It was sometimes said of author John Major, who succeeded Margaret Thatcher as British prime minister in 1990, that he ran away from the circus to become an accountant. In fact, although Major’s father, Tom, had some circus skills, he and his wife, Kitty, worked principally in music hall. Major, who in his retirement has already published a book on the early days of the archetypal English game of cricket, has now written this affectionate history of another British institution, music hall, inspired by the career of his father, who died when John was nineteen. His mother was not Kitty, who was killed in a tragic stage accident, but Gwen, also a performer and friend of the couple, whom Tom subsequently married. John was born when his father was sixty-four and no longer treading the boards. He never saw his parents on stage, but heard their stories and met many of their friends and survivors from their music hall days, which they recalled with nostalgic pleasure.

Music hall had its origins in the song and supper rooms of early nineteenth-century London, which offered late-night food and drink with musical entertainment, patronised by gentlemen looking for a good time with more than a hint of bohemian licence. The music might range from comic songs and ballads to madrigals and operatic arias. Women were not admitted as either performers or audience members until the 1860s. It was only in the second half of the century that music hall began to take its distinctive form, still associated with alcohol but less so with food, and appealing to a much more popular, working-class audience, a poor relation, it seemed, of the so-called ‘legitimate’ theatre or drama.

For performers, it was, in Major’s words, ‘a tough and ruthless profession’. In the early days, they would often perform at several venues in the one night in order to make a living. As music hall developed across the country, it also became a peripatetic profession, as artists moved from one engagement to another at their own expense. Given the association of music hall with alcohol, it is not surprising that they often sought consolation in booze. Many died young; even someone as successful as Marie Lloyd seemed to age prematurely and died at the age of fifty-two.

Tom and Kitty Major in a promotional photograph, c.1915–16

Music hall did not run to spectacle and special effects. It depended upon engaging the audience with song and dance interspersed with monologues and sketches. It could encompass sentimental tear jerkers and earthy comedy, laced with double entendres. Marie Lloyd was particularly famous for her skill in milking these with charming knowingness. One story, not mentioned by Major, has her receiving some complaints about a song with the verse beginning, ‘She sits among the cabbages and peas’. She agreed to change the line, so at the next performance regaled an appreciative audience with ‘She sits among the cabbages and leeks’. It was, of course, this sense of contact across the footlights, often accentuated by a chairman moderating proceedings, which was the essence of music hall. In the West End, the audience remained at a respectful distance from what was happening on the stage: in the music hall in less salubrious parts of the city, the audience felt they were participating in the entertainment.

Major points out, with some satisfaction, that music hall audiences were often conservative. It is true that music hall was not above invoking jingoism, most famously in its popular use of G.H. MacDermott’s song ‘We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do’ at the time of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78. By the same token, Herbert Campbell in 1878 made a hit with a parody, ‘I don’t want to fight, I’ll be slaughtered if I do.’ Insofar as music hall entertainers set out to unify an audience, there was often likely to be an appeal to the lowest common denominator. This was certainly true of World War I, when popular patriotism was de rigueur. On the other hand, Major shows some sympathy for the music hall artists who went on strike in 1907 for better terms of employment.

Although this was a time remembered for some of music hall’s most famous stars – apart from Marie Lloyd, there was Vesta Tilley, Dan Leno, Little Tich (Harry Relph), and Harry Lauder – it also saw the beginning of its decline, challenged by the rise of the musical, pantomime, and revue, all of which pandered to the audience’s increasing appetite for spectacle. Music hall stars were lured into the annual pantomimes, where they could at least exploit their improvisatory skills. And much of music hall began to adapt itself to the form of variety, which might include leggy choruses and tableaux vivants, with lavish sets and stationary models either exotically costumed or virtually nude.

By the early twentieth century, the vitality and charm of music hall, with its sense of boisterous communion between performers and audience, were beginning to win some admirers among writers and artists. Walter Sickert was drawn to it as a subject for his darkly impressionistic paintings, while writers such as Rudyard Kipling, J.B. Priestley, Max Beerbohm, and T.S. Eliot sang its praises. Eliot was enthralled by Marie Lloyd: he saw her as having the ability to ‘express the soul of the people’.

Major includes only a slim chapter about Tom and Kitty, and there is a certain starchy reticence about his family and its relationships. Although his admiration for music hall performers is evident, the prose is workmanlike rather than eloquent. One might not expect endnotes in a book such as this, but some gesture towards a bibliography would have been appreciated by many readers. However, My Old Man is splendidly illustrated.