Music ♰

Music sheet cover for 'The Ratcatcher's Daughter', 19th century.
Museum no. S.2768-1986, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Music halls can be traced back to the taverns and coffee houses of 18th century London where men met to eat, drink and do business. Performers sang songs whilst the audience ate, drank and joined in the singing. By the 1830s taverns had rooms devoted to musical clubs. They presented Saturday evening Singsongs and Free and Easies. These became so popular that entertainment was put on two or three times a week.

For more middle-class clientele song and supper rooms opened in the 1830s. They served hot food and provided entertainment until the early hours of the morning. Rooms like The Coal Hole, off the Strand in London soon developed a scurrilous reputation. At Evans’ Song and Supper Rooms in Covent Garden singers were paid £1 a week and free drink. The star of Evans' Song was Sam Cowell who was most famous for his song, 'The Rat Catcher’s Daughter'. It was so popular that fellow performer Charles Sloman, who was famous for improvising lines off the top of his head, wrote an extra two verses. Sam Cowell was brought up in America but came to Britain in 1840 where he worked as an actor in Scotland and then London. After a few years of hard graft in the theatre, Cowell began to move into comedy character songs fashionable in the music halls. He was best known for his cockney songs such as 'Villikins and his Dinah' and 'Billy Barlow', but he also burlesqued serious dramas including a version of 'Hamlet' in doggerel. While enjoying considerable popularity in Britain, Sam accepted an invitation to do a tour in America which turned out to be a disaster. Poverty, a harsh winter, and alcohol destroyed his health and he died young, as did many performers of his generation who drank. He was only 45.

The taverns, saloons and supper rooms would have been noisy and difficult places in which to perform. The audiences chatted throughout the acts and could be very unruly often throwing things at the performers – bottles, old boots, even a dead cat. Industrial towns favoured hurling iron rivets. In some halls, bottles carried by the waiters were chained to the trays and the orchestra was protected from the missiles by steel grilles stretched over the pit.

While women were not allowed in the middle-class song and supper rooms, working-class women went to the taverns. In the early days they would often accompany their husbands and bring along their children and even babies. Charles Dickens declared in disgust that the pit had became ‘a virtual nursery’.

The Green Gate Tavern, print, 1854. ©
Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Green Gate Tavern on London's City Road was a sort of Victorian pub theatre. Many public houses put on entertainment of one sort or another, usually involving music and comedy.

This image from 1854 shows a scene from a play called Paul Pry by John Poole. The play's central character was an idle, meddlesome anti-hero. Not many of the audience seem to be at all interested in what is happening on stage. Just opposite the Green Gate, a rival pub was the Eagle, one of the most famous early music halls which was doing a roaring trade by 1854.

Vam.ac.uk,. 'The Story Of Music Hall - Victoria And Albert Museum'. N.p., 2015. Web. 2 Mar. 2015.