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This is the front cover of the hardback book by Sir John Major from memories given to him by his father Tom Major, who with his wife Kitty, performed upon the Music Hall stages and topped the bill at the famous Leeds City Varieties Theatre in 1915. A wonderful story. Here is the inside cover message from the book published by Harper Collins:
In this colourful personal history, former prime minister John Major takes a remarkable journey into his own unconventional family past to tell the story of the rise and fall of the British music hall. Music hall was one of the glories of the Victorian era. Sentimental, vulgar, boisterous, but always patriotic and on the side of the underdog, it held up a mirror to the experiences and aspirations of its audience, and sometimes the general absurdity of life. Vast, smoke filled auditoriums were packed night after night in nearly every town and city in Britain. The most popular performers, such as Marie Lloyd, Vesta Tilley and George Robey, were among the highest paid and most celebrated figures in the land. Yet for the majority of artistes further down the bill, life was a constant struggle with unscrupulous theatre managers, low wages and unrelented hardship.
This was the world that John Major’s father, Tom, entered at the age of twenty-one as a comedian and singer. In My Old Man, the former prime minister uses his father’s story to springboard for an entertaining history of the music hall, from its origin in the pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century through its heyday in the late Victorian times to its eventual decline with the rise of radio and cinema in the twentieth century.
Packed with vivid anecdotes about the great performers of the day, this affectionate, warmhearted history is a celebration of a lost age’.
This fine book contains grand photographs of the times with one photograph showing a aerial flying act well over the seated audience! It showed that circus performers also played a part in the old music hall programmes as they did later in its rather grander replacement ‘variety’. I managed to see John Major at the City Varieties theatre this autumn when he presented a stage talk about the book and the times.
I sent to him a copy of my views that one may read in The Stage – Online Talk forum. He so kindly replied to me thus: ‘It was a great thrill for me to appear at the City Varieties Leeds, where my father had topped the bill both 97 and 99 years ago. Thank you too, for sending a copy of the playbills indicating your family’s show-business lineage. Since writing the book, I have been astonished how many people have direct – and in some cases distant – connections with show-business in general and music hall in particular. (Sir John is Patron of the British Music Hall Society)
With all good wishes, John Major’.
