Minor work wastes good Major material

MEMOIR: My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall, By John Major, Harper Press, 363pp, £20.

When John Major took over from Margaret Thatcher as Conservative prime minister of Britain from 1990 to 1997, he was so nondescript that the Spitting Image puppeteers created him in 50 shades of grey.

He spoke in a dull, strangulated drone, and there was about him an air of haplessness and ineffectuality. He was widely thought not to be really up to the job.

Then the stories about his background began to trickle in. And John Major’s home life turned out to be wonderfully strange: the monochrome man of politics had once been the boy who ran away from the circus to become an accountant. Then, just when we thought it couldn’t get any better, garden gnomes came into the picture.

His father, Tom Major Ball, aged 64 when John was born, in 1943, had been for many years a slapstick entertainer in the music halls, in partnership with his first wife, Kitty, as “Drum and Major”. The pair were usually near the bottom of the bill, nevertheless they appeared with great stars of the day: Marie Lloyd, Hetty King, Lupino Lane, Nellie Wallace, Florrie Forde, Harry Champion and the rest.

According to some sources he fathered at least five children with four different mothers over a 42-year period: the journalist Terry Major Ball; the dancer Mary Moss’s son Tom F Moss; and daughters Patricia Dessoy and Kathleen Lemon, as well as John. (Kathleen is not mentioned in My Old Man.)

When the music halls closed down and he found himself without clowning work, Major Ball started a company manufacturing garden gnomes. In the 1950s that business failed; Major Ball and his second wife, Gwen (John’s mother), lost their family home and moved to a ramshackle house in Brixton owned by a man John knew as Uncle Tom but who proved to be Moss, John’s half-brother though 40 years his senior. Moss, a fine tenor in the Josef Locke tradition, had spent years on the halls, on bills with big names such as George Formby. And he in turn had a half-sister (no relation to John), the variety comedian Jill Summers, who ended up playing blue-rinsed battleaxe Phyllis Pearce in Coronation Street.

I met Tom F Moss once, when I was sent to do a story many years ago at Brinsworth House, a retirement home for performers at Twickenham. (In 1906 Tom Major Ball and Kitty had been founder members of the Variety Artists Federation, the charity that administered Brinsworth.) Moss was quite a character, refreshingly different to the rest of the placid old-timers there; a wheezing, snaggle-toothed old fellow with a drinker’s nose and gravelly Lancashire accent, happy in himself although he conceded he had made some big mistakes. He blamed “booze and women” for the way his life had turned out. No mention was made of his half-brother John, then climbing the ranks of the Young Conservatives.

Though he writes about his parents with tremendous love and tenderness, Major mostly attempts to normalise the raffishness and sheer oddness of his background, and avoids his father’s evident eye for the ladies, opting instead to use his life as a springboard to tell the story of the rise and fall of British music hall.

The My Old Man of the title refers to a famous music-hall song as well as to his dad, and it is the halls rather than the family that is the focus of the book.

This is a pity. I would far rather learn more about this amazing family and their good and bad times, seen through the eyes of a little boy who would one day grow up to be a prime minister, than read yet another history of the halls full of stuff already on public record.

Working-class audience

And, alas, much of My Old Man is written in a print version of that dull, strangulated drone. Music hall was never boring, surely, but John Major sometimes makes it seem so. He correctly identifies the basic appeal of such entertainment – a strong identification by a poor, working-class audience with performers drawn from their ranks, who spoke to and for them about the daily concerns of life. As the heyday of the halls is now beyond the reach of living memory, he can only fall back on the familiar reference material upon which all theatre historians draw. Roy Hudd, for example, has already covered most aspects of music hall and variety in a series of warm and entertaining books.

For the novice, though, Major provides brief lives of most of the big stars of the era, some basic social commentary and plenty of startling anecdotes of triumph, degradation and excess. Factual mistakes are rare (though it should be pointed out that it was Herman’s Hermits, not Manfred Mann, who had a hit with Harry Champion’s old song I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am in the 1960s).

But while the general subject of music hall may now belong to history, in one significant way its shadow lives on, and in a form unimaginable to those who were around at the time. Some of the stars were filmed, elderly but still brimming with zest, and these clips are now freely available.

So if you want to learn about the charm and fun of music hall, you don’t need to read any book; just go to YouTube, and there, among many others, you’ll find the great male impersonator Ella Shields crooning Adeline, the comedian Lily Morris plaintively wondering Why Am I Always the Bridesmaid? (make sure you stick with Lily for her dance at the end), Little Tich doing his big-boots routine, and – the essence of music hall – the irresistible sand dancers Wilson, Keppel and Betty.