Category Archives: Music Hall

Special Collections and Archives highlights: 2024 edition

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Karen Brayshaw, Special Collections and Archives Manager 

As 2024 draws to a close it is my great pleasure to look back on another busy and exciting year of activity in the University’s Special Collections and Archives. The only change to our Team this year is that we said goodbye our project archivist Daniella in the summer. Daniella worked with us on two funded projects, the David Drummond Pantomime Collection and the collection from the Craigmyle Fundraising Consultants.  The project included sorting, listing, repackaging, and making the two collections accessible and discoverable. You may have seen what she got up to on our social media channels. We wish Daniella well in her new venture. 

Daniella with some Aladdin material from the David Drummond Pantomime Collection.

The whole team have been amazing colleagues throughout the year – especially when I had to step back from work for a few months in order to recover from a health issue – I am very lucky to work with such an awesome team!  Although I’ve missed seeing the work that has taken place in the last three months, I have been able to follow the exciting events through colleagues and social media. One of the many highlights of the year for me was the amazing exhibition celebrating Kent’s rich mining history.  It was a great example of collaborative working with our volunteers and in this case we owe many thanks to Amy. It proved to be a popular attraction, and we had many visitors to the gallery, including external groups. As well as overseeing and co-curating our wonderful exhibitions, Beth has been busy working with the philanthropic community to grow the UK Philanthropy Archive and raising the funds to enable us to catalogue them. I’m looking forward to 2025 when much of this work will take place and the records will be added to our catalogue. Beth also has a loyal group of volunteers who come in regularly to work on the University archive, which will be super helpful next year as we approach the University’s 60th anniversary. Beth has also worked to deliver new and innovative sessions for external groups, and it was a joy to see the pantomime collection being utilised to stimulate the students from Canterbury College exploring ideas for their projects.  

Clair has had an amazing year, working to get more of our collections listed, repackaged, and added to the online catalogue for all to see. A significant amount of this has been made possible through the excellent work Clair does with student work placements and volunteers.  I was especially pleased to see the Holt’s Bairnsfather collection being listed and repackaged – you can read more about it below. Clair has also been busy this year overseeing loans of collection items for external exhibitions, which is another way of sharing our amazing collections with wider audiences.   

Christine has also been busy devising new sessions and introducing new material to the seminar groups, exposing the academics and students to the richness of our collections. In 2023 we were pleased to receive the Louis James collection and Christine has done an amazing job of cataloguing the whole lot! The collection is already proving its value in enriching our teaching offer and Christine is being a brilliant advocate for it. It’s also very satisfying to witness the great work Christine and her volunteers are doing with our theatre programme collection.   

Items from the Louis James Collection

Alex is keeping the Phase One rig busy and producing amazing images from the cartoon and theatre collections. This enables greater access as well as supporting the preservation of the collections. Mandy continues to beaver away making sure our cuttings collection is kept up to date. At the same time, she has been digitising some original art works and sheet music. Sam has been working on digitising and cataloguing collections in the British Cartoon Archive, specifically Lawrie Siggs and Donald Rooum Collections. You can now find the records for Lawrie Siggs on our catalogue. Jacqueline completed cataloguing the Arnold Rood collection, Jack Reading and Colin Rayner’s collection, Charles Lewen’s collection, and books from the David Drummond Pantomime collection. It’s always a joy to see what treasures she brings back from the basement!

Our colleagues from the Curation and Discovery team, Stu, Matthias and Emma have been working with us one day per week and continue to make big strides in dealing with our British Cartoon Library backlog as well as our digital cartoon collection and various book collections, making them available to everyone.   

I never cease to be amazed and humbled by the talented people that come to support us in our work. Our volunteer projects this year have yet again been hugely successful – many thanks to everyone who has helped us in 2024! – and we look forward to working with our current and new teams of volunteers in 2025. 

If you are on campus do drop by the Templeman Gallery, Block A|1. The team are currently installing a wonderful exhibition about pantomime (Oh yes they are!) which I promise will not disappoint you.  The new listening station has some lovely content on it. And do keep an eye on our social media channels for updates on our associated events.  

Sneak preview of our upcoming pantomime exhibition ‘Magnificent! Spectacular!’

Clair (Digital Archivist) 

Once again, the year has gone by super-fast and I feel as if I can only just recall all the amazing things the team has achieved this year, but there are a few stand outs for me.  

Firstly, we are so lucky to have worked with some amazing volunteers and placement students this year.I supervised a group of three students – Lizzie, Harvey and Nirvanna – who worked on packaging and preserving some ceramic objects in the British Cartoon Archive. You can read a blog post about this work here. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with our lovely volunteers, one of whom, Grahame, not only donated a collection of theatre programmes to us last February but also committed to listing them all for us! He’s now finished that work but continues to volunteer with us, working now on our Max Tyler collection. 

Completed packaging of Holt Bairnsfather Collection objects.

 

We’ve received some fabulous material for the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive this year which I’ve had the pleasure of sorting, accessioning and cataloguing, including three fan collections (Laura Grimshaw’s Teenage Obsessions, Richard Gill’s ‘A Rich Comic Life’ Collection, and the Joseph Champniss Collection), the Lakin McCarthy Entertainment Ltd Collection, and a collection of material from Stewart Lee.

Our loan service has been busy again this year, with British Cartoon Archive material going out to the Herne Bay Cartoon Festival and Imperial War Museum, and a continuing loan of a Nick Garland cartoon to the V&A that is part of an international touring exhibition.

Image of the V&A exhibition ’Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser’ installed at the V&A Musuem in South Kensington.

The poster for the ‘Churchill in Cartoons’ exhibtion outside the doors of the IWM.

It’s such a pleasure that we’re able to share our collections to the wider public in this way and I really enjoy being able to make connections with institutions in Britain and abroad through supporting their exhibitions.The exhibition at the IWM (Churchill in Cartoons: Satirising a Statesman) opens from 29 November 2024 to 23 February 2025, so do check this out if you can. We were very lucky to be invited to the Private View of the exhibition, which we very much enjoyed. It’s a fabulous look at Churchill’s political career through satirical cartoons. And I’m delighted to say we already have two exciting loan requests in process for next year, so things aren’t slowing down!

 

Lastly, I was thrilled to organise a Halloween event with my colleagues Beth and Christine this year. Called ‘Ghost Stories’, it was a behind-the-scenes tour of our archival stores with a difference! Attendees were titillated with (battery-powered) candle-lit readings of classic ghost stories. The event was very well received, and we hope to do another event next Halloween, albeit with a new spooOoOOooky theme.

An image of a spectre in our stores, lit only by emergency lights and (battery) tea lights

Beth Astridge (University Archivist)

Exhibitions in the Templeman Gallery

We run a regular programme of exhibitions in the Templeman Gallery and our ‘Mining in Kent’ exhibition was a particular highlight! Using a range of our archive material this exhibition told the story of the history of mining in Kent, from the early days of discovering the Kent coalfield to the impact of the 1984 Miners’ Strike. We were able to showcase material from several collections including the Richard Richardson Mining Collection, the British Cartoon Archive, the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive, and the Labour and Socialist Newspapers. We held several tours of the exhibition as well as a launch event and have been really pleased with the local interest and feedback about exhibition and our events. We are particularly grateful to one of our volunteers, Amy Green, who assisted with research, writing panels and captions, and installing the exhibition.

We also curated a virtual version of this exhibition which you can view on our exhibitions page.

