eastlondonhistory.com

The themes, language and characters of ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be’ were a disturbing blast of the new for London’s theatreland when the play moved up west from Stratford. So it comes as a shock to realise that the irreverent musical is 50 years old this month.

So much about the play was novel. This exuberant and sentimental piece by Lionel Bart and Frank Norman may not seem to share much with the ‘kitchen sink dramas’, and the ‘angry’ writers such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker. But it too played its part in sweeping away the dead wood from the West End. The Shaftsbury Avenue of the 1950s seemed filled with plays that reflected polite Edwardian London rather than a city where Teddy Boys were slashing cinema seats. In the work of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, the working classes were represented by minor comedy characters - in Bart and Norman’s play, the working classes (teds and all) took centre stage.

With the background of the two, how could it be any different. The play had been written by Norman, who had followed a troubled road to the East End. He had been abandoned by his mum and dad as a boy, turned out by his adoptive parents, and shunted around a succession of children’s homes before drifting into crime and a three-year prison sentence in his early twenties. Released from jail in 1957 he began writing. First his prison memoir, ‘Bang to Rights’ was a surprise hit. Soon afterwards, Joan Littlewood, who was reinventing theatre out at Stratford East, picked up the draft of ‘Fings’. She handed it to collaborator Lionel Bart and the experimental theatre company had a hit on its hands.

Bart meanwhile was East End to the core. Lionel Begleiter had been born in Stepney, the son of a Jewish tailor. He was a talented painter and a natural musician but seemd to lack the discipline to stick at anything. In the late forties he was expelled from St Martin’s School of Art for ‘mischievousness’. That mischief found an outlet a few years later, first in a string of hits for Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Anthony Newley, then in a run of musicals that drew heavily on his cockney roots.

Bart took the language of the East End and cranked it to within an inch of parody. And in ‘Fings’ he had great material to start with. Jeffrey Bernard, no mean hand with a comic phrase himself, wrote that Norman was “a ‘natural’ writer of considerable wit, powers of sardonic observation and with a razor sharp ear for dialogue particularly as spoken in the underworld”. As any writer knows, there is a wealth of craft and a deal of sweat in appearing ‘natural’. Frank’s renditions of cockney speak is real like the New York slang of Damon Runyon’s New Yorkers is real - colourful, exaggerated and humourous, catching the spirit of the language better than any dry transcription could.

And when Bart got hold of Norman’s play ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be’ (it was always dubbed ‘a play with music’ rather than a musical) the great Brooklyn writer might have recognised many of the character types - if he could have understood the words that is. Bart, released from the restrictions of turning out two and a half minute pop songs for Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele and Anthony Newley, went totally to town. He knew he was good. For years he had been writing songs for amateur revues at the left-wing Unity Theatre (a theatre club that had grown from the Workers’ Theatre Movement, itself born in the politics of the 1930s’ East End). But he had also won three Ivor Novello awards for his pop numbers in 1957, another four in ‘58 and two in 1960. By the time he got to work on ‘Fings’ Bart was at the top of his game and oozing confidence.

So Lionel took Norman’s motley crew of spivs, hookers, gamblers, teds and bent coppers and matched his cracking tunes to lyrics that had some among the West End audiences laughing … but others scratching their heads. The references to ‘our local Palais’, trips to Southend and ‘Teds in drainpipe trousers’ were one thing. But the use of rhyming slang and thieves cant (similar to gay ‘polari’, this back slang was only intelligible to those in the know) mystified many in the stalls. The producers thoughtfully produced translations of many of the words in the programme. A few years later, another product of Stratford East, ‘Sparrers Can’t Sing’ would also baffle non-cockneys.

Give it a few years and everybody would expect regional accents and slang in their films, plays, musicals and pop songs. Bart, who probably thought he was, at 29, at the start of a brilliant career, was sadly closer to its end. ‘Oliver!’ followed just a year after ‘Fings’ but the sixties saw a a couple of hits followed by some expensive flops. Norman wrote more autobiography, a string of moderately successful novels, before enjoying an Indian Summer with his three late ‘Soho caper’ novels, featuring Soho private eye Ed Nelson.

* Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be debuted at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in February 1959.
* Frank Norman died in December 1980 of Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
* Lionel Bart died in 1999 of cancer.

