PEOPLES PUBS

RMT helpline 0800 3763706 :: november/december 2010 :: RMTnews 32 PEOPLE’S PUBS - Words by Mike Pentelow, Pictures by Peter Arkell MARIE LLOYD Chart Street, Hoxton, London N1 Queen of the Music Halls and mistress of the saucy innuendo, Marie Lloyd (1870-1922) was also a staunch and active trade unionist. The Music Hall Ladies Guild elected her as its first president in 1906, and she used this position to form an alliance with other entertainment unions for a broader and stronger front the following year. This was with the Variety Artists' Federation, the National Association of Theatrical Employees, and the Amalgamated Musicians' Union. This alliance immediately proved crucial in organising a strike to successfully resist an attack on their pay and conditions of employment. The music hall employers demanded artists lower down the bill work extra matinees without extra pay; and they forbade them from working at rival theatres to boost their income. Marie, as a top-of-the bill star, was not directly affected by these worsened conditions. But her sense of solidarity with her fellow performers meant she joined the strike wholeheartedly without hesitation. "I will never go back upon the music hall stage until the wants of every musician and stagehand are satisfied," she declared. Leading from the front, she was on the picket line at the Euston Palace where strikebreakers included performing animals and singer Belle Elmore, who was later murdered by her long suffering husband Dr Crippen. However, some now believe him to be innocent including family members and forensic scientists, and a campaign is under way to clear his name. Belle was implored not to be a blackleg by one of the pickets. But Marie, who had a poor opinion of Belle's singing quality, shouted out: "Go on, let her work. She'll do the strike a lot more good by going on and singing than by stopping out! You go and work Belle!" Sure enough when Belle started singing, and news spread that the great Marie Lloyd was singing for free on the picket line, the entire audience streamed out of the theatre. Marie also performed for free at a strike benefit concert organised by the union at the Scala Theatre in Charlotte Street (later the first headquarters of Channel Four). In the days of arbitration her persuasive evidence to the Board of Trade convinced it to rule in favour of the strikers. She was also an active supporter of votes for women and appeared in a suffragist play at The Oxford on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. This was the theatre where she made her West End debut at the age of 15. The audiences, who were well plied with pots of beer by waiters during the performances, had a reputation for being "distinctly crude" in their reactions to acts. But the young Marie took them by storm with her mischievous rendering of a song about a young woman in a garden "surrounded by various vegetables". One line was how she "sits among the cauliflowers and peas." When at a later royal performance she was told this was too suggestive for Her Majesty she changed it to she "sits among the cauliflowers and leeks." Her Royal Highness was not amused. Marie's later union militancy also attracted royal disapproval, and she was barred from the royal command performance of 1912 even though she was the most popular star of the day. Undaunted, Marie hired another nearby theatre on the same night for a rival show with placards proclaiming: "Every performance by Marie Lloyd is a command performance - by command of the British public". Her funeral was attended by thousands, and stirred a comment from the writer T S Eliot that it was "her capacity for expressing the soul of the people that made Marie Lloyd unique". Her father was an artificial flower maker who supplemented his poor wages by working as a waiter in the music halls and pubs of Shoreditch. Marie had nine younger brothers and sisters, two of whom died in infancy, one by being smothered in an overcrowded bed. The pub is within a few hundred yards of where Marie was born at 36 Provost Street, and went to school in Bath Street. “A Pub Crawl Through History, The Ultimate Boozers’ Who’s Who,” by Mike Pentelow and Peter Arkell, is published by Janus. ISBN 978-1-85756-701-4.