Image of Coal Not Dole leaflet from the Richard Richardson Mining Collection

Another exhibitions highlight this year has been our collaboration with the Brook Rural Museum on an oral history project relating to memories of hopping and hop production in the Brook and Wye area of Kent. This resulted in an exhibition in our Gallery space featuring recordings of the oral history interviews alongside material that described the history and future of hop production in Kent. This exhibition will be on show again in 2025 at the Brook Rural Museum, so make sure you plan a visit!

Page on Picking Hops from Ann and Jane Taylor, Rural Scenes or a peep into the country: For children (1840), a book in our Children’s Literature collection (S 519.T23 TAY CLC

Listening Station

Our Listening Station in action during the exhibition, Local Stories: Memories of Hopping around Brook and Wye, Kent

The oral history exhibition gave us the opportunity to show off our new listening station in the Templeman Gallery. This is a new audio-visual unit that allows us to upload video and audio material for viewers to listen to/watch in the exhibition space. It is hearing aid enabled and has two listening speakers – so please watch out for future opportunities to discover more of our video and audio collections – including material for our next exhibition on the David Drummond Pantomime Collection.

Philanthropy and Fundraising

Page from early records of the National Benevolent Fund showing some of the early donors/subscribers, National Benevolent Fund Archive

The UK Philanthropy Archive continues to thrive and a highlight this year was receiving some important new collections. In July we received the collection of the National Benevolent Fund – a charity established in 1812 which used a subscription model to support ‘distressed gentlewomen’ with pensions and annuities and later supported those experiencing poverty. The collection had been identified as a collection at risk by The National Archives and we were pleased to play a part in saving this fascinating collection and giving it a home.

In September we were delighted to receive the archive collection of the John Ellerman Foundation along with a grant to enable the repackaging and cataloguing of this important collection of a foundation established by Sir John Ellerman, once Britain’s richest man, and the family behind the Ellerman Lines and Wilson Lines shipping business. Look out for more about this in 2025 when we start the cataloguing process.

And finally, also in September, we received the Jack Petchey Foundation archive. Sir Jack Petchey was a businessman and philanthropist who started a taxi business, a second-hand car business and later a property business, generating the wealth that he dedicated to charitable work and philanthropy focussed on young people through his Foundation. The full catalogue for this collection will appear on our website soon.

This year we have also made great strides towards cataloguing the Craigmyle Fundraising Consultants collection – a project that will be completed in 2025! The partial catalogue is available now to view on our website.

University Archive

In the University Archive we are gearing up to the University’s 60th anniversary celebrations later in 2025. One aspect of this will focus on music and live music performances on campus, and I have enjoying communicating with alumni who have memories and sometimes photo evidence of fantastic bands and gigs they attended. Volunteers Peter Stanfield and more recently David Blair have been doing an amazing job researching and logging the gigs and bands who played at the University since we opened in 1965. We are looking forward to making this complete list available for researchers and former students highlighting what it was like to work, study and enjoy live music on campus throughout its history!

Cataloguing the David Drummond Pantomime Collection

The Archives Revealed funded cataloguing project was almost(!) finished this year by our brilliant Project Archivist Daniella Gonzalez.

Students from EKC Canterbury College studying the David Drummond Pantomime Collection – image courtesy of Amanda Sefton-Hogg, Canterbury Festival.

We are using Daniella’s work to inform the final exhibition of the year – Magnificent! Spectacular! – which will showcase this fantastic collection and tell the story of the history of pantomime from the early days of the Commedia dell’Arte to the modern extravaganza we know today!

A panto project highlight was working in collaboration with the Canterbury Festival and  EKC Canterbury College to bring more than 100 students onto campus to use the David Drummond Pantomime Collection as inspiration for coursework across subjects such as fine art, textiles, graphics, and photography. You will be able to see a couple of the students creations in our exhibition, and we were super pleased that this highlight was featured in The National Archives publication, A Year in Archives.

Christine Davies (Special Collections and Archives Coordinator)

I had the great pleasure this year of cataloguing the collection of literature gifted to us by a former professor of Victorian and modern literature at Kent, Louis James. The Louis James Collection primarily comprises literature of the Caribbean and African diasporas, but there are also important theoretical and historical works on race, colonialism and slavery too. Many of us have heard of Olaudah Equiano, the famous abolitionist, but Mary Prince is less well known – born into slavery in Bermuda, her dictated memoirs were published in London in 1831 and reprinted twice in the same year. Further highlights in the collection, for me, include an unpublished typescript of Derek Walcott’s play Franklin; diverse artisanal, cloth-bound books published by the Writers Workshop (a small printing press established in Calcutta); the plethora of Caribbean poetry which details the migrant experience in Britain with irony, sometimes anger, always charisma, and which – on the page and in performance – was completely innovative. Kamau Brathwaite created the ‘Sycorax video style’ by combining customized typefaces with irregular page layouts; others’ are marked by their rhythmic similarity to reggae (dub) and/or their fusion of dialects. Amongst the African literature, there are works that reflect on Apartheid, delve into Anasi lore, and diverse anthologies that celebrate the continent’s diversity (from works of magical realism to social justice, from Nobel prize winners to Onitsha market literature); one of the most powerful works, for me, is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the cross, the manuscript of which was written in secret, from gaol, on toilet paper. The collection amounts to more than 1000 items and is fully accessible on Library Search.

Examples of Writers Workshop publications in the Louis James Collection, as displayed for our South Asian History Month Archives tour

I’ve also had good fun this year devising new material and seminars for Kent’s School of English, which gives students the opportunity to handle rare books and consider the intricate cultural and socio-political contexts of their period of study. The explosion of print in the eighteenth century gave rise to numerous newspapers and periodicals, the latter typically published monthly. These new arenas of print were not only used to disseminate information but also direct public taste and opinion and even shape literary developments. Fiction could be serialised in these monthly publications and biographies and gossip columns fuelled an emerging celebrity culture, giving voice to more obscure figures since forgotten – how many of you have heard of the blind poet and early disability advocate, Thomas Blacklock (1721-1791)? Did you know that The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1847) provided inspiration for both Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters?

Volunteer Amelia Bocskei working on photographs found in Terry O’Brien’s programme collection

As Beth and Clair have both mentioned, we couldn’t do all we do without the invaluable support of our volunteers, and this year has marked a significant leap forward in the management of our theatre programme collections.

Through the collected efforts of Ladaya Berrier, Amelia Bocskei, Stefana Ivanova, Rhea Nurice Lempert and Jessica Mulroy, thousands of programmes have been organised, re-packaged, and listed on spreadsheets, and this will be used to create and enrich catalogue records next year. This work has already enabled us to consolidate our existing holdings of theatre programmes and refine our collecting priorities; it has also enhanced our engagement work by filling gaps in performance history. Our volunteers have also found the experience greatly beneficial, stating how much a privilege it has been “to preserve a voice from the past” and “interact with original historical documents.”

Alex Triggs (Digitisation Administrator)

The high-resolution digitisation of the British Cartoon Archive collections continued throughout 2024 utilising the Phase One photographic rig. This year the focus has been on the original cartoon artwork of Mac (Stanley McMurtry), cartoonist with the Daily Mail. Mac’s career with the Daily Mail began in 1971 and lasted for almost five decades. As a result, this collection contains circa 5000 items of which approximately 80% have been digitised during the year. In addition, a selection of playbills from the David Drummond Pantomime Collection have also been digitised over the past 12 months. Many of these date back to the 1850s and require careful handling as they are extremely delicate.