The East End of the late 19th and early 20th century was the birthplace and home of music hall – and nobody personified the energy, bawdiness and vigour of the halls more than Marie Lloyd. The cockney chanteuse sang of a life of drunkeness, lewd behaviour and moonlight flits. But musical fiction paled next to the facts of her outrageous life. It was a lifestyle that was to scandalise staid English society and would, ultimately, lead to her early death.

Matilda Victoria Wood was born on 12 February 1870 in Hoxton, the eldest of nine. All the sisters, Daisy, Alice, Rose and Marie would hang around at the Eagle music hall round the corner, and all wanted to go on the stage.

The young Matilda had a taste for hard work and a flair for organisation. She cajoled her sisters and friends into group called the Fairy Bells Minstrels, who toured the mission halls with a programme on the evils of drink – ironic given Marie’s later taste for the stuff.

Although she was only 16, the determined Matilda announced she would go on the stage. Promoters were always scouting the halls for fresh talent and she soon got a try-out at Belmont’s Sebright Hall in Hackney Road, and was then retained for a fee of 15/- (75p) a week.

Soon she was appearing at small halls around the East End, doing two or three shows a night, rushing from one to the other carrying her costume. Enormous success wasn’t far away and it resulted from a potent mix of talent, ambition, relentless hard work … and a ruthless and mercenary streak. Now dubbed Marie Lloyd she needed a signature song, and found it in The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery. She pinched the song from fellow performer Nelly Power and it quickly became her own, while Nelly faded from view.

Success came and with it the first of a string of disastrous romances. Marie was earning a fortune, which no doubt made her doubly attractive to Percy Courtenay. He became Marie’s first husband in 1887, when Percy was 25 and Marie just 17. She was working as hard as ever, but her husband had no regular job. Marie Jr was born but the marriage was over by 1893. The drunken Percy began following Marie, hanging around at the stage door and abusing her.

Marie’s career went into orbit. The audiences loved her and she loved the East End halls where she constantly pushed the limits with her saucy winks, vulgarity and risque songs. Marie was such a huge star by now that she couldn’t avoid the stories appearing about her in the papers. Eventually Marie had to appear before the Vigilance Committee.

She sang her songs without the usual winks and gestures and the committee let her go. Marie then gave a rendition of the chaste drawing-room ballad Come into the Garden Maud, so laden down with innuendo and gesture that it became quite obscene.

In 1901 she began living with singer Alec Hurley. It was another shock for puritanical England – she wasn’t to be divorced by Percy Courtenay till 1906. Soon after came the Music Hall Strike, which had its first meeting at the Hampstead house of Marie and Alec. It was called by the smaller artists who were being asked to do extra performances for no extra cash. The artists won, the managers gave in, but Marie had made powerful enemies.

In 1910 Marie was 40, but sedate middle age didn’t beckon. Instead she left Alec and moved in with Derby-winning Irish jockey Bernard Dillon, 18 years her junior. Dillon was to lose his jockey’s licence within months. His career over at 22, he began drinking heavily.

Her career began to falter too. The first Royal Command Performance was held in 1912 specially for the Music Hall, but Marie was omitted by the vengeful managers. Then in 1913 Marie and Bernard arrived in New York for a six-month tour. They were arrested at the quayside – their crime was to be unmarried. Charged with moral turpitude, they were deported straight back to Britain.

Marie began to drink. She often arrived late on stage, her voice became weaker and her act shorter. In October 1922 she was appearing at Edmonton and the last song in her act was the famous It’s a bit of a ruin that Cromwell knocked about. The delighted audience howled at her staggering about on the stage, thinking she was acting the drunk. But Marie was desperately ill. The crowd laughed when she fell, thinking it was part of the act. But it was Marie’s final call.. Three days later, on 7 October, she died.

