Bert Ambrose
Benjamin Baruch Ambrose entered the world on 15 September 1896, the son of an East End Jewish wool merchant. His parents, like many thousands of Jews before them, had fled to London from the persecution and pogroms of Eastern Europe. And like many thousands of others, they believed in the twin pillars of hard work and family.
The young Benjamin, with his at least slightly Anglicised name, was luckier than many. As a merchant, his middle class father was better placed than the multitude of unskilled and semi-skilled workers who daily fought for a living in the sweatshops of Whitechapel. Benjamin, or Bert, as he was now calling himself, had no intention of going into the family firm though. Music was everywhere in the East End Jewish community of the early 20th century - in the home, on the street in the theatres and music halls - and the young Bert showed an early flair for the violin.
But playing the violin on street corners and in East End music halls wouldn’t be enough for the ambitious young Ambrose. America was where the glamour and the money was. New York in the days before World War I was a far more bustling and vibrant place than London, as immigrants poured in from all over the globe. The restaurants and supper clubs of the city were paying good money and musicians arrived from all over Europe, melding their traditional folk strains with music from the classics and the music hall, and the Blues music which Black musicians were bringing from the south. From this rich mix would emerge Jazz, while the new supper bands would serve up ‘whiter’ versions to enterain the diners and quaffers of cocktails.
At 15, Ambrose (the Bert was soon discarded) left for New York with his aunt, and soon landed his first professional job on violin, playing for Emil Coleman at Reisenweber’s restaurant. He was able, ambitious and worked hard and soon moved to the big band at the Palais Royal, backing the floor show. But Bert wasn’t to stay in the background long. When the bandleader was taken ill, the teenager stepped into the breach and made the job his own. Realising there was more money in running the show, he put together a 15-piece band at $50 a week. A row with the owner of the Palais Royal saw Ambrose moving his whole outfit to the Club de Vingt, where his popularity and wages only increased.
But brilliant careers depend as much on chance as design. Ambrose was back in London in 1922 to visit his sick mother in Whitechapel when he was approached by the owner of the West End’s Embassy Club. Albert de Corville was trying to build a nightspot to rival the glamour of New York and offered Ambrose the unheard-of sum of £360 a week to lead a seven-piece band at the club. Almost immediately de Corville fell into money troubles and was bought out by restauranteur Luigi, who offered Ambrose a share of the business.
It seems extraordinary now that a star of Ambrose’s magnitude could get to his late twenties without ever hanging made a recording. But the 1920s is when records really kicked off. Not many people could hear the famous bands live, but they could buy their discs and listen to them on the wireless. In April 1923, Ambrose entered the studio to cut 12 sides for Columbia. He must have had a canny eye on the States, where live broadcasts from the restaurants and clubs, and from theatres such as the Savoy Ballroom and the Apollo, were making stars of the musicians and boosting demand for their recordings.
Back in London though, Ambrose’s records weren’t selling, hindered by Luigi’s staunch insistence that there would be no broadcasting from the Embassy. Columbia, denied the publicity of radio, didn’t ask Ambrose and his boys to cut any more discs. The following year, Ambrose walked out, onto the boat, and took up a residency at New York’s Clover Gardens for $200 a night. For a year, the bandleader ignored the increasingly frantic pleas from Luigi to return home, only capitulating when he got a cable from the Prince of Wales, an Embassy regular. “The Embassy needs you. Come back - Edward,” read the message. Ambrose heeded the royal command and returned, for a couple of years at least.
But in 1927 he was enticed away for good, by a contract at the newly opened May Fair Hotel. The money wasn’t so great, around £500 a week, but crucially broadcasting was included, and Ambrose became a huge star with his Anglo-American combo. If Ambrose had a sharp eye for the deal, he also had a terrible way with money and a habit of falling out with his business partners. During the twenties and thirties he moved back and forth between The May Fair and the Embassy, to the Cafe de Paris, to Ciro’s Club (and an abortive business venture with American bandleader Jack Harris), and made his real money with countless recordings for Decca, HMV and Brunswick.
By 1940, Ambrose was exhausted and fed up with a West End beset by German air raids. He decamped to his farm in Hertfordshire, only emerging to cut more discs with his all-star band. He discovered his taste for live music in the fifties, but also found that the world had moved on. He played with ever-smaller bands in the hope that rock and roll would be a passing fad. By the late fifties, the money had gone. A compulsive gambler, Ambrose once boasted he had ’spent a million pounds at the tables’. In the late forties he had been hauled into court on currency charges. But now he struck lucky, discovering the 16-year-old Kathy Kirby singing at the Ilford Palais. Ambrose pushed here and her song ‘Secret Love’. Kirby became a star, and Ambrose was flush once more. His remaining years were spent as Kirby’s manager.
Ambrose collapsed on Saturday, 11 June, 1971 at the Yorkshire TV studios, where Kirby was recording a show. He died later that night. Kirby was shattered by the death of her mentor and her career never recovered.