Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (10 page)

By the late 1840s, when John Wilton pitched up in the neighbourhood to take up ownership of the Prince of Denmark pub on Grace’s Alley, the whole area had undergone something of a sea-change. The development of the London and St Katharine Docks, just a mile or so south, brought an influx of new arrivals and the area soon became infamous as one of London’s most disreputable. Nicknamed ‘Sailortown’ by the locals, it swarmed with rough naval types who, having sometimes spent years at sea, were eager to make the most of their shore leave and were on the lookout for a suitable watering hole to kick off the night’s adventures.

Many of them would have beaten a path to Wilton’s pub on Grace’s Alley, which sat snugly in the centre of a terrace of Georgian houses. It was out of this drinking den that one of the grandest music halls in London grew, a place which has miraculously survived more or less intact, and which still stages entertainment today, just as it has done, on and off, for more than 150 years.

Walking down the Alley, it’s possible to almost miss the entrance to Wilton’s altogether. The front of the building gives very little clue as to what’s going on behind the modest facade, but it’s a very different story once you push through the oxidised red front door and step inside to explore what really is one of London entertainment’s hidden gems.

On closing the door behind you, you find yourself in a paved lobby with a staircase heading upwards and doorways leading off to rooms on the right and left. The walls are mostly unplastered - unlike most of Wilton’s original clientele - and the exposed brickwork gives the place the look of a large Victorian house ‘affording an excellent refurbishment opportunity’, in modern estate-agent speak. Take a turn to the right and there’s the bar. Always a magical discovery.

Like many of the best showbiz tales, the story of Wilton’s Music Hall really begins in the bar. When John Wilton was the boss, it was known as the Mahogany Bar because it was the first place in London to have fittings and counters made of, you guessed it, mahogany. It was considered quite swanky for its time and was obviously one of the selling points that brought people here in the first place. I can imagine later Victorians getting all steamed up about stained glass and marble pub interiors in the same way that we might get excited by a sleek, new, modernist bar with intimate, minimalist, leather-upholstered booths and futuristic lighting, but I find it hard to imagine a time when people thought a place was cool because of the type of wood that was used to make the fittings. I doubt most people would even know one specimen of wood from another these days, but a century and a half ago it was obviously a big deal.

So did the latest timber to hit town dictate where people chose to spend their evenings? ‘Cor, mate, have you seen that new plywood place up at the docks, yeah lovely, it’s got a very light atmosphere. The pine bar, nah mate, that’s all finished, too many splinters. You want to get up to that Prince of Denmark, it’s all teak! It’s a bit dark, but beautifully smooth.’ Makes you wonder how they would’ve reacted to linoleum and Formica.

You can still buy a drink in the Mahogany Bar today before taking your seat for the show, although the room has changed a lot since the old days. The only trace of its original ritzy past is to be found on the ceiling where a few pieces of elaborate plaster moulding cling on tenaciously. A fitting symbol of the precarious nature of the business we call show.

John Wilton began staging entertainment in the Mahogany Bar in 1850 and before long his singing and comedy evenings became a huge success. When you have a big hit on your hands you need to act on it quickly before you become yesterday’s papers, so, to accommodate more punters, Wilton knocked through the back wall and extended the bar back towards Cable Street, which ran parallel with Grace’s Alley. A short while later he did the same thing again, and again, until he could extend no further.

Business was booming, and Wilton knew a good opportunity when he saw one. He wanted to follow Morton’s lead and turn his pub into a fully fledged music hall. It was a great location for a bigger venue, with plenty of passing trade, but he didn’t have the free space to build it within the narrow confines of this terraced street. After much head-scratching he came up with a grand design: John Boy Wilton hit on the idea of buying several of the adjoining terrace properties (complete with sitting tenants) in order to slap up a huge great music hall across their collective back yards.

What makes Wilton’s such an astonishing time capsule is the fact that if you call in today to have a nose around, you can still see the evidence of how the great man realised his vision. Stepping out of the bar, you head back across the entrance lobby and into the rooms on the other side. These were once ground-floor shops run by Wilton’s neighbours and later his tenants. They remained operational even after he began to knock the terraces around. Records show that back in the 1850s a bootmaker plied his trade in one of them, a baker in another. I don’t know if Wilton bled them dry with the rent he charged but, if not, the proprietor of the other shop - an importer of leeches - could have done the job for him.

Upstairs there’s even more evidence of how he must have re-jigged the buildings in order to realise his glittering vision. The upper floors are labyrinthine and somewhat disconcerting, not least because, at first sight, the windows which once gave a view out on to the back gardens appear to have been painted black. Closer up, I realise this was an optical illusion - a result of Wilton’s eagerness not to waste an inch of space when he built the hall across the back yards of the terrace. The blank, black space seen from the back windows is actually the side wall of the hall itself and, because the window frames have lost their glass, you can actually reach out your hand and touch it.

Deprived of access to their rear yards, the only route out of the building for the tenants who rented these rooms above the ground-floor shops was through the front door of the bar. The cumulative comings and goings of shopkeepers, tenants and customers must have been something to behold.

But that’s enough about the rest of the building. Top of the bill at Wilton’s is the music hall itself, which you enter through a doorway no bigger than an average-sized front door in the downstairs lobby. The minute you walk into the auditorium itself, prepare for your socks to be blown off - not a risk that future generations entering the ExCeL arena in Docklands are going to have to guard against, I suspect. The place needs a fair bit of TLC, and some serious structural work to boot, but to see it in its faded grandeur somehow makes it all the more special and gives you a real and delightfully eerie feel of what it was like in its heyday. I’m not going to bamboozle you with technical data relating to the interior such as the balcony’s ‘bombe carton Pierre front, supported on unusual helical-twist cast-iron columns’ or its ‘elliptical vaulted ceiling with ornamental fretted ribs’ because that would make it sound like I knew what I was talking about. Seeing is believing in my book, and if you haven’t seen Wilton’s yet, then you’d better have a word with yourself and resolve to pay it a visit.