Left: Our ‘digital kitchen’; Right: a playbill from the David Drummond Pantomime Collection.

On the audio-visual side, I have continued the digitisation the University of Kent Archive collection of vulnerable analogue magnetic audio cassette tape recordings. Moving forward, I am now beginning to address the significant number of at-risk VHS video cassette recordings contained within a several of the Special Collections, perhaps most significantly the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive.

Mandy (Special Collections & Archives Assistant)

I always enjoy scanning our Carl Giles collection every year for the Giles Annual, they are always fun. I have scanned 6,000 cartoons in our Hector Breeze collection, which is so interesting to do. I’m now working on another cartoon collection – the Alan Ralph Collection – which is now being digitised. The song sheets in the Max Tyler Music Hall Collection have also been so lovely to scan as some of them are so vintage and very delicate. Overall, it has been a busy and interesting time for 2024!

Hector Breeze cartoon (HB0012)

Jacqueline Spencer (Project Curation and Discovery Administrator)

I began the year cataloguing Arnold Rood’s collection of books on theatre. He collected widely around a strong nucleus of works by and about the extraordinary theatre designer (and son of Ellen Terry) Edward Gordon Craig. Next, I catalogued the extensive set of 20th century theatre periodicals in the Reading Rayner collection, then I added books from David Drummond Pantomime Collection to the library catalogue supporting the project to catalogue his archive. He collected books related to pantomime including both scholarly works on the origins of the genre such as ‘The reminiscences of Thomas Dibdin at the Theatres Royal, Drury Lane ..’ of 1824, and some lovely, illustrated children’s books such as ‘Naughty Cinderella’ from 1936.  Charles Lewsen’s books on theatre arts enhance our collection scope in this area, his collection contains more 19th century material. This delicate personification of ‘La Comedie’ with mask and barely visible sprites over her shoulders is the frontispiece from his copy of ‘Masques et bouffons (Comedie Italienne) with text and drawings by Maurice Sand, Paris 1862.

‘La Comedie’, Masques et bouffons (Comedie Italienne) with text and drawings by Maurice Sand, Paris 1862

The Holt Bairnsfather books came next, with a bottom-up view from the trenches of the 1914-18 World War. As this year ends, I have started cataloguing the Muggeridge Book Collection. Focusing on windmills in the U.K. and the Netherlands, William Burrell Muggeridge and Donald Muggeridge were also interested in industrial archaeology and country life and work and sought out locally published pamphlets which can be hard to find as well as substantial scholarly works on mills. Their books are now to be found in our ‘Wind and Watermills Collection’.

Matthias Werner (Curation and Discovery Administrator)

This year I have been focused on cataloguing books and cartoons for the British Cartoon Archive (BCA). I’ve catalogued the remaining books from the Eric Linfield Collection. I am currently working on the John Jensen Collection. John Jensen passed away in 2018, and the Special Collections Team has collaborated with his widow, Pat, and sons, Hal and Sean, to incorporate material from his estate into the existing collection at Kent. The books that have been passed on to us are from various eras and countries and primarily focus on caricature, cartoons, and comics.

Das grosse Trier-Buch, Walter Trier (1972)

My personal highlight, however, has been working on a book from our general BCA collection: Cataloguing a book on Walter Trier, a renowned German artist and illustrator, best known for his work on Erich Kästner’s children’s books. Seeing illustrations like the one below brought back some fond memories from my own childhood.

Additionally, I continue to catalogue Steve Bell’s cartoons for the BCA catalogue. Steve has been sending us his works published in The Guardian, ensuring they are preserved in the national cartoon archive. Looking through pieces like the one below takes me back to the surreal and bewildering times of the COVID pandemic.

[No caption], Steve Bell, 04 Mar 2020 (4470-040320 CONVID19)

Emma Solway (Curation and Discovery Administrator)

Ella Baron- Political Cartoonist

The British Cartoon Archive, housed in Special Collections and Archives, is a unique and ever-expanding collection. I have recently started cataloguing cartoons published in the summer of 2024, from a range of newspapers and cartoonists. This is challenging as each artists’ signature caricatures, styles and motifs must be learned and recognised over time. In addition, describing the events satirised within each cartoon involves developing a good knowledge of current domestic and world politics and the significant public figures of the day.  This is an interesting and stimulating part of my job, even more so when a cartoonist new to you grabs your attention.

[No caption], Ella Baron, 05 Jul 2024 (115193)

It is still quite rare to see political editorial cartoons drawn by women in my work, so she interested me immediately. The “boys’ club” is a common complaint of women working as cartoonists. As most editorial cartoonists stay in their jobs for life and are historically all men, this leaves women with little opportunity. However, it was great to see Ella’s biography, as she is having a flourishing career working regularly for the Times and the Guardian amongst others, after winning the British Cartoon Associations Young Cartoonist of the Year in 2017. As she once commented she enjoyed making a living from drawing Trump all day, I’ve included one of her cartoons featuring him from the Times in August this year. To learn more about Ella visit Ella Baron Cartoons.

An intern’s experience: Jenni-Rose Nicholl

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We were lucky enough to work with student Jenni during her internship from March to April 2023, as part of her Classical & Archaeological Studies course at the University of Kent.

Jenni worked on a variety of collections during her time with us, including the Colin Seymour-Ure and Holt Bairnsfather collections in the British Cartoon Archive, the Papers of the Shirley Foundation collection in the UK Philanthropy Archive, and the Max Tyler Music Hall collection. She also assisted us with facilitating seminars and school visits. Jenni writes about her experience below.

Objects from the Holt Bairnsfather collection being sorted and packaged in our workroom.

An internship is designed in its nature to provide the intern with real-world experience in the relevant field of work they are completing their study in. Having recently completed my internship with the University of Kent’s archive team, it can safely be said that I have gained a tremendous amount of experience and hands-on professional context in which to take my degree further.

From my first day being shown around the archives by the incredibly knowledgeable Clair Waller, my mind was blown by the sheer amount of work and effort that our incredible archivists do every single day in order to keep the University archives, alongside the British Cartoon archive, up to date and relevant for today’s scholars and students alike. By far my personal favourite part of the internship was cleaning the books given to the archives team from individual’s personal collections [ed – the Colin Seymour-Ure collection], being carefully instructed as to the care and management of dirty and weak covers and how to prevent the books from deteriorating further.

A portrait of Professor-Colin-Seymour-Ure

Professor-Colin-Seymour-Ure

Whilst partaking in my internship I was regularly using a scanner and uploading photos in an organised manner onto the computer, something a self-confessed technophobe such as myself found greatly beneficial for future employment as well as daily life. A career in archaeology would not be such without numerous types of paperwork in which listing remains crucial.

A photograph of Dame Stephanie Shirley standing in front of a large promotional sign at the 2019 Linkedin Summit, Talent Connect On Tour.

Dame Stephanie Shirley at the February 2019 Linkedin Summit. Papers of the Shirley Foundation.

Through my internship I was instructed in the use of listing sheets and how to correctly fill them out directly benefiting my future prospects in the archaeological field. My internship has greatly grown my confidence in a professional environment and with the instruction of Clair Waller, Beth Astridge and Karen Brayshaw, I have gained invaluable experience and fond memories for my future career.

A photogrpah of Jenni's hand holding a book that has been laid between boards and wrapped with cotton tying tape.

An example of a book Jenni cleaned before applying a bit of collections care by wrapping the book between boards using cotton tying tape. This helps to preserve the book, providing support to otherwise fragile or damaged bindings.

