Into the limelight

The online accessibility of British population censuses has resulted in an outpouring  of ‘who and how we were’, keeping amateur genealogists, local historians and social commentators extremely busy. Barry Anthony’s book relies heavily on the censuses of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, combined with a close reading of the astonishingly detailed stage magazines and papers such as the Era and the Entr’acte, to flesh out what we know of the early life of England’s most famous comic actor.

Charlie Chaplin’s stage career was not long; he seems to have seen, in some flash of foresight, that film was the coming medium and by 1914 he had transferred his gifts from theatre to screen. But one of his great late films, Limelight, released in 1952, is entirely rooted in his experiences of the London music halls of his youth.

The chapters of this book are on the formative figures around the young Chaplin — his mother, his father, their friends and relations, all of whom were performers in the halls. Most are obscure and the author demonstrates dogged research into the dilapidated outhouses of music-hall history.

It is an unedifying picture of minor ‘stars’, neither big enough to maintain a public following over a long period nor sharp enough to adapt to the quick-changing fashions of the ‘old’, intimate music hall as it became swallowed up by the big and brash Variety Theatre. Their tiny flames are only kept alive by aficionados of the halls such as Anthony, who piles up the squalid details of drink, violence and dissolution.

The scene for most of these south London catastrophes was Kennington Road and its environs. This was the favoured location for the underbelly of the halls: it was near the theatre agencies in Waterloo and popular halls such as the Canterbury, Gatti’s and the South London Palace.