Of course a music hall is much more than bricks, mortar and some impressive plasterwork. It’s a place to perform. So it was a great pleasure to take a turn around the place in the company of the president of the Music Hall Society and fabulous entertainer, the irrepressibly iridescent, indefatigable, irresistible, individual and indispensable Mr Roy Hudd, who reckoned playing Wilton’s would’ve been rather like performing in the working men’s clubs up north during the 70s (i.e. tough).

The majority of the audience would’ve been made up of sailors who, back on dry land after months at sea, turned up for the show with pockets full of money ready to spend on birds, booze and banter. Rumour has it, according to the venerable Mr Hudd, that there was once a trap door beneath a bench at the back of the hall from which some ‘heavy’ would intermittently pull a lever, sending a group of well-oiled jolly jack tars into the cellar, where they would be relieved of their chattels, via the cosh, and the next thing they knew upon waking was that they were back aboard ship.

Those who managed to avoid a coshing had the chance to see stars of a different kind because many of the brightest lights of early music hall would have played Wilton’s - such legendary names as Sam Cowell, the comic vocalist who’s considered to be one of the country’s first singer-songwriters. As far as I know, Cowell was no relation to he of the high-hitched trousers and centre parting, although by all accounts he very much had the ‘X’ factor back in his day and was renowned for folksy ballads such as the perennial crowd-pleaser ‘The Ratcatcher’s Daughter’.

Another man who graced the stage at Wilton’s on many occasions was ‘the idol of the barmaids’ himself, George Leybourne, the nattily dressed swell also known as ‘Champagne Charlie’, because of the song that made him famous:

Leybourne was supposedly in the pocket of Moët et Chandon who paid him to promote their champagne, although I’m not certain if this was on a ‘drink-as-much-as-you-like’ basis. I’d have quite fancied the job myself if this was the deal, though I doubt whether Moët would have been able to afford me! Having said that, apparently champagne was more of a working man’s drink back then, and was even available on draught at music halls. Can you imagine the devastation? ‘I’m just off for a pint at the local, dear. See you in three days!’

Wilton’s also became home to a new breed of singing performers from the 1860s to the 1880s, like Harry Clifton who became famous for his ‘motto’ songs, offering advice to audiences whose lives had altered dramatically through industrialisation and urbanisation. Roy Hudd told me that Clifton was paid by factory owners to come up with songs that would reconcile workers in the audience to their lot and at the same time induce them to put in maximum effort at the workplace. Now there’s a cue for a verse of one of Clifton’s finest!

Talking to Roy while soaking up the wonderful atmosphere of this unique survivor makes me reflect on Madness songs and connections with the repertoire of the music hall. Although I am not one to blow our own 76 trombones like the Victorian showmen, we’ve always had an interest in singing about the woes of the common man and have never been averse to a spot of ribaldry or entering into the vernacular, which is all part and parcel of the songs of the music hall. And what a parcel it is. In his great book,
London: A Literary Companion
, Peter Vansittart describes what he sees as being the stuff of music-hall songwriting:

Well, that sounds just about the perfect description of all the things I look for in a well-constructed pop song.

It’s not only us who’ve been influenced by that tradition. Though the music halls may have disappeared, the ‘lowbrow’ street music which they nurtured has adapted and survived, and what a lively little beggar it turned out to be. In my opinion, some of the more bawdy current crop of young artists would have no problem plying their trade in the music halls.

John Wilton died in 1880, at the age of 60, by which time the hall was under new management, having been rebuilt following a serious fire three years earlier. But its days as an entertainment venue were numbered. By now, many of the smaller halls were struggling to survive. They had become infamous for the rowdy, drunken behaviour of audiences and the bawdy songs and ‘provocative dancing’ they had come to enjoy. That all sounds bloody marvellous to me, but it obviously didn’t go down too well with the temperance movement, whose path I keep crossing as I wander through stories of disappearing Victorian London and who blamed society’s ills on excessive alcohol consumption.

They brought pressure to bear on the authorities to clean up the halls and new health and safety laws were passed which squeezed out the smaller venues, whose proprietors couldn’t afford to comply with them. Many simply returned to being pubs, others were demolished. Those that decided to soldier on soon found themselves under threat from fresh competitors as new-style ‘deluxe’ music halls or ‘variety’ theatres started going up in the 1880s, mainly in the West End to begin with, such as the Tivoli in the Strand and the London Pavilion on Piccadilly Circus.

Wilton’s finally went dark in the late 1880s. But miraculously, unlike all the other original London music halls bar Hoxton, it survived against all the odds. There were several reasons why it managed to dodge the wrecking ball. As with Hoxton Hall, the first is to do with having a bit of help from above. In 1888, the hall became a Methodist mission and remained so until 1956. Apparently, during the first dock strike of 1889, 2,000 meals a day were served at the hall to striking dockers - that’s an awful lot of covers. The fact that the hall was fulfilling an important role in what was now an extremely run-down and impoverished area of the East End probably saved it from demolition. It was also lucky to survive the Blitz, somehow managing to keep its head down when many other buildings in the district were losing theirs. After Wilton’s days as a mission came to an end in 1956, it became a rag warehouse and was earmarked for slum clearance, but it received an eleventh hour reprieve in 1964, thanks to a campaign led by the former Poet Laureate and all-round good egg John Betjeman.