 

 

 

Special Collections and Archives highlights: 2022 edition

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Yet again 2022 has been a year packed with activity and fun! We’ve seen a number of changes for the Special Collections and Archives team; adapting back to life on campus, welcoming new colleagues, fully reopening our Reading Room service post-pandemic, and embarking on new projects. We’ve also had a bumper year for volunteers, who have been working with our theatre collections, British Cartoon Archive, and medieval and early modern manuscripts.  

As is tradition, it’s time for us to take a step back, reflect on what we’ve achieved, and tell you about some of the highlights… 

Karen (Special Collections and Archives Manager) 

It’s been an exciting year in special Collections and Archives. We’ve seen a number of changes in our team. In February we welcomed Beth Astridge to the role of University Archivist – you’ll recall that Beth was our project archivist for the UK Philanthropy Archive so it was exciting to be able to welcome her to a fulltime position. Beth has made her mark already in organising and delivering some excellent projects – you can read more about that in Beth’s section. We welcomed Rachel to our team on secondment from the Collections Management team. Rachel is working parttime as the project archivist for the UK Philanthropy Archive continuing the amazing work Beth was doing. In the spring we said goodbye to Jo, who worked as our Senior Library Assistant for almost a decade. Jo now has a fabulous job in London – though she still finds time to pop in and see us occasionally! In the summer we welcomed Christine in Jo’s place. Christine is now firmly established as our Special Collections and Archives Coordinator. Christine is doing a brilliant job of curating already established and new content for seminar groups as well as assisting with the research and selection for our latest exhibition 100 Years: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.  

The logo for our T.S.Eliot exhibition, featuring a cartoon by John Jensen of Eliot in profile.

A poster advertising our Eliot exhibition, featuring a cartoon by John Jensen of Eliot in profile (JJ0584).

Clair and I had great fun meeting and working with Major and Mrs Holt to prepare their Bairnsfather Archive for addition the British Cartoon Archive – see Clair’s piece for a taste of what we have. We are also working on acquiring some other significant cartoon archives in the next year – which is especially thrilling as in 2023 we celebrate 50 years of Cartoons at Kent! Watch our social media for more details soon.  

Mandy has been beavering away making sure our cuttings collection is kept up to date as well as digitising the beautiful photographs of Canterbury that we acquired a few years ago. You can see some in examples in Mandy’s section below.  

Digitisation work has moved forward in a huge way this year. The Phase One kit is now fully functional and being put to good use – see what Alex and Matt have to say below for the latest from them. 

We’ve also been lucky to tempt our former colleague Jacqueline back to the fold – Jacqueline has been working as a project cataloguer to get the books from Carl Giles Archive catalogued. Many of the books are now available on our online catalogue with more to follow in the New Year.  

Earlier this year we received a small grant from UKRI AHRC to support some new collaborative research. We were delighted to work in partnership with our colleagues at the University’s School of Arts, Professor Helen Brooks and Dr Oliver Double, with Helen being primary investigator and Olly and myself acting as co-investigators. As a group, we were particularly interested in exploring representations of gender in popular performance, giving us the opportunity to contribute to the discourse on gender expression and new audiences with diverse, inclusive histories of performance and gender. 

A handmade poster featuring images of Hetty King, Dan Leno, and a costme design for a Principal boy, along with text advertising the event.

Poster for the ‘Beyond the Binary’ project

Beyond the Binary: Performing Gender Now and Then, brought together students, public researchers, performance-makers, archivists and academics from all backgrounds and from across the gender spectrum to undertake original research into our historic music hall and pantomime archives. They worked together on line to unearth histories of gender play and presentation hidden within the collections. 

The research group also had the opportunity to spend a day in Special Collections and Archives and  helped us to deliver a day at the Beaney Museum. 

The final event of Beyond the Binary took place on Thursday 29 September, with a spectacular show, Rowdy Dowdy Boys and Saucy Seaside Girls at the Gulbenkian Arts Centre, Canterbury. The event brought together music, comedy and history. This new performance-lecture was co-created with non-binary folk performers, the Lunatraktors and featured comedian Mark Thomas. The Lunatraktors created new work inspired by items in the collection, which were displayed on a screen and on the stage – including comedy boobs, which were displayed on a specially made stand (adapted from a music stand) alongside one of the pantomime Dame costumes worn by Eddie Reindeer. Mark Thomas performed a hilarious piece he had written on the day – again inspired by the collections.  

An image of two songsheet covers. On the left is Mille Hylton, 'The rowdy Dowdy Boys'. On the cover stands mille Hylton in a full suit and top hat. On the right is Hetty King's, 'Oh! Those girls! (those saucy seaside girls)'. On the cover we see a photograph of Hetty King, standing wearing a full suit and hat, and holding a walking cane.

Two songsheets: Mille Hylton, ‘The rowdy Dowdy Boys’; Hetty King, ‘Oh! Those girls! (those saucy seaside girls)’

This year we were also delighted to succeed in our bid for the Archives Revealed Cataloguing Grants scheme. Our cataloguing project –Oh Yes It Is! – will be starting early in the New Year and will continue throughout 2023. The funding award will make an enormous difference in how we make the David Drummond Pantomime collection accessible to everyone. We will unlock its potential for researchers, historians, performers, and all those interested in the history of theatre and pantomime. We can’t wait to get started! 

A small pile of 12 theatre programmes on a white table.

Some items from the David Drummond Pantomime Archive

Stop the Press! We’ve also just heard that in the New Year we will be receiving material from the first British Muslim pantomime Cinder’Aliyah. I can’t wait to share more news about it with you all when we have the details.  

I think 2023 is also going to be filled with activity and fun!  

Beth (University Archivist) 

2022 has been my first year as University Archivist, as well as finishing off a few projects relating to the UK Philanthropy Archive, so there has been a lot going on!  

Highlights of the work on our philanthropy collections include researching and installing the ‘Exploring Philanthropy’ exhibition which was up from April to November and allowed us to display items from the UK Philanthropy Archive for the first time and introduce visitors to the history of philanthropy; welcoming Fran Perrin to the University to deliver the second Shirley Lecture on open data and philanthropy; and presenting at the Association of Charitable Foundations conference in November 2022, alongside Felicity Wates (Director of the Wates Foundation) and Sufina Ahmad (Director of the John Ellerman Foundation) about the value of projects that reflect on the history of trusts and foundations with some ‘how to’ tips about dealing with your archive records. A lovely celebration to finish the year was that Dame Stephanie Shirley – the founder of our UK Philanthropy Archive – visited Canterbury to receive her honorary degree. It was my first Canterbury Cathedral gradation, and it was wonderful to experience it with Dame Stephanie!   

A photogrpah of Fran Perrin delivering a speech in front of an audience. Fran stands in front of some windows wearing a red top and black blazer. The audience sit on chairs and face away from the camera.

Fran Perrin delivering the second Shirley Lecture, ‘Open Data and Philanthropy’

In University Archive work, I managed a team of amazing student interns who worked on a survey of the paintings, sculpture, photographs and other artworks on display in the College buildings. This survey led to some new acquisitions to the University Archive as we explored the Colleges!  We located the archive records of Rutherford College and also some of the records relating to the early days of Darwin College. These have now been added to the University Archive collection and I’ll be looking at cataloguing the Eliot, Rutherford and Darwin College archive collections later in 2023.  

