For a while the institution flourished greatly. It was named the Savoy Club—on the lucus a non lucendo principle—and by those who had not been chosen for membership it was nicknamed “the Saveloy.” A continuous conviviality was the dominant note of the establishment. The hours kept by the members were astounding. The pace, in a word, was too fast. And in a couple of years the Savoy closed its doors, the unfortunate mariner who founded it having lost in the venture the savings of a lifetime.
It was at the Savoy that I first met John Hollingshead. After the closing of his theatre he would drop in of a night, generally accompanied by one or two members of the Gaiety company. No man ever undertook the management of a playhouse with less practical knowledge of the stage than Hollingshead; no man ever conducted a theatre more successfully, and to no man is the public more indebted for the amelioration of the condition of that portion of it which patronizes the drama. Hollingshead was a man of sound common-sense, never hide-bound by tradition, and always possessing the courage of his opinions. These were the characteristics which he brought to bear on the unknown enterprise of theatrical management. And so considerable was the success attending the application of his principles to the unfamiliar task which he had undertaken, that in the course of a few years he became known all over “the profession” by the sobriquet of “Practical John.”
It is true that after a successful managerial career lasting over many years his luck deserted him, and his theatre fell into other hands, but the period of undimmed success during which he kept burning that which he called “the sacred lamp of burlesque” was one upon which he might look back with considerable satisfaction. He was in many directions a reformer. He abolished the programme fee. He refused to sublet his cloak-rooms to the harpies who at that time held an undisputed monopoly for at once incommoding and fleecing the playgoers who booked for the stalls and boxes. He was the first man in London who installed the electric light. He did not, indeed, use it as an illuminant inside his theatre—electric lighting was in its infancy, and had not as yet been tried as an indoor illuminant—but he burned a fierce, if blinking, electric globe over the main entrance to the Gaiety, and he should have the obituary honours due to the pioneer.
Gradually I became on intimate terms with Hollingshead, and remained a friend of his until his lamented death. Some millions—I am speaking by the card—had passed through his hands to actors, authors, musicians, and the rest of the vast army required to carry on the business of a successful theatre. Yet he died in somewhat straitened circumstances. His courage and his equable temper, however, did not desert him. He was a bit of a fatalist, I fancy. He spoke jauntily of being “equal to either fortune.” Originally he had been on the Press. He was one of the staff of Charles Dickens on Household Words and All the Year Round. He wrote for Thackeray on the Cornhill, and for Norman Macleod on Good Words. Indeed, in the sixties his work was in general demand by the magazine editors. The daily paper with which he was most intimately associated was the Daily News, for which his particular friend Moy Thomas was dramatic critic. When he severed his connection with journalism, he characteristically observed that a journalist is like a barrel-organ—wound up to play so many tunes, and that when he has “run down” it is time for him to retire. Which, I may parenthetically mention, would have been a sad doctrine for some of us.
No figure was more familiar in the Strand, Garrick Street, and the West End than that of Hollingshead in the halcyon days of the Gaiety. His good looks, his neat attire, his silvery hair, his hat cocked a trifle on one side, his brisk walk, his cheery expression, and his generally debonair appearance, suggested even to the outsider the busy, competent, yet good-natured, man of affairs. He was an excellent talker, very fond of paradox. A utilitarian philosopher, he was a follower of Jeremy Bentham. It was difficult to gather from his views as given in conversation what his political convictions really were. I once asked him the question. He readily replied in that curious but modulated falsetto of his. “I’m a Tory Socialist,” was his answer.
