In February 1908, the star attraction at Pickardâs Panopticon, a variety theatre on Glasgowâs Trongate, was the Auxetophone, a new gramophone system that played the latest recordings by the opera singer Luisa Tetrazzini and the comedian Harry Lauder. Ten years earlier, in 1898, audiences could have seen Harry Lauder himself on the same stage, not yet the great star he was shortly to become, but a rising Scottish comedian topping the bill. Nor was the hall itself quite the same: in 1898 it was still called the Britannia, the old âBritâ, the longest-established music hall in Glasgow. But the change from featuring a live performer to a recorded reproduction of his voice, in which the novelty of the technology became the main attraction, was highly significant. (For Lauder personally it was arguably the making of his career, as the phenomenal international success of his recordings catapulted him to stardom with audiences as far afield as North America, Australia and South Africa.)
Between the two datesâfrom the 1890s to the 1900sâa change occurred which rendered music hall entertainment available to wider audiences. Part of it indeed involved new technologiesâgramophones and talking machines, bioscopes, kinematographs and primitive sound film systems such as the Gaumont Chronophoneâwhich began to demonstrate the potential for music hall entertainment to reach a new mass audience, mediating what was performed on the stage for an audience outside and beyond the auditorium.
Not that this was appreciated at the time. The new devices were largely regarded as mechanical novelties. A newspaper claim that the Auxetophone was âthe loudest talking machine in existenceâ and could be heard in the open air for a distance of twenty-five miles provoked a letter to the editor from a man living only twenty miles outside Glasgow: he had been disappointed so far, but asked the managers to try again as he wanted to hear Lauderâs âStop Yer Ticklinâ Jockâ. 1 The quality and sophistication of the sound was also an issue. Plans for Glasgow Corporation to use a Pathe Frères disc machine for concerts at the City Hall claimed that it âsends forth the human voice or orchestral piece as distinctly as the original deliveryâ, and was so powerful as to be easily heard in a hall four times the size of any in the city. 2 But overloud delivery in the wrong acoustic could be disastrous; equally so live: a group of performers from the Britannia giving a music hall concert in Dumbarton were reminded to âaccommodate their voice to the size of the roomâ and that they were ânot on the top of Ben Lomondâ. 3
However, the impact of these technologies was not the sole agent of the change but symptomatic of something wider. What had happened to music hall was a process of commodification, in which an entertainment that had its roots in older popular forms became in time the focus of a modern entertainment industry. At its height in 1914 the number of music halls in Glasgow had risen to eighteen, with six theatres, from respectively five and three in 1868. 4
As the product of the urbanisation of British culture in the early nineteenth century, music hall was arguably a perfect expression of the society that produced it, not only in developing as an industry along capitalist lines, but in embodying what was the determining social and cultural trend of modern urban societyâcosmopolitanism. The term itself carries a raft of associations and meanings: in the broad sense cosmopolitanism involves openness to a wider range of influences and possibilities. On one level it connotes modernityâthe latest fashions and styles, and through them innovation and new technologies. But more profoundly it relates to urban experienceâto people coming together in new environments and circumstances of urban living. Judith Walkowitz, the author of a model study of cosmopolitan London, who defines cosmopolitanism as both an intellectual programme and a social and cultural experience, believes that âin the late-Victorian period it gained new currency as a description of urban spaces and their cultural and social milieuxâ. 5
If part of cosmopolitanism then is about experience of the city, which was central to music hall, it also relates to historiansâ views of the forces at work in shaping the landscape and relationships of Victorian cities. Simon Gunn, who has explored the development of industrial centres such as Manchester and Birmingham, has written that âthe nineteenth-century city was both progenitor and locus of the experience of modernityâ, and that âurban modernity [thus] implied simultaneously the remaking of the city and the ways it was experienced, handled and managedâ. 6 As a topical entertainment, music hall was all about city life and whatever was current; its songs and sketches providing a stream of content satirising and lampooning everything from well-known political personalities and sporting figures to contemporary styles and fashions, gender relations, and the scandals and causes cĂŠlèbres of the day. But beyond this, music hall and its performances offered an insidersâ perspective on the city based on collective experience; as Patrick Joyce expresses it:
This sense of music hall embodying the lived, tactile experience of town life, of where to go and what to doâwhat Peter Bailey calls âknowingnessâ and Joyce refers to as âtownologyâ (âand what Maurice Chevalier would have called savoir faire)âmakes it a key proponent of cosmopolitanism and an important resource for studying urban entertainment culture and the processes by which it developed. But this street-wise cosmopolitanism of knowingness and savvy, rooted in the city, as well as accessing modernity also drew on older cultural inheritances and traditionsâtraditions rooted in pre-industrial urban life. At what point did these older traditions and new influences intersect, and to what extent did music hall in Glasgow, Scotlandâs great industrial centre, represent the meeting of the rich Scottish popular theatre tradition with new influences from south of the border in England and from dynamic cultural markets such as America?The songs themselves frequently addressed urban experience, providing a sort of commentary on city life, but also a kind of âconduct bookâ for the poor in terms of managing the everyday problems of city living. 7
In this respect, another key aspect of cosmopolitanism was receptiveness to new cultural influences from outside, which offered what Richard Sennett has termed âthe experience of diversity in the city as opposed to a relatively confined localismâ. 8 This cultural cosmopolitanism was evident in a general sense in wider British fashion and theatrical and popular cultureâfor example in new musical and dance styles such as minstrel shows, plantation songs, the cancan, cakewalk, ragtime and honky tonk and jazz idioms. But it also had a particular immediacy in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Glasgow, where the presence of communities of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Russian and eastern European immigrants brought economic competition for jobs and housing and presented challenges to social cohesion and the processes of integration in the cityâs rapidly developing society. Given these tensions, what role did stage representation of these communities and their ethnic characteristics in the cityâs music halls play, positive or otherwise, in forming perceptions of, and attitudes towards, these groups? And in the reflexive aspects of such cosmopolitanism, how did such ethnic stage representations contribute to links with communities in the Irish and Scottish diaspora overseas?