We have put on some fantastic exhibitions this year which definitely deserve a mention in this summary. In June, with funding from the Migration and Movement Award Fund, we installed the exhibition ‘Reflections on the Great British Fish and Chips’ after working with a Research and Curation Group of volunteers, and our colleague Basma El Doukhi, who explored the collections and co-curated a display of original material looking at themes relating to migration, movement, global food production and the fishing industry. 

A photograph of a small group of people standing in the Templeman Library gallery space, looking at the exhibition.

The launch event for the ‘Fish and Chips’ exhibition.

With further funding from The National Archives’ Archives Testbed Fund we recently held a brilliant sensory event – Taste the Archive – where were hosted a food sharing viewing of the exhibition where we tasted fish and chips, falafel, ma’amoul, hummous and Arabic breads – all of which are featured in the exhibition. It was lovely to share food and learn more about other traditions and cultures in this sensory way. 

A photograph of six people crowded around a table of various foods.

The ‘Taste the Archive’ event

We ended the year with a new exhibition celebrating 100 years since the publication of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. This is a great exhibition featuring some unique items from across the collections so come along and see it before April 2023! 

Clair (Digital Archivist) 

This year seems to have gone by so quickly; it’s a little hard to come to terms with the fact that we’re already writing our highlights of the year! Nevertheless, here we are in December.  

This year I had the pleasure of surveying and accessioning the Holt Bairnsfather Collection. Major Tonie and Mrs Valmai Holt are a couple who live in East Kent. They founded Major and Mrs Holts Battlefield Tours in 1978, offering tours to the public of famous battlefields across the world, before becoming authors. Together they have published over 30 books, including a biography of Bruce Bairnsfather. Their passion for Bairnsfather began in the 1970s, and since then they have amassed an extensive collection of Bairnsfather memorabilia, artworks and collectables. 

Left: Major Tonie and Mrs Valmai Holt with their publications. Right: some publications from the Holt Bairnsfather Collection.

Tonie and Valmai welcomed Karen and I into their home to assess and survey the collection, before we listed and packaged it up for the archive. It includes pottery, china, books, journals and magazines, ephemera, metalware, sketches and artworks. An incredible collection, it really gives an insight in to the impact of Bairnsfather’s work and the popularity of Old Bill and the Better ‘Ole, even some 60+ years after his death.  

A comparison of Bruce Bairnsfather’s ‘Well, if you knows of a better ‘ole, go to it’ (A Fragment from France, 24 November 1915) and Martin Rowson’s ‘Great War Studies – Module 8’ (Guardian, 06 Jan 2014. ©Martin Rowson, MRD0392)

We will continue to sort and organise the collection and hope to be able to add it to our catalogue in detail over the next year. 2023 brings the 50th anniversary of the British Cartoon Archive, and I’m sure this collection will play an important part in celebrating its continued value, and historic significance.  

A cartoon in the style of Leonardo Da Vinci's 'Last Supper', but the characters have been replaced with the Giles family at Christmas dinner.

Ronald Carl Giles, ‘Well, if you know of a better hole to spend Christmas, go to it!’, Sunday Express, 1954. ©Express Syndication Ltd (GAC0102)

We’ve also made some positive steps this year towards improving our digital storage capacity and structure, after experiencing some challenges over the last few years with third party storage and disparate SAN locations. This work will have a real impact on our ability to continue to preserve and protect our digital and digitised collections in a robust and standardised way.

Christine (Special Collections and Archives Coordinator) 

The greatest joy for me this year has been in planning and delivering diverse workshops in Special Collections and Archives to support graduate skills training and taught UG and PG modules. Over the course of 11 different sessions, I had the opportunity to meet and work with 135 students from the University of Kent and beyond, whose engagement with our materials established new insights and lines of enquiry. 

Delving deeper into the archives of Monika Bobinska and Josie Long – two stand-up comedians and comedy club managers – I got to appreciate the home-spun and community-driven nature of their endeavours. These were/are truly pioneering women in their sector who cultivated emergent talent by emphasising inclusivity and creative freedom. Their clubs – respectively, the Meccano Club and the Lost Treasures of the Black Heart – provided space for experimental performance and audience participation. Just look at these charismatic felt audience contributions representing stops on the London Underground… 

A collage of contributions from audience members. They are paper based and very colourful, including handmade images of a house, and another of Bow Church.

Creations that represent areas of London where audience members live (BSUCA/JL/2/6/4/4)

And this unassumingly pub-battered, pint-stained, contacts book that lists the crem de la crem of the alternative cabaret circuit – from Jo Brand to Mark Thomas.  

A photograph of the front cover of a black notebook with a sticker in the top right corner noting 'Cabaret'.

A contact books for the Meccano Club with contacts for comedians, agents and venues (BSUCA/MB/1/1/6)

Another collection I’ve particularly enjoyed getting to know this term is our Modern Firsts Poetry collection, which boasts an astonishing variety of rare small press items and even unpublished proofs from British and American poets of the 20th century. Some of our wonderful volunteers have worked on repackaging this collection this term in order to better preserve the more delicate items – many of which are loose leaves, single sheets, or folded or bound in intriguing ways. This hands-on work has enabled us to not only improve our catalogue records and archival practice, but also to uncover some truly unique items. With examples that are at once abstract and incredibly tactile, this collection surely epitomises Modernist aesthetics and critical thought; ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’ testify, too, to the enduring legacy of T.S. Eliot – check out our current exhibition celebrating the centenary of The waste land!  

Rachel (Project Archivist) 

This year I moved into the role of project archivist for the UK Philanthropy Archive here at Kent, so a highlight for me was learning about the amazing collections we hold! This year saw us add two new collections to the Philanthropy Archive – those of the Wates Foundation and Craigmyle Fundraising Consultants. 

The Wates Foundation archive is our first collection from a fully family run organisation. The organisation was first set up by three brothers, Allan, Norman and Ronald Wates. The Foundation has three family committees, one for each of the brothers, which means that the work they support is hugely varied. The archive contains project files for each organisation the Foundation has supported, ranging from city farms, to local sports teams, to crime and drug rehabilitation. There is also a wide range of literature and media outputs from these projects. 

A photograph of four items from the Wates archive, including 2 VHS tapes, and 2 DVDs.

Four items from the Wates Foundation Archive

The Craigmyle Archive is a fascinating one, looking at philanthropy and fundraising from a different perspective from our other collections. Until now all our material has been from philanthropists themselves, whereas Craigmyle are professional fundraisers, working with charities and organisations who are looking to fundraise for projects. The company was founded in 1959, at a time where professional fundraising in the UK was basically non-existent. Their early focus was on supporting fundraising for schools, and there is a huge amount of material relating to all the work they have done in that area. The collection even has records of their work with other people who feature in our archive, such as Dame Stephanie Shirley, our founding donor! Clients supported by Craigmyle include Salisbury Cathedral, St. Paul’s School for Boys, Macmillan Cancer Relief, Kingston Theatre Trust and The Woodland Trust, to name just a few. This is by far the biggest collection the Philanthropy Archive has taken in yet, and a dedicated archivist will be being employed to work with it next year, so watch this space! 

Outside of the collections, my highlight for this year has definitely been attending the degree congregation at Canterbury Cathedral last month where the University of Kent awarded Dame Stephanie Shirley an honorary degree.

A photograph from the graduation ceremony. The image shows the following people standing together in a group (left to right): Dr Beth Breeze, Dame Stephanie Shirley, Rachel Dickinson, Beth Astridge.

A photograph from the graduation ceremony. Left to right: Dr Beth Breeze, Dame Stephanie Shirley, Rachel Dickinson, Beth Astridge.

