Alec Hurley
For years his only epitaph was as ‘Mr Marie Lloyd’, and the second Mr Marie Lloyd at that. But a recent ceremony at Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park aimed to redress the balance – and give Alec Hurley some of the recognition he deserves.
On Sunday 25 January, the British Music Hall Society and the Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery unveiled the newly restored grave of Alec Hurley (and several of his family). Proceedings were led by Roy Hudd OBE, president of the Society.
Alec (sometimes Alex) Hurley was a music hall coster-singer, born on 24 March 1871. The coster singers and comedians were a popular genre in the late 19th century, with stars such as Albert Chevalier and Gus Elen building lively acts on Cockney barrow-boy characters. In the mid-1880s, Alec, a merchant seaman’s son from the East End, had given up his job as a tea-packer and taken to the stage. First with his brother, and increasingly on his own, he worked the East End stages, playing ‘smokers’ and then moving into the West End theatres and then around the country.
Long before he adopted the coster character, Alec was getting good notices for his fine tenor voice, and recordings of Hurley survive to this day. Every artist needed signature songs, and Alec’s included The Strongest Man on Earth and You Must Be Drunk.
By 1891, Hurley was just 20, but already an established figure on the music hall circuit. He began to develop a coster routine, and started using songs that fitted the character – Pretty Polly, The Lambeth Walk and, most successful of all at the time, I Ain’t A-going to Tell. The Salvation Army, staunch opponents of the music halls, made a habit of adapting and neutering the popular songs of the theatres, and Alec’s song became I Ain’t A-going to Tell.
His meeting with music hall’s biggest star, Marie Lloyd, initiated a turbulent period in his life. The play Mr Marie Lloyd tells a story that Nellie Power, reigning queen of the halls around the turn of the century, wanted to see Marie Lloyd at work. Since it was unheard of for her to go to a theatre alone, she gave Alec Hurley the money to take her there. This was the first time that Alec had seen Marie.
They met and married … eventually. Marie was already wed to Percy Courtenay, so the new couple had to live together until her divorce came through. They were a stage duo too. In 1901, the pair went to Australia where they appeared together with huge success. Courtenay finally divorced Marie in 1905, and she married Alec in 1906.
The pair were to have a dramatic impact on the London stage far beyond their performances. Minor acts were finding themselves increasingly squeezed by theatre managers, with a change in contracts demanding they give extra performances for no extra pay. They decided to strike, and Marie and Alec offered their Hampstead home for the first meeting of the strike committee. The pair contributed to the strike fund and the managers eventually caved in. In 1912, the London theatre establishment was to get its revenge when the biggest name on the British stage was excluded from the inaugural Royal Variety Performance.
But by 1912 the marriage was over. In 1910, Marie’s increasing drinking and infidelities became too much for Hurley. She had met a young Irish jockey called Bernard Dillon, who had won the Derby on a horse called Lemburg. He was 22 and Marie was 40; she moved in with him, leaving Alec to tour alone.
If alone, Hurley wasn’t a sad figure. Popular both on and off stage, he continued to tour Australia, South Africa and the US, with huge success. Now living at Jack Straw’s Castle in Hampstead, the athletic Alec listed his pastimes as ‘sculling, ball punching and long walks’ and would rise early to run on Hampstead Heath. Buchanan Taylor described Hurley as ‘One of nature’s gentlemen … a poor born Cockney who had improved himself.’ George Mozart wrote that ‘in spite of little education, he was most intelligent and observant’.
But it was a life cut cruelly short. Appearing in Glasgow on Friday 28 November 1913, Alec became sick after the second house. He returned to London, was diagnosed with pleurisy and pneumonia, and died just a week later, on 6 December. He was aged just 42.
July 6th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Hi, could you tell me wheather Alec Hurley and Marie Lloyd had any children please.
Thank you very much, yours Sincerely Ms Kowalewicz