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Marie Lloyd, Dr Crippen and the Bedford Music Hall in Camden

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Marie Lloyd at home in 1921, a year before she died.

There is a strange, but rather brilliant documentary, directed in 1967 by Norman Cohen, called The London Nobody Knows, the beginning of which features a slightly incongruous James Mason, in very smart polished shoes, gingerly stepping over the literally putrefying remains of an old music hall theatre.

The building was the Bedford Music Hall on Camden High Street and it was said to be Marie Lloyd’s favourite place to perform. Unfortunately the theatre closed permanently in 1959 and the sad, rotting building was eventually demolished ten years later. Two years after nearly ruining James Mason’s brogues.

Excerpt from The London That Nobody Knows

At one point in the film James Mason mentions, with a wry smile on his face, that an early regular performer at the Music Hall may well have still been haunting the place -- a local singer called Belle Elmore.

Elmore’s stage career was relatively unsuccessful and her name is unknown to most of us today, especially as a Music Hall artiste. However, after her death in 1910 she achieved notoriety throughout the land, not as a singer, but as the murdered wife of the infamous Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen.

The Bedford Theatre in 1949

Belle Elmore in 1900, ten years before she was murdered by her husband.

Dr Crippen

Before the infamous Doctor had murdered Elmore and subsequently burnt her bones in the oven, dissolved her internal organs in an acid bath, buried what was left of the torso under bricks in the basement and placed her decapitated head in a handbag which was subsequently thrown overboard on a day-trip to Dieppe, the married couple lived at 39 Hilldrop Crescent. It was quite a salubrious address about a mile from the Bedford Music Hall.

Hilldrop Crescent near Holloway in 1910

Dr Crippen is notorious, of course, for being the first murderer to be arrested with the use of telephony when, during an attempted escape to Canada on the SS Montrose with his young lover Ethel Le Neve, Captain Henry George Kendall sent a telegraph back to England saying:

Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers. Moustache taken off growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Manner and build undoubtedly a girl.

Chief Inspector Dew, who had already once interviewed Crippen and initially decided that he was innocent, took the faster White Line steamer -- the SS Laurentic -- to Canada. On the 31 July 1910 the Inspector greeted the couple when they met him on the ship:

Good morning, Dr Crippen. Do you know me? I’m Chief Inspector Dew from Scotland Yard.

After a pause, Crippen replied,

Thank God it’s over. The suspense has been too great. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

Crippen then held out his arms for his handcuffs. Dew later recalled:

Old Crippen took it quite well. He always was a bit of a philosopher, though he could not have helped being astounded to see me on board the boat. He was quite a likeable chap in his way.

Chief Inspector Walter Dew

Dr Crippen being led off the SS Montrose, seemingly by one of the Thompson twins but more likely by Chief Inspector Dew

Ethel Le Neve circa 1910

The final resting place of a bit of Belle Elmore

The Hallway at 39 Hilldrop Crescent

Crippen and Ethel Le Neve were tried separately by the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey and Crippen, likeable philosopher or not, was found guilty after just 27 minutes by the jury and subsequently hanged at Pentonville prison in November 1910. Ethel Le Neve, however, was acquitted and only died in 1967 -- not long after James Mason was filmed exploring what was left of the Bedford Music Hall.

The Old Bailey during the trial of Dr Crippen August 10th 1910

James Mason in his piece about the old theatre in Camden failed to relate that only nine years after Marie Lloyd’s fiftieth birthday celebrations (which were incidentally held at the Bedford), and seven years after her death in 1922, the comic-actor Peter Sellers actually lived at the Bedford with his mother and grandmother in a rented flat above the entrance in Camden High Street.

Sellers’ mother was performing at the Bedford in a production called ‘Ha!Ha!!Ha!!!’ along with his father. When the revue finished, Peter’s father Bill suddenly decided to leave home forever, leaving Peter, his mother, and grandmother to totally fend for themselves while still living upstairs at the theatre. Sellers may well have been still living in the flat above the Bedford when he performed, at the age of five, with his mother in a revue called Splash Me! at the Windmill theatre in Great Windmill Street.

The Bedford Theatre’s fortunes eventually declined and, like many other theatres and converted cinemas in London, it eventually capitulated to its unavoidable fate when it fell dark completely in 1959.

Bedford House on Camden High Street in 2007

Dr Crippen’s old address, 39 Hilldrop Crescent, was spared the indignity of being demolished at the whim of a sixties Camden council planning meeting, but only because it was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War. It was replaced, like so many other buildings, by a nondescript block of flats. Another nondescript block was built to replace the Bedford Theatre. It is still known as Bedford House though.

39 Hilldrop Crescent today

Marie Lloyd and Claire Loumaine 1913

If Heat magazine, or perhaps Perez Hilton, had existed before the First World War they would have surely printed the picture above which features a 43 year old Marie Lloyd embracing and kissing a woman called Claire Loumaine. The photograph was taken on 25th April at Paddington Station where the music hall star had gone to meet Loumaine on her return from Australia.