I graduated from Kent in 2012, but this was my first time seeing a ceremony from the other side. Canterbury Cathedral is such a lovely setting for a graduation ceremony, it feels appropriately grand for recognising all the work put in by our students to achieve their degrees. This was also my first time meeting Dame Stephanie in person. We discovered it was honorary degree number 31 for her, but she was still incredibly grateful for the recognition and genuinely had a wonderful time in a glorious setting. The speech she gave referenced her support of the University, including her ties to our archive and her work with the Tizard Centre, and her message to all our graduands was heartfelt and really well received. 

Matt (Digitisation Manager) 

As Alex has alluded to below, after the install and learning phase of 2021, 2022 has been the year of the Phase One. It’s made a huge difference to our digitisation abilities as we’ve learnt to make the most of the whole system. As we progress with our pre-planned projects we’ve started to consider what it can do for us in the next years and the other collections we can digitise. When looking at collections we’ve had for years it’s exciting to have a new perspective on them now that we can digitise them in such amazing detail. 

We’ve also spent some time in the last few months refurbishing a new space for our digitisation systems so that we can bring it all into one custom space, (and also so that we can finally relinquish half of the Special Collections work room back to our colleagues). We’ll be moving in at the start of next year. 

A photograph of an empty room, with concrete walls , with white shelves high up on the wall.

Our new digitisation space in the Templeman Library

Earlier in the year we completed a project assessing our preservation and access systems for our digital collections which means next year we can move forward into testing and hopefully acquiring a new system that will mark a significant step forward in our digital offering to users of our various services. 

Mandy (Special Collections and Archives Assistant) 

Here are a few photos that I have been lucky enough to scan over this past year.

three images left to right: A black and white photograph of a delivery van parked up on a road, with the load on the back of the van spilling over in to the street. A black and white photograph of an elephant being paraded through Canterbury High Street. A man walks in front of the elephant, talking to a policeman in uniform riding a bicycle. A black and white photograph of a garage with a van in the driveway.

Three photographs from the Crampton Canterbury Photograph Collection

They are from our Crampton Canterbury Photograph Collection, and show how much Canterbury has changed throughout the years. 

Alex (Digitisation Administrator) 

2022 has seen the new Phase One photographic reproduction rig come into its own. Alongside colleagues Matt and Clair we developed efficient work processes for the digitisation of artwork and objects within the collections. Once we had the rig up and running in early February the main focus has been on the Beaverbrook Collection of cartoon artwork. The Beaverbrook collection is significant, containing original cartoon artwork by major cartoonists published in some of Britain’s leading newspapers from the 1930s through to the 1960s. To date we have captured around half of the entire collection, over 4000 high-definition images. I’ve found it a fascinating process, particularly the insight it provides to the day to day “talking points” during a turbulent period of global history. 

David Low, 'The Nightmare Passes', Evening Standard, 8th May 1945 (DL2416)

A David Low cartoon from the Beaverbrook Collection, ‘The Nightmare Passes’, Evening Standard, 8th May 1945 (DL2416)

In the audio-visual domain, I completed the digitisation the University of Kent Archive collection of vulnerable analogue magnetic audio cassette tape recordings in the first part of 2022. Since then, I have moved on to digitise of a number of smaller audio cassette collections within the greater Special Collections and Archives stores. These have included recordings from the British Stand Up Comedy Archive, the Ronald Baldwin local history collection and the R. W. Richardson collection of recordings relating to the 1980s Miners’ Strike, particularly in East Kent. 

A photograph of a cassette tape, lying on top of its case. Behind it is an audio deck used for digitisation.

One of the many audio cassettes Alex has digitised this year!

Most recently I have been digitising a series of interview recordings carried out by the University’s Dr Philip Boobbyer. The interviews were conducted during the 1990s in post-Soviet Russia. The subjects of the interviews were various activists and dissidents from the Soviet period. The content has particular contemporary relevance in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

Jacqueline (Project cataloguer) 

I am cataloguing the personal library of Giles the cartoonist kept within his archive in the British Cartoon Archive. The library shows Giles’s distinctive set of interests reflecting both his work as a cartoonist and home life near Ipswich in Suffolk. He indexed books with coloured drinking straws to mark images that he might use as references. His collection of works of cartoons from the two world wars, together with contemporary photographic books give a poignant insight into lived experience of those events.

A photograph of books from the Giles library on a shelf.

An image of books from the Giles library

There are sections on farming, on architecture, sailing and ships and series of how to draw books, I-Spy books and even an Argos catalogue. The mix of ideas for cartoons and his everyday life appears here in his copy of ‘Teach yourself brickwork’ with “Lady Diana” written the other way up on his plan for a brick wall with measurements inside the front cover. 

A photograph of a book open to the front page. Inserted in the book is a piece of paper with an image of a brick wall drawn in red pen, alongide some measurements.

An image of the inside of ‘Teach yourself brickwork’ with an inserted note inside

Remembering Marie Lloyd

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Friday 7th October, 2022 marks 100 years since the death of Marie Lloyd, one of the most famous and popular music hall stars of the late 19th and early 20th century and “Queen of Comediennes”.

Max Tyler Music Hall collection, University of Kent

Early years

Born Matilda Alice Victoria Wood on the 12th February 1870, Marie was the eldest of nine children. All of the Wood children would take their turn on the stage, performing together as early as 1879 as a minstrel act called the ‘Fairy Bell troupe’, with a number of her siblings going on to have successful careers in their own right.

In 1885 Lloyd made her first professional solo performance, performing as ‘Bella Delmere’ at the Royal Eagle Music Hall on 9th May, aged just 15. However, this name was quickly changed and by June of that year she was performing as ‘Marie Lloyd’. Despite not having the best of singing voices, Marie oozed charm and was a natural comedian, making her an instant hit. Her popularity continued to grow, and she continued to get bookings at halls across London, performing songs such as “The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery”, “She Has a Sailor for a Lover” and “Wink the Other Eye”. By 1891 Lloyd was a household name, pulling in large crowds at halls across Britain, and starring in the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane’s Christmas pantomimes alongisde stars such as Dan Leno. As her star continued to rise, her agent reported that Lloyd was fully booked up for years at the best houses across the UK, and that her salary ran from £250-£300 a week, sometimes as much as £700 a week at the height of her career. 

Reputation, charity, and controversy

Part of Lloyd’s appeal was that she did not appear on stage to be bound by the moral constraints of the time – her songs were cheeky and risqué, and she would play with the audience. However, this cheekiness did give her somewhat of a reputation. In 1895, Lloyd added the song ‘What’s that for, eh?’ to her act. The song tells the tale of a schoolchild who, when she asks her parents awkward questions, gets unsatisfactory answers. So she goes to her friend ‘Johnny Jones’ for help, and he teaches her the facts of life. And while the lyrics were not indecent, when Marie performed the song she was suggestive, winking to the audience and gesturing.

“What’s that for, eh? Tell me Ma
If you don’t tell me I’ll ask Pa”
But Ma said, “Oh its no thing shut your row”
Well, I’ve asked Johnny Jones, see
So I know now.”

The song and it’s performance was so controversial that it was cited as evidence in a hearing of 1896, when the Oxford Music Hall was threatened with having its licence withheld.

