STARN: Scots Teaching and Resource Network
Back to Criticism & Commentary
Criticism & Commentary
The Waggle o' the Kilt
Back to 'The Waggle o' the Kilt' contents
Popular entertainment in nineteenth century Glasgow: background and context for The Waggle o'the Kilt exhibition, by Alasdair Cameron
Without the route map of 'great' plays to guide them through the centuries, most theatre historians assume that between 1756, when John Home's Douglas was first produced and 1899, when J M Barries Little Minister took his curtain call, Scotland had no theatre of her own. In fact, during these years, not only did most of the country support thriving theatres, Scotland even exported her 'national' drama. But both drama-based history, which results in peaks (Douglas) and troughs (the nineteenth century), and history written from the assumption that Scotland is slightly to the north of Drury Lane, are inadequate when trying to understand Scotland's fragmented theatrical tradition. Only by studying popular theatre and entertainment can a clear tradition of Scottish theatre be pieced together.
This tradition continues into the twentieth century where it influences writers in the construction of plays, often giving Scottish drama an immediate out-front appeal and a rambling construction which encompasses songs, stories and plot. It has also been used continually to save theatres, which commission and produce plays in Scots or with Scottish characters to attract audiences when fortunes are failing. This tradition, so often accused of being nakedly commercial (which is undoubtedly true) and debased (which is not), has rescued many of the more high art theatre ventures which sought to distance themselves from popular roots and appeal to an intellectual elite. The full-scale rehabilitation of the Citizens' reputation which was made in the wake of the success of their variety show The Tintock Cup is perhaps the most spectacular example.
The Tradition of Scottish Popular Drama
Scottish dramatists, from Sir David Lyndsay and his Satire of the Thrie Estatis [ 1554] onwards, have borrowed what we might regard as distinctive features of popular theatre and cheerfully mixed genres, used music and dialect, and exploited direct audience involvement to great effect. For long periods, for example between 1603, when the Court of James VI went South, and 1660, with the Restoration of the Monarchy, the only regular theatre in Scotland was provided by rope dancers, menagerie owners and quack remedy sellers, like the famous John Pontus, who set up his stage in the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. But perhaps the most interesting part played by popular entertainment in Scottish theatre history was in the late nineteenth century. By then the spread of the railways and the rise of what was euphemistically called the "London touring production" had led to the disappearance of the local stock companies and independent theatres in Scotland. Scotland's Theatres Royal had been bought up by syndicates of managers and became the home, for a week at a time, of society dramas, melodramas and musicals from the South. At least one of those syndicates, that of Moss, had been founded on the acquisition of Scottish music halls by performers who had made their name appearing in them.
This state of affairs was true all over Britain, but the loss of theatrical independence was all the more crippling to Scotland, as "real" theatre became synonymous with London theatre and with companies who arrived by train one Sunday and left by train the next. London touring theatre, expensive and metropolitan, was patronised by Scotland's prospering middle classes. With the notable exception of J M Barrie, plays by Scots, about Scotland and performed by Scottish actors were relegated either to the theatres in the poorest parts of Glasgow, or to touring theatres, known, because of their very low admission price, as 'penny geggies'. There, national drama, Shakespeare and melodrama with a Scottish accent were well, but informally, performed to large audiences composed almost entirely of the urban and rural working classes and there, happily, it thrived until displaced by the cinema.
Apart from being a fruitful source of theatrical anecdote, the geggies also played a vital role in the preservation of Scotland's "national drama" Plays about Scotland, or with Scottish themes and settings, provided more than half the geggies' repertoires. Chief among them were Rob Roy and Wallace Hero of Scotland, both plays with a strong nationalist message. But there were many others, including adaptations, or 'Terryfications', of many of the novels and poems of Sir Walter Scott.
The foundations for the national drama had been laid between 1815 and 1830 at the Theatre Royal Edinburgh, then under the management of W H Murray and his sister Mrs Henry Siddons. This theatre, said to compare favourably with any outside London, has been called Scotland's "first" national theatre, in the hope of a second. Murray himself added to its repertoire several now forgotten plays, such as Gilderoy and Crammond Brig, based on incidents from Scottish history. They were originally written for very middle-class audiences but those audiences had abandoned the Scottish theatre by the end of the 19th century. The plays' sprawling construction, however, proved susceptible to adaptation by the geggy performers as, in most of these national dramas, tragedy and comedy, action and pathos, dialogue and music were all mixed up together. They also allowed audiences to be addressed directly, and almost anything could be the cue for a favourite Scots song or some Scotch comic "business."
