked along the Bois de Boulogne with an independent air – which would have been cheering to hear if you were contemplating visiting the pawnshop or currently engaged in dodging the rent man.

Because if Mr Charles Coburn could do that, then could not others? And when Mr Coburn issued his genial invitation to Come Where the Booze is Cheaper, a delighted shout of assent would surely have gone up.

And could there be better dreams for young men than of one day dressing like Burlington Bertie, or copying George Leybourne – ‘Champagne Charlie’ himself – who ‘only drank champagne’? Or of sinking the wine recommended by Leybourne’s rival, ‘The Great Vance’, who sang about Cool Burgundy Ben and Cliquot, Cliquot.

The girls would have been given dreams too – dreams of The Only Boy in the World, and of riding with him On a Bicycle Made for Two.

And if they were hesitant about allowing a young man’s advances, they had only to listen to the inimitable Marie Lloyd’s maxim:

“I always hold with having it if you fancy it
If you fancy it, that’s understood,
And suppose it makes you fat
I don’t worry over that,
For a little of what you fancy does you good.”

Most actors will declare that all theatres have ghosts, starting with Drury Lane’s famous ‘Man in Grey’ and its capering Regency comedian, Joe Grimaldi, all the way down to the humbler levels of spectral chars eternally trying to scrub out fake blood after Macbeth’s death.

There were – and probably still are – other forms of spooks, too. A snatch of song has drifted down from some unnamed source, in which its composer affectionately celebrates the tradition of the ghost ‘walking’ each week – theatrical slang for payment of wages:

“On Friday nights the ghost walks
Rattling its chains to itself;
For that’s the night the ghost hands out the pelf.
On Friday night the ghost walks
Always as white as a sheet.
Cheerless as sin, so we buy it some gin,
And some bedsocks for its feet.”

The music hall era is still just about tangible. Photographs exist, and there are even scratchy old recordings providing the glimmer of an insight into how people spoke and sang in those days – of how words were differently pronounced.

Hearing those early recordings is like reaching out a hand and just touching the fingertips of the vibrant colourful characters who enlivened those bygone stages. Long may their voices echo down the years – and, metaphorically, across the pages.

Chalice of Darkness by Sarah Rayne was published on 7 February, 2023. It’s the first of her Theatre of Thieves series.

Sarah is the author of a number of pyschological suspense novels, together with six Phineas Fox music-based mysteries, and six haunted house mysteries. She lives in Staffordshire.

Music hall and musical inspiration

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