Dan Snow's History Hit - Gangsters, Pimps & Prostitutes: London's West End

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

London's West End attracts people from across the world to its many theatres, restaurants and famous nightlife but how did this centre of pleasure come to be? Originally on the fringe of London from its very inception, it was the playground of the rich seeking to let their hair down. Many of these entertainments were far from wholesome though with freakshows, drink, drugs and sex rife amongst its theatres, music halls and clubs. There have been many attempts to control this hedonism most of which have failed miserably and even the World War's of the Twentieth Century couldn't stop the party. In this episode, Dan is joined by London historian Stephen Hoare to explore the evolution of Piccadilly and the West End. 

Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto, or switching mobile providers. Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Hello and welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's a slightly slow day over at History Hit Towers. We went to the Broadcast Media Awards last night in glamorous London to see if History Hit TV would be announced as the best specialist channel of the year. We were nominated, made the shortlist, but folks, we didn't win. We didn't win. We were beaten by some jokers from a place called the bbc heard of them but i must

say like the spartans at the battle of thermopylae outnumbered outgunned as it were with no hope of victory we put a pretty heroic battle it was good to even get there and the happy news is we've all got crushing hangovers today anyway so it's a perfect perfect day to kick back and listen some podcasts this one it's about london it's about entertainment prostitution there is some language in this podcast that you may find offensive is language used in the sources from the time and we're talking about the area around piccadilly really the word piccadilly comes from a piccadill a lace collar and this street was seen as the fashionable lacy fringe of London. Aristocrats could live out the west in sort of rural

idylls, but then nip in and get stuck into the more urban pleasures. It became famous for shops, restaurants, theatre, bustling nightlife, and, yes folks, sex. And it wasn't just in the 17th 18th century we're also talking right up to the first and second world wars so everyone please go and subscribe to historyhit.tv on netflix for history nominated but not winner of britain's best specialist channel and then once you've done that just relax in a darkened room and listen to me and the historian Stephen Hall talking about pimps, prostitutes and London's West End. Enjoy. Stephen, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's a great pleasure.

So London is now, we all think, you know, theatre town, West End. When does this reputation begin? It begins really at the very end of the 17th century. It was when Piccadilly was a country road and Green Park was an open space. And there was a chap called Henry Wynne Stanley, the engineer who built the Eddystone lighthouse. engineer who built the Eddystone lighthouse and he wanted to raise the money to build the lighthouse by erecting a sort of fairground entertainment thing called Winstanley's Water Museum and it was a giant wooden tower with a windmill on the top and people could go in and see all the pulleys working, and they would be given three glasses of wine and claret, as if by magic, because the windmill operated a hydraulic system. People, they were amused, entertained by science. I'd have been entertained by that. That

sounds absolutely brilliant. And then that had the effect of attracting other entertainment venues. Yes. One of the earliest ones was Philip Astley, who later created Astley's Amphitheatre on the South Bank in Lambeth. And at 22 Piccadilly, in about 1797 or so, he created Astley's Hippodrome inside a ballroom. What he did was create an internal sawdust ring, have stables at the back, and the horses would canter round and they would follow his instructions. The horse would drop down as if dead.

It would then get up. Riders would jump on the back of the horse, perform all kinds of equestrian feats of daring do, and people loved that. It was a kind of supplement to the Mayfair, which was going on in Shepherd Market at that time, and it was like a rural entertainment. There were a lot of horse shows, People loved horses and Philip Astley, who had fought in the War of Spanish Succession, he was a cavalryman. He was discharged, had given his horse

and taught the horse tricks and people queued up to see it. It was the origin of the modern circus. London's growing, people have got some money, there's a bit of recreation, what's going on? What's it say about the city, about England at the time? What it's saying is that Piccadilly was a genteel, it had an enormous supply of wealthy people, but also increasingly people of the middling sort, who were drawn to the area's many coffee houses, gentlemen's clubs.

There was a huge popular thirst for both entertainment and knowledge. These were forerunners of museums. Sir Hans Sloane created the nucleus of the British Museum with a collection of very important artefacts. But you had amateurs muscling in and creating their own museums. And the most famous one is a chap called William Bullock, who in about, again, late 1700s, he created something called the Liverpool Museum. He was a goldsmith and jeweller from Sheffield, William Bullock. His brother, George Bullock, was also a famous Regency designer.