Whatever you think of Shoreditch, you’re unlikely to consider it the root of London’s Theatreland. Yet, back in 1576, it was home to the capital’s first playhouse.
Throughout the Middle Ages, plays became hugely popular. But the actors, minstrels, jugglers and the like didn’t perform inside. Instead, troupes would travel from town to town, taking the entertainment to a new audience every day.
They would perform religious mystery plays on church steps, the more ribald productions in inns and taverns.
But the growing popularity of the more formal, many-act plays which were now being produced by the likes of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson meant that cash could be spent on a permanent playhouse.
In 1576, the great tragic actor Richard Burbage, who was running his Lord Chamberlain’s theatre company out of Shoreditch, raised the cash to build the capital’s first proper theatre.
The Theatre, as it was imaginatively dubbed, lay at the corner of New Inn Yard and what is now Great Eastern Street and it was a huge success.
William Shakespeare joined the company when he arrived in London in 1592 and, in the six years following, Shoreditch saw debuts of the Bard’s earliest work – Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet and many more.
Globe timbers
The Theatre was demolished in 1598, its timbers taken to construct the world-famous Globe Theatre at Bankside, which was uncovered again in the 1990s.
But Shoreditch’s theatrical story was just beginning. By now Burbage’s Curtain Theatre was doing a roaring trade at Holywell Lane, opposite the west end of Bethnal Green Road.
Shoreditch itself had started life as a religious, rather than a theatrical, hamlet. Like many villages it was born at the crossing of two Roman roads – in this case Kingsland Road and Old Street.

First mentioned in 1148 as Scoredich, it was the site of the new St Leonard’s Church in the 12th century, and in 1152 the Augustinian priory of Holywell.
But by the late 1500s, Holywell priory was gone and the theatre was built on its redundant grounds. Colourful characters began to replace the holy men who had sought sanctuary from the City.
Many of the players are buried in St Leonard’s churchyard. And in 1598, Ben Jonson fought a duel with Gabriel Spencer in Hoxton Fields, killing him. Spencer’s body lies in the churchyard in Shore-ditch High Street, alongside that of Burbage, and Henry VIII’s jester, Will Sommers.
Around the 1680s, Shore-ditch changed again. Most of the actors had migrated west and it became the focus for charitable works, as men made rich by the City looked to bequeath their wealth.
Geffrye Museum
In 1695, Robert Aske endowed the Haberdashers almshouses and a school in Pitfield Street. Then in 1715, London mayor Robert Geffrye built the Ironmongers almshouses in Kingsland Road – now they house the Geffrye Museum.
By the 1850s, as London’s population boomed, Shore-ditch had a population of more than 100,000. Today it’s the slightly scruffy north-west corner of the East End.
But wander round St Leonard’s churchyard and you can almost see the ghosts of Shakespeare, Jonson and the rest of London’s first theatre community.

Lionel Bart’s music ranged from his greatest success, Oliver!, and musicals like Lock Up Your Daughters and Blitz. His songs such as Living Doll, Rock With The Cavemen and Little White Bull gave chart hits to British rock’n’roll stars like Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele. It was a curious hybrid – but it had its roots in East End soil.

Bart was born Lionel Begleiter in Whitechapel in 1930, the 11th child of a Jewish tailor, and it was his childhood that formed his songs. “Oliver! was a strange marriage of the Jewish music of my barmitzvah and the street cries of my childhood,” he recalled. “Fagin’s music was like a Jewish mother hen clucking away!”

It was a colourful background, but one Bart was fond of embellishing still further. Many of his friends talked of his constant rewriting of his childhood, a habit which drove the ghostwriters of his biography to despair.
Certainly, although he never learned to read or write music, there were early signs of musical ability. Aged six, one of the young Lionel’s teachers told his father that the lad was a musical genius, and his proud dad bought him a violin. Lionel soon got bored with the discipline required and dropped his lessons.

Expelled from St Martin’s

At 16, he decided his artistic future lay with painting, and won a scholarship to St Martin’s School of Art. That didn’t last either, though. He was expelled for “mischievousness”, but didn’t regret leaving the lonely life of the artist in his garret. “I like a good mob working around me,” he explained, an esprit de corps that would be fulfilled in the huge musical productions that were to make his name.

One thing he did acquire during his studies was that name. His bus journey from Whitechapel to the West End every day took him past Barts Hospital, and Begleiter reinvented himself as Bart.

After National Service, Bart set up in business with his RAF pal, John Gorman. With a borrowed £50, they started a printing firm in Hackney. But business was never Bart’s forte – this was the man who later sold the million-spinning smash hit Oliver! for a paltry £15,000, and poured in £80,000 of his own cash in 1965 in a vain bid to save the flop musical Twang!!