The Penny Geggies
The name geggy derives from a Glasgow word, the verb to 'gag' which, according to actor Peter Paterson in his Glimpses of Stage Life, described a make-shift tour of small towns undertaken by actors who were between seasons at the major Scottish theatres. In Glasgow, the geggy developed from the booth theatres which crowded round Glasgow Green each July for the Glasgow Fair which, by 1850, had become the annual holiday for industrial and agricultural workers in much of the West of Scotland. The geggies resembled booth theatres in architecture but gave better and longer performances than those prevalent at Fair time. Like the Fair theatres however, the geggies which toured the country were constructed of canvas and wood like circus tents. Seating around 400 and heated by charcoal braziers, they were erected and dismantled in each new town visited.
The geggies were very vulnerable to the elements. The playwright Joe Corrie remembers a geggy pitched on a pit bing which was destroyed in a storm. Will Fyffe, the famous Scottish comedian, remembered his father's geggy being blown into the river at Perth. Unfortunately, the young Will was on the roof when the theatre blew down and to his consternation the company seemed more interested in saving the geggy than in saving him.
Glasgow Fair
Although the geggies only emerged quite late in the nineteenth century as a distinctive theatrical form, they were heirs to a tradition of popular entertainment in Scotland which, because of the variety of diversions produced there and the huge number of people attracted to it, was closely associated with Glasgow Fair. Some idea of the Fair's scope in the middle of the century can be gleaned from a report of 1865 which mentioned that the central area of the Fair held nine exhibitions, six peep-shows, two waxworks, a circus, twelve shooting galleries and five acting theatres, in addition to a host of peripheral events. We also know, for example, that in 1844 a total of 96,000 people paid 1d (a penny) to see the 'Bosjesmans'. These were advertised as primitive tribesmen from Africa, though they were rumoured to be Irish labourers dressed in feathers and rabbit skins and whose primitive language was Gaelic. It was also said that one of the Bosjesmans ate live rats as part of their performance. This certainly outdid another showman who merely bit off their heads and skinned them with his teeth, managing to skin twenty in as many minutes until the police reluctantly intervened on behalf of the tender-stomached.
The 'acting theatres' of the Fair specialised in short sharp dramas played to full houses throughout the day. Such performances were, however, very lucrative. In his early incarnation of the geggy, David Prince Miller remembered acting Richard III in five acts, twenty times in seven hours. If the audience averaged the usual 400 and they all paid their penny admission, then his company of eight would have made the handsome sum of thirty three pounds - though they must have been rather weighed down by 8,000 copper coins.
Scottish Popular Theatre
The theatres of the Fair, like the geggies, constantly recycled Scottish subjects. Characters like Tam O'Shanter and Souter Johnnie would come alive in wooden theatres from morning till night. Sometimes the "unco guid", Scotland's version of the moral majority, would recoil from the use made of 'national' characters. Dramatisations of Tam O'Shanter were, it seems, often a thin excuse for some glimpses of female flesh in the scene in which the witch Cutty Sark dances in a very short shift in "Alloway's auld haunted kirk." Audience prurience and prudery however, meant that the witch was given the "bird" if she came too near the footlights. One theatre owner, according to a report on prostitution and fornication at the Fair (both of which were rife), devised another ingenious adaptation of Scottish iconography. Rather than have the actors engage in mock-combat or merely promenade to attract his customers, he apparently paid a prostitute to dress up in "Highland garb" and perform "unspeakable acts." Once lured by such sirens however, the spectators often discovered that they had paid to see a play like Othello in performances, the report tells us in surprise, "remarkably free from positive immorality."
Mumford's Geggy
The area of the Fair was also the home of Mumford's Geggy, which stood at the corner of the Saltmarket and Greendyke Street. It seems however that the name 'geggy' was only added as a nostalgic afterthought when the theatre had closed. It had been opened as a puppet show in 1835 by Mr Mumford, a drunken Englishman much given to lecturing his patrons on the evils of drink. He is also said to have been responsible for a spurious and much-recycled retort when his audience accused him of being a little under the weather in the title role in a performance of Rob Roy: "if you think I'm drunk", he said, "wait till you see Bailie Nicoll Jarvie." Mumford's theatre, built out of wood, was rather ramshackled and had a flap in the side facing the busy Saltmarket. When a show was due to start, this flap would open, revealing a small band of musicians playing to attract an audience.
The Geggy Actors
The most famous actor in Mumford's Geggy was Geordie Henderson, who was renowned for his "dying fall" and for his habit of issuing challenges to fight to the sometimes rowdy audience or stagehands or whoever was handy. Informality on stage was a Glasgow tradition in all types of theatres. The city's most famous actor-manager of the nineteenth century, J.H. Alexander, when not actually speaking, used to wander round the stage, re-arranging the scenery, cajoling the band, reprimanding actors, and counting the audience to make sure that the house receipts were correct. He would even, regardless of what the other actors were doing, perform 'Alexander's Jig' if requested by the Gallery.