Now, behalf of Crown, Bullock had created a museum, which was not your idea of a museum or my idea of a museum. It was basically a room full of stuffed animals. He'd created an artificial forest and peopled it with quadrupeds. And he was very careful. He labelled them all. He got some kind of taxonomy working. He was one of the founding members of the Carl Linnaean Society. So he did have some scientific pretensions, but also he was a huckster and a showman. And alongside all these animals, you can walk through an artificial jungle.

There were also examples of Militaria and Napoleon's armoured coach that was captured from the Battle of Waterloo, that was on display. And one of the most politically incorrect exhibits ever to grace London was the Hottentot Venus. And his exhibition, which today you can't even talk about, even mention this thing in polite society today. But it was called the interior of Africa, and he'd got a stuffed giraffe. He'd built an African village. But these two businessmen, inverted commas, from Cape Colony, Mr. Felix Caesar Hendricks

and William Dunlop, a retired Scottish surgeon, brought a woman called Sarah Bartman. And she was exhibited solely, I think, for the lascivious entertainment of men on account of her extremely prominent buttocks. And this, even at the time, was totally, totally unacceptable. In 1807, you'd had the slavery act had been passed people were very very anti the idea that a african woman could be shown in a museum or as an entertainment a court action was brought the show was terminated, and poor old Sarah Bartman was eventually palmed off to somebody in a sham marriage and exported to France. But that's a whole different story. William Bullock then goes on to create something called the Egyptian House, which was a building that is so fantastical

that it's a great pity it was demolished. This Egyptian Hall existed between 1812 and was finally demolished in 1905, but it had to pay for itself, and it paid for itself by exhibitions, but they weren't even of any merit. They were what I would call, and you would call, freak shows. It was rather like a version of Ripley's Believe It or Not. He'd had his fingers burnt with the hot and top Venus, so then he tried the world's thinnest man. And this was a poor Frenchman called Claude Seurat, who was otherwise known as the human skeleton. He exhibited him to a hushed audience. You know, the curtains would part, the spotlight would focus on this poor benighted Frenchman who was wearing basically a loincloth.

People would pay half a crown to see this. But you also had the world's fattest man who lived in Albany or lived across the road, Daniel Lambert, the Irish giant Patrick Cotter O'Brien, who was eight feet tall, an absolute prodigy. He exhibited the Siamese twins, genuine Siamese twins, during the lifetime of his tenure at the Egyptian Hall. It's interesting you talk about the expression Hottentot, Egyptian Hall, people from Ireland. This does feel like London is the capital of the world. There's a huge international, multicultural, as we would say in many ways it's tasteful now but you're bringing the world to the people of london it sounds like that is 100 correct before the

zoological gardens opened in regent's park people never seen most of these you know polar bears lions and everything else they might have read about them in adventure books but this chap william bullock was actually showing stuffed versions. Then he got much more sophisticated. He actually visited Mexico, came back with a Mexican and a Mexican village and a whole load of Mexican artifacts. People were flabbergasted. He did the same thing for Lapland. He did the same thing for Lapland. He came back with a stuffed reindeer, with a load of laps, wearing traditional costumes, sledges, a snow scene.

And at the height of the obsession with Egypt, his pièce de résistance was an authentic recreation of the tomb of Thseudomosis in Thebes. And this was a plaster cast. Historically, it was 100% accurate. It is something like the cast courts at the Victoria and Albert Museum. And people, for the first time, they might have seen hieroglyphics up close. So it was, the empire was feeding in to Piccadilly. And Piccadilly was also becoming absolutely more multicultural. People were opening their minds to the world. It was a very adventurous mindset. Of course, the interesting thing, obviously, William Bullock retired. He actually retired in style. He went native, literally. He got so obsessed with Mexico, he went back there. And then he traveled on to the United States, where he founded a town in Louisiana and stayed there for the rest of his life. He died there. Then there was another chappy

who rented the Egyptian Hall of Mr. George Lackington, a bookseller who had made a fortune. And he pursued a slightly different course. I think George Lackington, he leased it out to showmen. And that is the first time that you're getting a United States influence coming in. P.T. Barnum of Barnum and Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth. This was his first venture in London. And he brought with him a sort of minute fellow, about 15 inches high, called General Tom Thumb, Eugene Stratton, who was a dwarf, and dressed him up as a soldier, gave him a horse and coach. And he's said to have displayed him in Piccadilly

