This, Mr. Charrington thought, was quite enough, and after he had done all he could, by personal influence, to deter respectable people from going to a certain notorious East End hall, in due course he opposed the license at the Quarter Sessions at Clerkenwell.
This, however, had but little result. Although in one year he actually proved by witnesses prostitution to be going on in three parts of the premises of the hall in question. To his horror and amazement, the magistrates (with a few noble exceptions) allowed the license to continue, although every minister of religion in East London, including the Bishop of Bedford, and 1800 respectable inhabitants, signed the protest against the house as "the nightly resort of prostitutes."
Mr. Charrington's worst fears as to the evil results of music halls were one morning more than confirmed by reading in the Daily News—
"On Saturday morning a young medical student named R—— shot himself with a revolver while at a house in Brompton Crescent, Fulham Road, where he had passed the night. It appears that he met a female outside the Pavilion Music Hall on Friday night, and accompanied her to her home. In the morning, during her absence to get some tea for him, the report of firearms was heard. Police constable S——, of the B. Division, was called in, and found the deceased lying on the bed, bleeding from the forehead, with a six-chambered revolver fully loaded under his leg, with the exception of one which had recently been discharged. Dr. R—— saw the man soon afterwards and found life extinct. A letter was found upon the deceased addressed to his mother in Mildmay Park, Islington. The deceased was about twenty years of age, and was a pupil to Dr. L——, of Kensington."
Now the mother of this unhappy young man had been previously asked to assist him financially in his campaign against the music halls. She was the only person Mr. Charrington had ever asked to help him. She was a very wealthy woman, but nevertheless she refused utterly!
Mr. Charrington's mind was made up. A definite campaign was determined on, and the determination resulted in a battle which, for its sheer fearlessness, audacity, and far-reaching consequences, is probably unexampled in the chronicles of missionary effort in England.
In order that the personal testimony of Mr. Charrington may be supplemented by public words, I quote what Punch said in one of its issues at that period.
"It is, however, in the disgraceful scenes enacted in the drinking-bars and saloons attached to these halls that the greatest evils exist—evils which cannot fail of exercising a fatal influence upon the frequenters of these places, of both sexes, who, in the first instance, go to hear a song, but become initiated in vice and immorality, rendered more easy and dangerous by the seductive influences by which they are surrounded. The more respectable the hall, the more prominent is this feature. These saloons are filled by men about town of all ages and conditions, with and without characters. There may be seen the young and inexperienced clerk, the heartless skittle-sharp and blackleg, the patrician roué and the plebeian fancy-man. This mixed crowd of folly and vice keep up a continued chattering, composed of obscene and vulgar repartees, to the great annoyance of the decent tradesman or working man who, accompanied by his wife or sweetheart, may have visited the hall with the delusive hope of hearing some good singing, but whose ears are thus polluted with vulgarity and slang. It is this sort of thing that has driven, and is driving, the respectable portion of society from these halls; and it is to provide attraction for the more spicy patrons that comic ladies and other sensation performances have been introduced. In these saloons the scenes that used to be enacted in the lobbies and saloons of theatres are reproduced, even in a worse and more offensive form."
The first definite step that Mr. Charrington took was to write a tract, which he caused to be disseminated very largely.
I give extracts from it here. It is not a great literary effort by any means—Frederick Charrington's life has been far too strenuous for any dilettante toying with words. But it is, at any rate, a direct and forcible appeal, written in language which those for whose ears it was destined were well able to understand.