Geordie Henderson however was rather less receptive to audience pressure. After a particularly affecting dying fall as Romeo, the audience requested a repeat performance. When he had complied three times and the audience was still unsatisfied, Henderson got up, strode to the edge of the stage, and pointed to the floor which was carpeted with the discarded shells of nuts and whelks (the contemporary equivalent of our - or rather your - popcorn) thrown onto the stage by the audience. "Giffe ye think ahm goin tae dee oan a' they whulks again, ye've goat anither think comin," he said and stalked back to his tomb. Sadly, by 1858, as part of the drive to make the centre of the city respectable, Mumford's had been bought up by an evangelical industrialist and turned into a Gospel Hall.
Unlike both the gaffs and barnstormers, actors in the geggies often made a good living, and though the geggies were touring theatres, standards of acting and production were often high. This is possibly because, although some of the actors were described as "having seen better days," many were Scots who had made a living with the independent stock companies playing characters from the "national dramas", but whose accents and training now precluded them from working on the London-oriented stage. In the geggies however, they gained new and enviable reputations. Geggy actors were also very resourceful: as most plays had to have a local, or at the very least a Scottish setting, actors from the geggies used to visit the larger theatres and adapt for their own purposes any play which they saw and which seemed suitable. They would also specialise in a particular skill. Whereas Geordie Henderson was famed for his "dying fall", Johnny Parry made a feature of dangling by the neck from the end of a rope in hanging scenes. Parry, it seems, suffered no mishaps, but the Scottish dramatist Joe Corrie remembered a geggy performance of East Lynne in which the angel representing the soul of Little Willie turned round on its upward path to heaven revealing an advertisement for washing powder.
The Saltmarket
The urban tradition of Scottish popular entertainment might also be said to have originated a short distance from Glasgow Green. This area was one of the most overcrowded in the city, home to waves of immigrants from Ireland, and home too to a warren of shebeens and brothels, some of them owned, unwittingly, by the Church of Scotland. Public houses along the Saltmarket, like the Shakespeare and the Bailie Nicoll Jarvie, had "free and easies." These rooms at the back of pubs were a forerunner of today's karaoke evenings where anyone could get up and sing. They were eventually closed down by the licensing authorities and formalised into Music Halls such as Davy Broons, the Britannia, the Star and the Scotia, spread along Argyle Street and Stockwell Street. Some of these like the Britannia were Temperance Halls and many of the artistes who appeared in the Halls were of a similar persuasion. They would make prominent appearances at the temperance concerts or "bursts" which were held on Saturday afternoons, at which the paper bags containing a bun to eat with the cup of tea provided as the "wee refreshment" at the interval, were burst in unison. The Scottish popular entertainment industry however was too small to be polarised into boozers and abstainers, and those who disapproved of drink often swallowed their principles and appeared in houses where alcohol was served. This century such divides continued, but more along the lines of class, into the respectable variety theatres like the Alhambra and the more robust theatres, like the Metropole.
The Fate o the Fair
In 1870 the Fair too, which had been under constant attack for its immorality, was tamed and moved out of the centre of the city to the Vinegar Hall some distance along the Gallowgate. The change was made easier because of a shift in population density in that direction and because of a change in the holidaying pattern of the middle class in Glasgow now that the possibility of going to the Clyde resorts had been opened up to all but the poorest in the city. The Corporation hoped that the less accessible site to which they had banished the Fair would lessen its popularity and counter the deleterious effect it had on the morals of the poor. But although the Fair lost its richer patrons it still became the centre of the summer entertainment industry in the city. In winter, when the geggies visited Glasgow, they established themselves on waste ground or in suitable buildings as near the centre as possible and so the sweeping away of the Fair meant little to them. In his paper on the geggies for the Old Glasgow Club, Robert Lightbody lists, as the most illustrious descendants of Mumford's theatre, the geggies of Glenroy, Collins, Ferguson and Mrs O'Brien. Unlike Mumford's, however, these were peripatetic and erected wherever there was space in the City or in an available field in the country. These geggy owners seem to have been very adaptable and whereas performances in the city always tended to be a bit rowdy, the geggy performances in the country appealed to the respectable artisans and farm labourers. But verbal interaction between audience and actors became so much a part of the geggies' performance that it was never discouraged. Hence the actors' fitness for the Scottish variety stage, which was to be the eventual destination of many of them. Will Fyffe was perhaps the most illustrious example of this progression.