driving this miniature coach around to drum up custom. Queen Victoria even commanded for General Tom Thumb to come and entertain her at Windsor Castle, which he did. So I think you're beginning to see an American connection, which is continued in a place called St. James's Hall, further up Piccadilly, but it's got strong links to the Egyptian Hall, where the hot-and-top Venus embarrassed and shamed Britain. There was a form of entertainment which is so, again, shameful. A minstrel troupe,

white men who blacked up, you know, blackface troupe. Again, that created a lot of criticism in the States, but people in this country loved it. I think it says something about lowbrow taste and Piccadilly, because if you think about the BBC, they staged a programme called The Black and White Minstrel Show, The George Mitchell Singers, which was last aired in 1967, the year that Jimi Hendrix started appearing at the Roundhouse on the Hammersmith Palais. I went to see Jimi Hendrix, but I hated the black and white minstrels. You listen to Dan Snow's history talking about London's West End and all its gritty detail. More coming up. Some things just take too long.

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There are new episodes every week. What about the hedonism? Something that's perhaps less popular in Britain, made people very nervous, nightclubs, staying out late, taking drugs. When do we start to see that in that area? That's a very interesting question, Dan. There was always a current of severe disrespectability. If I could rephrase your question a bit, I think it was the presence of so many rich and powerful men, aristocrats, people with no morals, but enormous sums of money to spend that attracted a very loose nightlife they clearly wanted entertainment and the authorities began to crack down on this but there were shows in leicester square for example at the alhambra the Empire Theatre, which purported to be ballets,

but in fact the ballet dancers wore flesh-coloured tights and very skimpy outfits. It was almost legalised prostitution because in the Alhambra Theatre there was something called the Theatre Promenade, a mezzanine in the theatre where men could sit at the table and dine while watching the scantily clad ballerinas strutting their stuff. But alongside the men were prostitutes soliciting for business so that you could watch the show, say, come over here, you know, let's go off and form an assignation. There were numerous places like Evans' Song and Supper Rooms, which again were a front for prostitution. And the early music halls were basically associated with what were the old coaching inns.

And again, the females who acted in there were renowned for their loose morals. So there was a whole range of Victorian social reformers and moral crusaders who were really protesting about this stuff. The government could bring in a licensing act to close restaurants and pubs in about, I think this was in about 1898, the first licensing act where your premises had to close at 12.30.

Thereafter, they started to license nightclubs, which were not nightclubs as we know it, but more ad hoc song and supper rooms where men and women would dance together, canoodle, do all kinds of naughty things. I think the government started to intervene in a serious way during the First World War with the Defense of the Realm Act. In the very early days, I think 1912, the very first Parisian-style nightclub set up in London was known as Ciro's that actually had a cabaret act. The whole place was closed down in 1916 under the Defence of the Realm Act and was turned into a hospital for wounded officers coming back from the trenches. The government's attempt to suppress nightclubs

led to their going underground, becoming in effect speakeasies, and the kind of axis of nightclubs shifts from Piccadilly towards Soho, where you've got basement nightclubs, you've got a mixture, a heady mixture of jazz music, drugs, and loose women. I suppose the most extreme examples or the most obvious example would be Murray's Cabaret Club, founded in 1916. That lasted till the mid-60s. Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davis were hostesses at this cabaret club. And I think Christine Keeler was a photograph of her wearing a sort of feathered headdress and very little else.

And she said she was just paid to walk around naked. There are a lot of other very similar clubs which somehow evaded strict and stricter licensing laws by getting around them entirely with something called bottle parties, where although the premises were not licensed to serve alcohol after a certain time, there was a get-out clause that if a guest had pre-ordered a bottle of champagne, let's say, or a dozen bottles of champagne, then these would be served to that person on the premises. The most extreme example was a nightclub called Shea Victor in Grafton Street. I think I said I was in 1924. One of the most distinguished visitors,

and this is why they couldn't close them down, was the Prince of Wales, and Louis Mountbatten, and Edwina Mountbattenten and all of that crowd of people surrounding the royal court. Now the police were keeping their powder dry waiting to pounce and they did so a certain night in November 1927 when the Prince of Wales was due to meet a delegation of foreign dignitaries to take them to the Cenotaph. They knew that he wouldn't be having a late night at Chez Victor. So they came in, closed the place down, arrested a number of the clients, rounded them up, took them away in police vans.