Max Tyler Music Hall collection, University of Kent

In October 1906 Lloyd was elected the first president of the Music Hall Ladies Guild. The organisation helped the wives of artists who were unable to perform and make money, providing food and resources to them and their families. They also supported young people, helping boys find work as messengers or call-boys. Some members of the Guild would use it as an opportunity to network and improve their social standing, however Lloyd did not have time for this pretentious self-promotion. She was well-known for her incredibly generosity and charitable giving, and preferred to have fun and entertain at Guild events.

Lloyd also petitioned for Music Hall artistes to have more rights and fair contracts. She used her clout as a well-known and celebrated artist to stand up for the community, and in 1899 she took a manager to court over a dispute with her contract, and won. This accomplishment was recognised by her peers, who presented her with gifts to mark her generosity in defending artist’s rights. She wrote in The Era “I am, and always have been ready and willing to help my brother and sister artists by every means in my power in anything that is for their good”. She was integral in developing the National Alliance, a group that wrote a charter that was sent out to theatre managers outlining the terms by which performers wished to work. The refusal by some to sign this charter led to a number of theatres being “blacklisted” by artists, and over two thousand performers taking to the streets to protest contract conditions.

1912 saw the first ever Royal Command Performance (later known as the Royal Variety Show) at the Palace Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, with acts performing on stage in the presence of King George V and Queen Mary. To some amazement, Marie Lloyd was left off of the bill. According to Graeme Cruickshank in the Spring 2012 volume of The Call Boy, this was possibly at the direction of Alfred Butt, Oswald Stoll and George Ashton (producers of the show) in their attempt to make the show “family friendly”. Some thought it may also have been due to her association with the music hall strike, or that it was simply a case of balancing the bill and not oversaturating it with female comedic performers. In public, Lloyd took the slight professionally and with dignity, but there is evidence that she was furious – Alfred Butt even wrote to the palace warning that Marie Lloyd was to write to the King regarding her omission (although there is no evidence of her ever doing this). Possibly telling of her feelings on the matter, on the night of the performance Lloyd put on her own show at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly, and left for Paris immediately after that performance. Albert Chevalier (who was also left off of the billing) said of it “The whole arrangement as it stands is really extraordinary. Who is there more representative of the variety profession? Miss Lloyd is a great genius, she is an artist from the crown of her head to the sole of her foot…”.

Marie continued to perform throughout World War I, performing new songs, including some with a military theme. She also frequently visited hospitals to visit wounded servicemen, and toured munition factories to boost morale.

“Now, I do feel so proud of you, I do honour bright
I’m going to give you an extra cuddle tonight
I didn’t like yer much before yer join’d the army, John
But I do like yer, cocky, now you’ve got yer Khaki on.”

Despite all her charitable efforts throughout her career and during the war, Marie was never officially recognised in the way her colleagues, such as George Robey CBE, were. This had an impact on her bitterness in later life, which was only exacerbated when she was overlooked again for the 1919 Command Performance.

Max Tyler Music Hall collection, University of Kent

Off stage life

Despite her successes, Lloyd had a troubled personal life. She was married three times, and experienced domestic abuse during two of them. She married Percy Charles Courtenay in 1887, but the marriage was unhappy, and filled with violence, drunkeness and jealousy. The couple divorced in 1894, after Courtenay discovered that Lloyd had started an affair with fellow performer Alec Hurley. Hurley and Lloyd married in 1906, however the pair were effectively seperated by 1910 after they had consistent marital probems. Lloyd began an open and passionate affair with Bernard Dillon, a jockey. Hurley initiated divorce proceedings in 1911. Sadly the relationship between Lloyd and Dillon was not a happy one, marred by Dillon’s jealousy, drunkeness, and gambling addiction. Despite this they married in 1914. He was violent and abusive throught the rest of Lloyd’s life.

Sadly, Lloyd was also a heavy drinker, particularly in later life, perhaps a consequence of her troubled personal life. She would often have violent fights with Dillon, with Lloyd sometimes needing to apply make up to cover the bruises. As she moved in to her 50s she fell in to a depression, and would no longer hide her feelings of bitterness and anger. In July of 1920 she took Dillon to court over his violence, making their private life very much a topic of public record. This resulted in him being ordered by the court to “keep the peace” for the next twelve months, a sentence that was apparently requested by Lloyd.

In the later years of her life, Lloyd was in financial trouble (in part due to Dillon’s gambling debts) and needed to work in order to get by. Her drinking and ill health made her less and less reliable, sometimes only performing for a fraction of the time that she was scheduled. She began to forget her lines and would sometimes stumble on the stage, so much so that stagehands would be asked to be on call to help her if she became unsteady. In order to save money, in early 1922 she moved in with her sister Daisy, and by the time of her death Lloyd was virtually penniless.

Death

Lloyd worked right up until days before her death, having been on tour for much of 1922 despite being unwell. Her last performance at the Edmonton Empire was the Tuesday before her death. Prior to the performance, she complained to Sidney Bernstein (the owner of the theatre) of a stomach ache and was shivering. Bernstein tried to persuade her to go home, but to no avail. Her doctor was called and he gave her some medication, before staying to watch her performance from the side of the stage. During the performance Lloyd staggered and fell, making the audience laugh thinking it was part of her act. After the show Lloyd collapsed and was taken home in a taxi, unconscious. She did not regain consciousness and died at her residence in Golder’s Green, 7th October 1922 at the age of 52.

Funeral and legacy

Lloyd’s funeral was held at Hampstead Cemetery on 12 October, 1922. More than 50,000 people turned out on the streets of Hampstead to watch her funeral cortege. It was estimated that 120,000 people visited her grave in the following weeks, with queues stretching out from the gates of Hampstead Cemetary. Many newspapers and fellow performers paid tribute to Lloyd in the days after her death. T.S. Eliot wrote a moving tribute to her in The Criterion of January 1923. He said of Lloyd…

“Marie Lloyd was the greatest music hall artist in England: she was also the most popular… It is evidence of the extent to which she represented and expressed that part of the english nation which has perhaps the greatest vitality and interest… Whereas other comedians amuse their audiences as much and sometimes more than Marie Lloyd, no other comedian succeded so well in giving expression to the life of that audience, in raising it to kind of art.” 

Many of the songs sung by Lloyd are still known today, including “My Old Man Said Follow the Van”, “A Little of What You Fancy Does You Good”, and “Don’t Dilly Dally On The Way”. A memorial tablet to Lloyd was installed in the vestibule at Tivoli cinema (what was the Tivoli Theatre) in the Strand in 1944, on the 21st anniversary of her death. Lloyd was also commemorated in 1977 with a blue plaque at her previous residence, 55 Graham Road in Dalston. In media, a stage show and BBC drama have been created depicting the life of Marie Lloyd.

Max Tyler Music Hall collection, University of Kent

Sources

Note

As with many acts at the time, Lloyd performed some songs that contained offensive and racist terminology, and we can not with good conscience speak of her success and popularity without mention of this. Music Hall song and performance was in many ways a reflection of social attitudes at the time, and this does not exclude those parts of white, British history that are offensive and repellent. We can see this in our collection of music hall songsheets, with some containing racist slurs and offensive depictions, imperialistic attitude, and that make light of marital violence, misogyny, and the class divide. Music Hall rose in a time of expansion of the British Empire and popular imperialism. Songs performed by both male and female artists played with notions of power, or leaned on stereotypes to connect with the audience.

Music in the Archives: A whistle-stop tour through our collections (part one)

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June is finally here! The sun is out (well, mostly), lockdown restrictions are starting to lift a bit here in the UK and – most importantly – it’s time for one of our favourite University events of the year: Summer Music Week. Kent’s brilliant Music department annually hosts a series of concerts to celebrate the end of the academic year, and in these strangest of times we need music more than ever.