The stalls of the Gaiety—more particularly the front row of the stalls—were filled with the jeunesse dorée of the period. These young gentlemen were each interested in the career of one of the shapely vestals who tended Hollingshead’s “sacred lamp.” A somewhat lavish display of figure was then de rigueur with the chorus ladies. It had not yet become the fashion for young men to marry into the chorus—so to say; but the young swells made other arrangements which—in those days—the chorus lady regarded as eminently satisfactory. So the fortunes of the chorus ebbed and flowed. I have called at the ineligible rooms of a chorus lady while she was lunching on fried liver and bacon; her hair was in curling-pins, and her principal article of attire was a far from cleanly peignoir. She has called me by endearing terms, and there was nothing in the world she would not surrender to me in return for a newspaper notice a line long. In a week’s time I have seen the same young woman drive up to the Gaiety in her own victoria, loaded with jewels, dressed in a Parisian inspiration, and with a crop of golden hair which spoke volumes for the prolific nature of the foreign soil in which it grew. Her attitude toward myself had changed as perceptibly as had her coiffure, “Hello, old chappie!” she has cried, with an amusing affectation of high-bred hauteur.
The swagger stallites who had organized themselves into a beauty cult at the Gaiety displayed every variety of what Tennyson called “the gilded forehead of the fool.” These young gentlemen were known as “mashers” (the object of their temporary devotions was known as a “mash”); as “Johnnies” and as “members of the Crutch and Toothpick Brigade.” In this race for the overrated favours of the chorus lady they were often beaten by the elderly “masher”—the fatuous old roué of the wig, the stays, the pigments, and the unguents. In these, as in all other civil contracts, it is money that matters, after all.
If Hollingshead played burlesque as his trump card, it must be recalled, in justice to his memory, that he instituted the matinée in London; and that he instituted it, not as the vehicle for amateur authors who played with problems, and called the result “problem plays,” but as the means of introducing to the London public (or re-introducing) the greatest living exponents of the highest examples of dramatic literature. He brought over from Paris the entire company of the House of Molière. He engaged Charles Mathews to play in a series of his memorable and delightful performances. And if I don’t mistake, he gave that veteran actor the opportunity of enacting a new part in a new-play, “My Awful Dad.” He afforded us the opportunity of seeing Phelps in his rendering of Sir Pertinax MacSycophant in Macklin’s “Man of the World,” probably the finest all-round bit of acting I have even been privileged to witness.
Knowing “Practical John,” I soon came to know the members of his company, the bright, particular star of which was Miss Nellie Farren. Miss Farren was the embodiment of the very spirit of burlesque. She was fun personified. And although she had the support always of a distinguished company—it included such men as Toole, Edward Terry, Royce, and John MacLean, and such women as Constance Loseby and Kate Vaughan—the whole weight of the production seemed to fall on Nellie Farren’s shoulders, and she lifted it how, and where, and when she pleased. Off the stage Miss Farren was quite as amusing as on. She had the rare gift of spontaneous humour, a fine flow of animal spirits, an unfailing good temper, the whole shot through with a certain indefinable Cockney quality which gave to everything she said its hall-mark. I do not think I ever spent more enjoyable afternoons than on those Sundays when Miss Farren was at home to her friends at Sunbury. She had bought two cottages near the gates of Kempton Park, and had them knocked into one. And here, on Sundays, the merry little châtelaine received her friends. And some very jovial gatherings we had on those Sunbury sabbaths. The outstanding characteristic of the average actress when off the stage is an obvious artificiality. The charm of the Farren’s society was in her frank naturalness, her ingenuous honesty.
Nellie Farren was the wife of Robert Soutar, the stage-manager of the Gaiety, a comic actor of limited range, and the author of some popular farces. An extremely convivial soul when off the stage, he was regarded as a martinet while on it, and during the entire period of his stage-management hardly a day passed without a rehearsal being called on some pretence or another. For this reason he was highly disapproved of by the chorus, toward the members of which his sentiments were sometimes conveyed with brutal directness. “It’s the only sort of language they understand,” he once said to me. Perhaps he was right, although the polished shafts of Byron’s irony often went home quite as surely. I have known a girl at rehearsal burst into tears under the suavely-spoken sarcasm of Byron, and I once received a letter of complaint from a member of a chorus illustrating one of his burlesques, in which the talented author of “Our Boys” was described as “a nasty, sneerin’ beest.”