And poor old Chez Victor himself, an Italian, was deported and he was not allowed back in the country. So you've got these sort of things happening i love it the prince of wales must have been absolutely furious about that that's brilliant i think he was but after he met mrs simpson he kind of retreated to fort belvedere and his tweeds and his famous argyle terrier so i think even he old age crept up on him and it happens it happens steven i'll tell you so for people listening abroad or further afield who don't know the joys of picket lee today the interesting is that that spirit has endured it's still a place full of recreation nightlife very cosmopolitan and clearly that history still exerts a profound force.

Indeed. Let's take Ronnie Scott's. Go to Soho and you will see a nightclub, Ronnie Scott's Jazz. You can get served at table, listen to jazz. It's all above board. It's fantastic. There were all sorts of clubs like the Marquis, the 100 Club, also Grouchos and the Colony Room,

it all still exists, more or less, you know, Soho House. All of these places owe their existence to clubs that were run by mainly West Indian entrepreneurs who, in the interwar years, were breaking the law. There's this kind of intersection between the Caribbean West Indian diaspora and jazz music and entertainment. Initially, the police were down on them like a ton of bricks. They used to raid these premises, but a lot of them became respectable. There's a place called the Florence Mills Social Club. Florence Mills was Britain's answer to Josephine Baker, a sort of a black singer and entertainer

who performed on the stage of the London Pavilion. She founded her own club. Subsequently became the Blue Lagoon and it was said that you had to hand your coat and hat and your gun in the cloakroom on your way in and collect them on the way out but some of those clubs the 43 club which was a loose nightclub lasted until the 1960s i think was renamed something else but paul mccney went, as did Jimi Hendrix, and there was a connection, a pedigree of these West Indian clubs like the Shim Sham Club,

the Plantation Club, all manner of clubs which promoted jazz music, imported stars from America, which promoted jazz music, imported stars from America, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, getting an English audience used to American jazz, and that jazz going mainstream. And is the future bright for Piccadilly? That's a good question. I think it is. I think last year's lockdowns dealt a very serious blow to the theatres. Everything in Piccadilly is built like a house of cards.

Restaurants depend on theatres, theatres depend on restaurants, they all depend on hotels because of the tourist trade. Once you lose one link in that chain, then everything becomes very difficult to resurrect. And I don't think the government's package of help for the artistic industries is doing an awful lot other than support shows which would be a success anyway. I think that at the margin, some theatres are bound to close, uneconomic places, but history has shown us that major disruptive events like the First World War, like the Blitz, like the Great Plague, Piccadilly started as a refuge from the London Plague. People fled from

the City of London and set up houses and businesses outside the walls of the City of London in what the greenfields of Piccadilly. But after the Second World War, things were looking pretty bleak for the West End. And I think with all of those buildings, you've got enough entrepreneurial va-va-voom of people to set up new ideas. You have spaces, but the spaces should not dictate what perhaps is shown there. There must be a lot of people with tight budgets, willing, ready to use public spaces as performance venues. to use public spaces as performance venues.

I mean, the 60s, for example, you had clubs springing up like Middle Earth in Covent Garden, small basement coffee clubs. I think the real money spinners will be small businesses, small arts venues, small coffee houses, which attract artistic types. And I think the West End still has this atmosphere. It's too big to fail. I mean, you've still got the wealth there.

And it's still a tourist attraction, whatever people may say. It's still one of the biggest cities on Earth. In a world of identikit digital experiences and identikit cities and towns, it's nice to go somewhere with that history and that energy, I agree Stephen Hawke, thank you very much for coming on the podcast Well thank you Dan, thanks Thanks folks, you've made it to the end of the episode Congratulations, well, all work out. And finish. Thanks, folks.

You've made it to the end of the episode. Congratulations. Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great.

Thank you very much indeed. That really does make a huge difference. It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account. So please don't ever do that. It can seem like a small thing, but actually it's kind of a big deal for us. I really appreciate it. See you next time. Some things just take too long.

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