We’ve collaborated with Kent’s music programme many times before and our links are incredibly strong – there are so many forms of music in our collections! So to celebrate this year’s concerts, we thought we’d put together a brief chronology of some of the musical highlights in our stores…

Pre-1700s collection: Psalms, prayers and printed hymns

Our Pre-1700s collection is a real treasure trove of items, ranging from some of the most important printed books in the literary canon (looking at you, Johnson’s First Folio) to travel narratives, histories and much more. A big part of the Pre-1700s collection is comprised of religious texts and sermons; fantastic for anyone interested in the many debates around the role of the Church and the development of Protestantism in England.

Photograph of hymn music in a 16th century bible.

Photograph of hymn music in a 16th century bible (C 549 BIB, Pre-1700s collection)

What’s particularly great about our Pre-1700s texts though is the insight they give into how everyday people practiced religion and interacted with the Bible, particularly after it was translated into English. Our 1580s Bible is such a great example of this; not only does it have marginalia dating from 200 years after its publication, but if you look in the back of the book there are musical scores to hymns sung in Church at the time!

John Crow’s Ballad and Song collection: oral history in print

Much of our Pre-1700s collection is comprised of books collected by the academic John Crow (read more about him here). Crow was a scholar particularly interested in a) the Renaissance world, b) Shakespeare’s legacy and c) ballad and song books, which for the purposes of this blog we’re going to refer to as an early form of sea-shanty TikTok.

A colourful row of books from the John Crow Ballad and Song collection.

A colourful row of books from the John Crow Ballad and Song collection

The ballad and song books contain many publications of the Percy Society (active 1840 – 1852), which published and reprinted rare poems and songs, and the Ballad Society (founded 1868) which had similar aims but focused on publishing folklore. Ballads were a big part of English popular storytelling for generations; they were often printed on cheap paper, sold on street corners and passed around in pubs – but few of them survive due to their ephemeral nature. The Percy Society and Ballad Society aimed to change this by printing them in more formal book editions (made of better quality materials so likely to survive longer). The ballad and song books we look after are a fantastic resource for anyone interested in folk music, exploring how histories were passed around between oral and written formats, and much more.

Theatre collections part one: the Pettingell playscripts

Spoiler alert: a great deal of the music we hold can be found in our extensive theatre collections – so much so that they appear three different times in this blog alone, and that’s only because we’d run out of space otherwise! It’s pretty much impossible to separate music from theatre, particularly during live performance’s rise to fame during the nineteenth century – orchestras could be found in nearly every venue. Music was used to create atmosphere, to heighten emotion, to change scenes and – of course – during songs and dances on stage. Amongst critics there were continual questions asked about music’s role in the theatres, it being seen by some to cheapen ‘proper’ drama.

Title page for a ballet version of Macbeth, complete with am illustration of Macbeth holding two daggers. from the Pettingell collection.

Title page for a ballet version of Macbeth from the Pettingell collection (PETT S.124)

Photograph of the play text for Boucicault's play 'The Octoroon', from the Pettingell collection. The printed text is crossed out and handwritten revisions are included on the next page.

Photograph of the play text for Boucicault’s play ‘The Octoroon’, from the Pettingell collection (PETT PAR 21)

One of the main gems of our theatre collections is without a doubt the Pettingell collection, which comprises of over 4000 plays collected by comedian Arthur Williams and later bought by actor Frank Pettingell. Williams attended many of the plays he collected and as a result a great number of the scripts, which you could generally buy cheaply as a kind of souvenir, are uniquely annotated by their owner with information such as cast lists and additional pages added in. The Pettingell collection also contains more than 300 pantomime libretti, which we’ll talk about more below. It’s a great collection if you’re new to the world of Victorian theatre as you can really get a sense of the range of plays produced during this era – from histories to popular folk stories to adaptations of famous literary works, not to mention unique genres such as melodrama.

Music hall: early celebrities, the world before Spotify and popular music in action

Selection of tickets from music hall events pasted on to a brown backing board from the Max Tyler Music Hall Collection

Selection of tickets from music hall events pasted on to a brown backing board from the Max Tyler Music Hall Collection

My colleague Clair has written brilliantly before about music hall, but it’s pretty difficult to talk all things musical in the collections without mentioning some of our wonderful material that belonged to the British Music Hall Society’s resident archivist and historian Max Tyler. For the uninitiated, music hall (not musical(s) – pronunciation is key here) was a form of entertainment especially popular in the late Victorian/early Edwardian era in Britain – around 1890 – 1910. It was where many forms of Victorian popular culture developed, and is largely responsible for the variety shows of the mid-late 20th century. Music hall’s popularity was due in part to the industrial revolution – people moved to newly urban centres looking for work, which in turn created a demand for popular entertainment venues.

Selection of photographs of music hall stars pasted onto a brown backing board from the Max Tyler Music Hall Collection

Selection of photographs of music hall stars pasted onto a brown backing board from the Max Tyler Music Hall Collection

Whilst the specifics of each music hall performance would vary, a few things would look similar at each venue: every event would have a chairman, to oversee and host the evening, and often a pianist to accompany performers. Admission was generally cheap (sometimes free, if you bought drinks) and caused licensers endless headaches about what constituted a proper venue! All kinds of performance would occur during a music hall night, from songs and ‘specialty’ acts such as dance, clowns and other physical entertainers, to condensed versions of plays (just don’t tell Boucicault about that…; see next post). Sometimes a single act would cross all different types of performance.

Cover for sheet music to 'All Thro' Sticking to a Soldier' sung by Miss Ada Lundberg, from the Max Tyler Music Hall collection

Cover for sheet music to ‘All Thro’ Sticking to a Soldier’ sung by Miss Ada Lundberg, from the Max Tyler Music Hall collection

Musical score for 'All Thro' Sticking to a Soldier' sung by Miss Ada Lundberg, from the Max Tyler Music Hall collection

Musical score for ‘All Thro’ Sticking to a Soldier’ sung by Miss Ada Lundberg, from the Max Tyler Music Hall collection

As our extensive collection of music in the Max Tyler Archive demonstrates, it was possible to purchase illustrated song sheets of many popular music hall hits for home performance – albeit these tended to be the sanitised versions, for more genteel audiences, rather than the more popular bawdy songs! According to theatre historian Jacky Bratton, the abundance of song sheets that survive today gives us a slightly skewed view of what was actually performed in music halls, as it just wasn’t possible to record specialty acts or perhaps even adapted plays in the same manner.

Work on the amazing Max Tyler Music Hall collection is still ongoing, but you can browse our listings of Max’s incredible research files on our archive catalogue here.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this mini-series about music in Special Collections & Archives; do visit our website for more information on the collections and if you have any queries please drop us a line (specialcollections@kent.ac.uk).

Sources:

John Crow Ballad and Song collection: the University of Oxford have an amazing resource via the Bodelian Library – Broadside Ballads online.

Pettingell playscripts:

Fuhrmann, C. Between Opera and Musical: Theatre Music in Early Nineteenth-Century London. In Gordon, R. and Jubin, O. (Eds) The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199988747.013.2

Pisani, M. (2004). Music for the theatre: Style and function in incidental music. In K. Powell (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 70-92). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL052179157X.005

Music hall:

Bratton, J. (2004). The music hall. In K. Powell (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (Cambridge Companions to Literature, pp. 164-182). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL052179157X.010