Does anyone know who Claire Loumaine is? I can’t find anything about her at all.

Nine years after Marie Lloyd greeted her close friend off the train at Paddington the music hall star collapsed on stage during a rendition of one of her most famous songs I’m One of the Ruins That Cromwell Knocked About a Bit. The crowd continued laughing thinking that the staggering around that preceded the fall was all part of her act. Lloyd was desperately ill however, and died soon after on 7th October 1922. One hundred thousand people were reported to have attended her funeral five days later in Hampstead.

A twenty year old Marie Lloyd in 1890

Marie Lloyd -- A Little Of What You Fancy Does You Good

Tags: funeral, Metropolitan Police, murder, music hall, trial
Posted in Camden, Holloway | 18 Comments »

Camden Town, Verlaine and Rimbaud, a toilet, Sid Sods Off and the McAlpine Fusiliers

Monday, December 31st, 2007

‘Those were wild days you know’

The Electric Ballroom opened in 1978 and, amongst others, Public Enemy, Joy Division, Madness, U2, The Smiths, The Pogues and Iggy Pop have all been on the famous Camden stage. However the place, initially called The Buffalo, has long been part of the Camden nightlife and originally opened in the mid-thirties catering for the large numbers of Irish immigrants who lived locally. It was a rough and ready sort of place with different tribes of drunken Irishman fighting every weekend and after the police were called out one too many times the ballroom eventually closed down.

At the end of 1937 The Buffalo was saved by a red-haired Irish man, a 20 year old contractor and amateur wrestler from Kerry called Bill Fuller. It was still a tough place – “We’d get all the Connemara lads in, and they were all well used to fighting, those were wild days you know”. In 1941 a bomb fell on Camden Town Tube station that also blew away the back of The Buffalo as well as the adjacent terrace, Fuller took the chance to extend the ballroom so it could now hold 2000 people.

The Big Bands all played there, the most famous of which was led by Joe Loss, one of whose singers was named Ross McManus – the father of Elvis Costello. McManus was the man who wrote and sang the song The Secret Lemonade Drinker in the famous R Whites Lemonade commercial which featured a man in striped pyjamas creeping downstairs to raid the fridge for lemonade. His yet to be famous teenage son sang backing vocals.

Jim’s not playing

In February 1964, to great excitement to the locals, the Country and Western star Jim Reeves was booked to play at The Buffalo. It’s difficult to believe now, but at the time and as far as the local Irish Catholic community was concerned, if there had been a popularity contest Jim Reeves would have come somewhere between the Pope and John F Kennedy. Reeves had but one request on his rider – the piano must be in tune. Unfortunately the piano wasn’t in tune, and the star’s manager turned to the promoter and said ‘Jim’s not playing’. By this time the ballroom was utterly packed with expectant punters and the manager of the ballroom and his staff soon realised what was likely to happen. They took the not inconsiderable amount of money from the cash box, hid it in a manhole behind the building and to a man did a runner. It didn’t take long for the audience to know what was going on and they began to riot and smash up the place. The police soon arrived, literally riding into the ballroom on horseback to disperse the crowd.

Jim Reeves died in a plane crash just five months later and never had the chance to return to Camden. Luckily, he lived a lot in his time:

Sid Sods Off

In July 1978 Bill Fuller, along with the former tour manager of Thin Lizzy, Frank Murray, changed the old two-levelled ballroom into a rock venue, renaming it to The Electric Ballroom. Sid Vicious formed a band called the Vicious White Kids which included the original Pistol’s bassist Glen Matlock (the musician he ironically replaced in the Pistols) and played their one and only gig just two weeks after the renamed ballroom opened. The gig was entitled ‘Sid Sods Off’ – the point being to raise his and Nancy Spungen’s air fare to the US. Shane MacGowan remembered the concert – “It was a great band and the place was packed out with a really hip audience. There were a lot of transactions going down – people joining groups, buying drugs, fucking each other in toilets, you know, the usual stuff.” A fortnight later, Sid and Nancy, as promised, did sod off, of course never to return.

You Really Look Like A Dick!

For me, my glory is but an ‘humble ephemeral absinthe’

Drunk on the sly, with fear of treason

And if I drink no longer, it is for good reason!

Paul Verlaine

Camden Town is world-renowned for its music scene, but two former Camden inhabitants had a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle that most of the musicians who live or work in the London borough these days can only dream about, perhaps even Amy Winehouse, and the two men lived there over 130 years ago.

There is a small plaque, placed anonymously in the 1950s, on the wall of number 8 Royal College Street in Camden – it marks where the French poets Verlaine and Rimbaud lived, somewhat rumbustiously, during the year 1873.

Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 and from the age of 6 was brought up solely by his mother. He ran away from home consistently during his childhood and eventually left home to join the Paris Commune in 1871. He had already decided that he was to be an anarchist and a poet, and had started drinking very heavily. He sent poems to the eminent poets of the time, one of whom was the symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, and due to the ridiculously prodigious quality of Rimbaud’s writing and troubled home-life he invited him to stay at his family house in Paris.

Verlaine, who was ten years older than Rimbaud and was until then happily married with a small baby boy, promptly fell in love with the sullen blue-eyed adolescent prodigy and he left his wife. The two lovers scandalised literary Paris with their general licentious behaviour usually involving absinthe or drug-taking of some sort. They eventually ran away, initially to Brussels but then travelling to the huge and haphazard city of London, losing themselves amongst the hundreds of thousands of refugees and where they revelled in the city’s strange language:

Dans le brouillard rose et jaune et sale des sohos

Avec des indeeds et des all rights et des haos

Le feu du ciel sur cette ville de la Bible

In the pink and yellow and dirty fog of the Sohos

With ‘indeeds’ and ‘alrights’ and ‘hos’

O Heaven’s fire fall on this city of the Bible

Both were at the height of their poetical powers and were writing poetry that remains central to 19th century French literature, but they were desperately poor and advertised in the Daily Telegraph, offering lessons in French, Latin and Literature and promising ‘perfection’ and ‘finesse’. However the beginning of the end of their stormy, infamous relationship took place while living in Camden and summed up their life together being equally comic and grotesque.

Verlaine had gone to the market in Camden for lunch and brought back two kippers and some oil to cook them in. He was holding the kippers out in front of him at arm’s length and Rimbaud sitting on the window ledge of the room they rented at the top of the house caught site of his older lover and burst out laughing. When he knew Verlaine was in earshot he shouted out ‘Ce que tu as l’air con!’ (You really look like a dick!). Verlaine, with all the dignity he could muster, walked quietly into the house, packed his case and while not saying a word walked out of the door. Rimbaud tried, but failed, to get him to see the funny side of his comment, but Verlaine hailed a cab and subsequently caught a ferry from St Katherine’s Dock to Belgium.

A week later they were briefly reunited in Brussels, but after a drunken night full of arguments and fighting. Their fights often involved one or both of them drawing knives or razors, however this time Verlaine went further and shot Rimbaud through the wrist. Verlaine was arrested and subsequently imprisoned, officially for assault, although realistically it was for sodomy. The two lovers never met again.

Sanitary Accommodation

George Bernard Shaw was a councillor in the borough of Camden between 1897 and 1906 and championed the cause and energetically campaigned, for “the unmentionable question of sanitary accommodation” for women. He also thought that the normal charge of one penny “an absolutely prohibitive charge for a poor woman.” He was criticised by other councillors who thought that women who so far ‘forgot their sex’ did not deserve toilets. Despite this eventually Shaw got his way and in 1910, at the junction of Parkway and Camden High Street, he was more than responsible for the first ever purposely built free public convenience for women in the United Kingdom.

Building on an angry hangover

One of the best songs written and recorded by Madness, but less well-known than many, is One Better Day which has the opening line Arlington House, address: no fixed abode. The song was written about a huge homeless shelter, one of a chain of hostels, built in 1905 by the Victorian philanthropist Lord Rowton. Rowton wanted to provide clean and healthy accommodation for working men, who in those days were forced to stay in filthy and flea-ridden lodging houses or often, of course, nowhere at all.

George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London written in 1936 wrote about Arlington House, “The best lodging houses are the Rowton Houses, where the charge is a shilling

, for which you get a cubicle to yourself, and the use of excellent bathrooms. You can also pay half a crown for a special, which is practically hotel accommodation. The Rowton Houses are splendid buildings, and the only objection to them is the strict discipline, with rules against cooking, card playing, etc.”

Other writers who have in their time stayed at Arlington House are the Irish poets Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh who wrote in his autobiography The Green Fool – ‘Many Irish boys made Rowton House, Camden Town, first stop from Mayo…the soft voices of Mayo and Galway sounding in that gaunt impersonal place fell like warm rain on the arid patches of my imagination. These boys were true peasants. They walked with an awkward gait and were shy. To me they looked up as to a learned man and asked me questions I couldn’t answer.’

The area around Camden has had a large Irish community since the 1840s when waves of Irish emigration occurred mainly because of the devastating famines in Ireland, but also because of the workforce needed to build the network of railways spreading across Britain at an incredible rate. After the Second World War another generation of Irish immigrants arrived to help re-build ‘on an angry hangover’ swathes of London destroyed by the German bombs. Thousands of men mostly from rural close-knit communities descended on London working ‘on the lump’ for Murphy, John Laing, Wimpey and McAlpine. Many of these hard-working, hard-drinking Irish navvies, especially as they grew older, became destitute and alcoholic and often both, ended up living at Arlington House. It still exists as a hostel today with a third of its inhabitants of Irish extraction – victims of displacement and poverty amongst what has become one of the flashier and trendier parts of London.