Tommy Steele and Soho’s 2 I’s

Anyway, music was changing, with big bands giving way to rock’n’roll, and Bart was spending time up West, mixing with young hopefuls like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard in Soho’s 2 I’s coffee bar. At the same time as he was producing his first stage show, Wally Pone of Soho, which debuted at the Theatre Workshop in Stratford, he was banging out the hits for Britain’s answers to Elvis. It came easily. He claimed to have written Living Doll in six minutes on a Sunday morning – about twice as long as Cliff took to sing it!

But what came easy, went easy too. Bart was hugely generous with his cash, a legacy, he reckoned, of his gambling father. “There were endless arguments about money,” he said. “I hated money and had no respect for it. My attitude was to spend it as I got it.”

By 1972, Bart was bankrupt, with debts of £73,000, and a huge drink problem. What cash hadn’t been ripped off by casual acquaintances had been poured into unsuccessful stage shows. Often, his pals saw the warning signs in his shows long before he could. His friend Noel Coward, on reading the script of his Quasimodo, remarked: “Brilliant dear boy. But were you on drugs when you wrote it?”

But towards the end of his life, attending Alcoholics Anonymous, and with a percentage of the profits from the stage revival of Oliver!, Bart was reconstructing his life. And Cameron Mackintosh, the producer of that revival, made one of the most telling quotes on Bart’s death. “Of all the people in this business who have had ups and downs, Lionel is the least bitter man I’ve ever come across. He regrets it, but he’s never been sour, never vindictive.”

Today, London theatre is synonymous with the West End, Shaftsbury Avenue and Drury Lane.
But back in the 1800s, the East End had a theatre to more than rival the West End – and one with its own distinct audience.
Despite being ignored by the middle classes and the critics, east London in the 1850s actually had the majority of the capital’s theatres – 14 east of the city compared to 11 in the West End.
Among the biggest, with capacities ranging from 2,000 to 4,000, were Hoxton High Street’s Britannia, the Grecian in City Road, the Effingham at 236 Whitechapel Road and the Garrick at 70 Leman Street.
But that was only the tip of the iceberg. There were seven music halls with a capacity totalling 7,000, as well as penny gaffs and saloon theatres like the Albion in Whitechapel.
And if you expected East End punters to be more rowdy than the toffs up West, you’d be rather wrong.
The famous actor Ben Webster gave evidence before a Commons Select Committee of 1866, looking into the state of London theatre, and said: “East End audiences are more attentive than the West and are just as appreciative of good acting.”
Good audience
And the actors themselves would have appreciated Webster’s observation, that unlike West End audiences, “East Enders don’t talk during the performance!”
A quarter century later, in 1892, another Select Committee heard the Examiner of Plays, Edward Pigott, tell that East End audiences were also much more moral… at least while they were in the theatre.
“The risky, immoral and indecent plays are intended for West End audiences – certainly not for the East End,” said Pigott.
“The further east you get the more moral your audience is.
“You may get a gallery full of roughs, in which every other boy is a pickpocket, and yet their collective sympathy is in favour of self-sacrifice. They have a horror of vice and a love of virtue.

“A boy might pick your pocket as you left the theatre, but have his reserve of fine sentiment in his heart!”
But if there were differences between east and west audiences, there were also distinct clientele at the various East End theatres themselves.
The Pavilion, at 193 Whitechapel Road, had a strongly Jewish audience – no surprise given the area – while the Effingham, down the road, had a mixture of local Jews and sailors.
In 1850, Charles Dickens described the audience at the Brittania as: “Prowlers and idlers… mechanics, dock labourers, costermongers, petty tradesmen, small clerks, milliners, stay makers, shoe binders and shop workers.”
Surprisingly, the weekends were not the top nights for theatre-going.
The Sketch, a theatrical publication of the day, recorded in its edition of June 24, 1896: “The best nights are Mondays, the working class are paid too late on Saturdays to enable them to spend their few coppers.”
“Slumming it”
Of course, it wasn’t entirely true that west stayed west. Author Clive Barker writes of toffs coming down to the Britannia to “slum it” in Hoxton. And The Sketch report writes that “the natives were not pleased to see silk-hatted invaders.”
But the theatres gradually became music halls and they, in their turn, were killed off by the cinema – though many of the old theatres were themselves converted into the first East End picture palaces.
Now, of course, Tower Hamlets is bare of both and we can only dream of the days when the East End was London’s Theatreland.