THE EARLY DAYS OF BRITANNIA

EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT

When Gildard and MacFarlane’s theatre first opened, it appears to have been called Willie Campbell’s Singing Saloon. Within a few months, though, John Brand took over the building and renamed it Britannia Music Hall, the name inspired by the statue of Britannia which was, until 1949, a local landmark at Glasgow Cross and was easily viewed from the front doors of the music hall.
   At first Britannia had no licence for the sale of alcohol. Nor did it have any connection to a pub. It quickly gained the reputation of being a ‘dry house’, sending hoards of drink-loving patrons through the doors of less sober premises. A notice was soon put on the wall advertising the Ship Tavern, ‘200 yards to the left-hand side’. Soon after, a pub, the Britannia Vaults, opened on the ground floor and the patrons came flooding in.
   The early audiences were predominantly male – it was not deemed the sort of place that ladies of any respectability should frequent, and, in any case, many women not only worked, but also had their hands full cooking, cleaning and looking after their large broods of children: eight or ten children in a family was not uncommon.
   The Britannia was somewhere men could find a bit of titillation and blow off a little steam. Victorian morality dictated that women covered themselves from the neck to the floor. Those women who exposed flesh were regarded as harlots, and so not much flesh was generally on view in public life – except in the music hall, where dancing girls and lady acrobats would expose legs in costumes skimpy by Victorian standards. This sort of risqué entertainment gave the lady performers an opportunity to make a shilling or two, and soliciting became a problem in music halls, with Britannia being no exception.
   Prostitution has always been a precarious occupation; soliciting on the streets ran the risk of a beating and a night in the police cells, whilst the dark lanes and backstreets left the women exposed to mortal peril. The dark corners of the crowded music halls, however, offered the working girls a relatively safe environment, warm and dry, and with plenty of entertainment to distract the crowd as they plied their trade.
   The biggest fear of the pious population had been realised. However, morality and decency were not exclusive to the middle and upper classes. The poorest too expected a certain standard of morality. In fact, it was about the only expectancy they had. A wife wanted her husband to come home at night sober and free of disease, yet everybody who strived for a decent life at least deserved decent entertainment at the end of the day.
   John Brand was not blind to the public’s misgivings and took steps to create an environment which was comfortable, wholesome and safe (to an extent) for the whole family. In the early 1860s he invested some money in upgrading the Britannia so that it would be more comfortable and enticingto the family audience and more able to compete with the grander music halls which were then starting to appear. In the balcony, which had originally been standing-room only, he added long, wooden pews and above the stage he added a proscenium arch.
   Brand’s alterations were completed in a manner indicative of the original fit-out of the auditorium. The pews were probably reclaimed and the proscenium was made out of old bits of timber which had either been lying around or rescued from some other building, then nailed together and covered (on the auditorium side) with canvas which was painted and decorated in a fancy manner. Only the performers saw the rough edges; to the public, it was a richly decorated frame for the antics on stage.
   Once a more comfortable environment had been achieved, it was time to tackle the ‘wholesome’ aspect of the place, which meant taking measures to cut down the amount of prostitutes who used the building as their main place of business. Brand employed a strict door policy and began printing the disclaimer ‘no ladies admitted unless accompanied by gentlemen’ on all his bills. It seems that once banned from selling their wares in Britannia, those plucky prostitutes moved across the road where they opened a small brothel; they would then find their ‘gentleman’ before they entered the hall. Many a fly button was left beneath the balcony pews, perhaps as a testament to this occupation, and years later, buried among the buttons, was found a card advertising ‘Dr Temple for diseases peculiar to men’.
   The Britannia’s notoriety for the ladies of the night was a source of comic comment in the local theatrical press, with anecdotes such as this one appearing in 1883 in Barr’s Professional Gazette:

A masher [toff] led his best girl into the Britannia Music Hall and paid the modest amount of threepence per head. Two youngsters sat down and one said to the other, ‘Man, Jock, if I wis gaun’ wi’ a judy [prostitute], I’d think shame tae tak’ her intae the 3d seats, wid you no?’ The masher and his girl heard the remark and disappeared before the performance was far advanced.

By now, music hall was a family treat. Up to 1,500 people would pile into Britannia for every show, which ran as many as four times a day. Glasgow’s hardest working and poorest population squeezed themselves next to others on the wooden benches, with not a hair’s breadth between them, and waited for the show to start. Clutching their pokes [bags] of mouldy vegetables, which they could buy from the vegetable seller who sold his rotten stock from a barrow in the lane, they sat together in a great human herd, munching and mooing in the gas-lit dimness as they drank their beer and prised steaming whelks (the first popular take-away food) from their shells. The atmosphere was thick with Woodbine smoke and the smell of people – this was prior to the invention of deodorant and luxury of indoor plumbing. The noise, the smell, the press of the crowd, the cries of babies and the heat from the open fires were a heady concoction. It was hardly a relaxing or comfortable environment.
   When 1,500 people were crammed together like that, mob mentality was easily triggered. If one person didn’t, for some reason, like the act and began demonstrating their displeasure, a ripple of dissatisfaction would spread through the swell of humanity like a Mexican wave. Before long, a perpetual shower of rivet punchings, rotten cabbage and whelk shells, along with a cacophony of verbal abuse, would come hailing down upon the poor supplicant on stage. This behaviour gained the early music-hall audience a reputation for leaving ‘no turn un-stoned’.
   But it wasn’t just the shower of objects that caused problems; smoking was also a source of discomfort for the erstwhile performer. In one report, the smoking in Britannia had become such a problem that there was a call for its ban – not because of any health reasons you understand; at this time smoking was considered good for the health (which is perhaps a contributing factor to why the average life span was only 45 years) – no, the complaint came from a performer who claimed that he couldn’t see the audience and the audience could not see him because the cloud of smoke was so thick.