Keek Shows and Tartanry (Now you see it; now you see it)
The all-embracing Glasgow word for any exhibition, menagerie or waxwork, was keek show, meaning, literally, peep-show. At Glasgow Fair such sights, according to a playbill, included 'Beasts and Beastesses from the bottomless Bay in the Vest (sic) Indies', 'Giants and giantesses', 'Fat boys and still Fatter girls', the ubiquitous learned pigs and 'unlettered dwarfs'. These were the typical attractions of any large British or American Fair. But there were also keek shows with a Scottish flavour.
These included waxworks of scenes from Robert Burns - Highland Mary was a pathetic and Tam O'Shanter a perennial favourite; panoramas of scenes from Walter Scott, concluding with a 'Vision of the Bard'; dioramas of Queen Victoria's journeys in the Highlands; and sculpture on Scottish subjects. We also know of a 'Wizard in Kilts' who performed in a booth, and the much more splendid Professor Anderson, 'the Wizard of the North', who built his theatre to resemble Balmoral Castle, complete with terraces, parterres, conservatories, trees and rhododendron bushes.
A short distance away from this at the Odd-Fellows were a Scotch comic and a Highland piper and dancer who attempted to play the pipes and dance a Highland fling at the same time with, as a contemporary observer noted, "an effect which is not easy to describe." The popular stage is often criticised for its use of, and reliance on, tartan and easily recognisable Scottish icons and symbols. It also stands accused, especially in the early twentieth century, of degrading Scotland and presenting a debased image of the country to audiences, at home, in the South and abroad.
While it is undeniable that there were some uses of stereotypes which were insulting, like the slow-witted Highlander (though even they usually turned out to be smarter than the audience was led to think at the start of a sketch), many of the images used were simply a trigger for an easy emotion. Acts were often very short, five to seven minutes being the norm for everyone other than the stars at the top of the bill. Something which made an instant impression was needed, and so the use of tartan and later outlandish versions of highland dress came into being. This need to grip the audience from first appearance also accounts for the fondness of many male performers for dressing up in women's clothes and singing comic songs about frustrated widows and old maids. The women they never dared to guy were the white- haired old mothers and black-eyed colleens of Irish legend. Exploring the truth behind this stereotype caused the Abbey Theatre from Ireland to be barracked on their first tour of America in 1910. This was something never risked by Scottish performers, and their appeal to the vast communities of exiles in the Empire was one of dewy-eyed memories of the country left behind. So lucrative were these markets and so genuine the feeting of loss that to challenge the exiles' vision of heather, bens and glens was impossible. They were left believing in rural idylls, undisturbed by industry, overcrowding or vicious landlordism.
But for those who were left behind, tartan and Highland imagery had a two-fold appeal. One was for those who had been cleared from the Highlands to the grimness of the cities, the other was much more general and part of Scotland's dilemma at the end of the nineteenth century. Here was a country, rich, industrialised and thriving which had no real status in the world. Tartan, St Andrew's flags and some kind of national imagery, however simplistic, was a means of creating a national identity. This was particularly important in a theatre which appealed to the working class who were not receiving the direct benefits of Empire and who were uninterested in the sophistry of the apologists for Union. Such audiences were not British but Scottish, and the images they saw on stage made sense when associated with performers who spoke like them and with whom they could identify.
Popular Drama later in the nineteenth century
Later in the century, geggy performances in general became more formal and the price of admission rose to 2d on ordinary nights, when there would be two houses and only one play. On Friday, however, admission was 4d and the extra charge would usually be for Macbeth in 'five long acts' with an afterpiece and 'good fires kept', or a 'grand national drama' like Rob Roy.
The geggies kept alive the nineteenth century 'national repertoire', performed plays about Wallace, Mary, Queen of Scots, Tam O'Shanter, Jeannie Deans, James V, Highland Chiefs, the Falls of Clyde, Wandering Steenie, and Warlocks of the Glen. They played them to Scottish audiences and played them with Scottish actors. The geggies, in a relaxed and informal atmosphere, provided plays about their own country and spoken in a familiar accent for people who were unable to afford the London shows or who could not travel to the large city theatres. In doing so, they preserved a distinctively Scottish dramatic tradition. So much so that later working-class playwrights like Joe Corrie, who had grown up with the geggies, were not afraid to write similar plays; plays which were quite unlike the West End dramas of the 1920s and 1930s. And when in the 1920s the Scottish National Players (earnestly devoted to founding a Scottish National Theatre) was started, it found its largest and most receptive audience not in the cities, where for 60 years Scottish plays had been considered inferior, but in the smaller towns and country areas where the geggies were still remembered and where the idea of a drama about Scotland, written by Scotsmen about recognisable Scottish characters and spoken in Scots by Scottish actors, seemed only natural.