In exploring these issues this book centres on the career of a particular Glasgow music hallâthe Britannia in the cityâs Trongate, later known from 1906 as the Panopticon, which opened in Christmas 1859 and, except for several brief interruptions, remained in more or less continuous operation until its final closure in 1938. Although in British theatre history the name Britannia is usually synonymous with the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, a tumultuous 4000 seat working-class venue memorably described by Dickens, Glasgowâs Britanniaâa music hall rather than a theatreâwas, in the context of that cityâs entertainment development, and for the generations who passed through its doors, no less iconic. In fact the Glasgow Britanniaâs role as a city landmark extended over several distinct phases of familiarity. Referred to as the âold Britâ as early as the 1880s, its twentieth-century redesignation as the quasi-scientific Panopticon (âall-seeingâ or âsee allâ) was quickly reclaimed to the vernacular by local working-class audiences as the âPots and Pansâ, or just âthe Potsâ. 9 The hall survives today, on the upper floors of an elegant Victorian building, and is one of the oldest remaining music halls in Britain.
Although the Hoxton Britannia has been the subject of academic study, notably in Clive Barkerâs pioneering research on the social composition and theatre-going habits of London audiences, 10 recent work in popular theatre has increasingly stressed the extent of regional and local variations. Dagmar Kift has written that in terms of culture and behaviour, âLondon [âŚ] was in no way representative of the whole sceneâ, just as it could be argued that âthere was no clear relationship between the authorities and the music hall either at a national or local level, but rather a multiplicity of relationships depending on the specific social and political structure of each localityâ. 11
This book will therefore use the example of the Britannia music hall, and later the Panopticon, as both a case study and as a prism through which to explore the development of popular urban entertainments in Glasgow between the 1850s and 1930s. It will look beyond the building to its audiences and performers, to gain as wide an insight as possible into the social milieu of music hall and its functioning. The aim will be twofold: to provide a narrative of the hallâs development as a commercial entertainment business, which evolved in ways which reflected the changing patterns of entertainments in the city; and, secondly, to explore the extent to which the Britannia came to reflect, through its stars, songs and performing material, as well as its modes of operation, and representations of ethnic groups, the life and culture of the city and the audiences it served. So the Britannia will be interrogated as both an example of the development of a specific music hall business, one which can be examined in the context of a distinct Scottish music hall culture and industry, and as a window on the popular culture of its times.
The purpose is to explore music hall not in isolation but in the broader context of the expanding city-centre market with which it interacted and competed. Music hall was at the forefront of this fast-emerging urban entertainment scene, which, as opposition to leisure relaxed in the second half of the nineteenth century, rapidly developed into a commercial entertainment sector based on popular theatre and fairground-based rides and shows. I aim to show how Britannia managers like Brand and Rossborough paved the way for the new industry and, by adopting astute strategies to win the trust of civic authorities, made the case for commercial entertainments as an accepted part of the fabric of city life. This was no small task; proof of the difficulty of earning and retaining the support of licensing bodies, even in our own infinitely more permissive society, was supplied by the recent demise of The Arches, an award-winning Glasgow arts venue forced to close in 2015 when, as the result of complex circumstances, it lost the confidence of the police and licencing authorities, despite having previously enjoyed good relations with both and protestations of support from the Scottish government and Creative Scotland.
A further object is to provide a much needed exploration of the cultural cosmopolitanism that music hall provided through links between its audiences and performances and a range of different communities and constituencies; its diasporic links to other Irish immigrant centres in the UK, as well as to Ireland and to communities in North America, which saw a constant circulation of songs and performers between the old and new worlds; the connection between turn-of-the-twentieth-century stage representations of Jewish identity and the Jewish community in Glasgow with the influence of North American centres like New York; and the association of new technologies and innovations in popular entertainments with America, a fascination fuelled by American films, music and popular culture which saw American styles constantly referenced and imitated.
In framing this approach to the Britannia, I have been influenced by two key themes: the debate over the role of popular culture in music hall generally; and the issues of representation of Scottish identity and culture which bisect it when dealing with the issue ...