‍ 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.”

‍Marie Lloyd, one of the greatest music hall artists who ever lived — T S Eliot

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‍IN OCTOBER 1922, the Daily Express paid tribute to a risqué Music Hall star whose cheeky acting and suggestive songs pushed the boundaries of accepted behaviour on stage. She was hated by some and loved by many.

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‍ But when she died more than 50,000 people turned out on the streets of Hampstead to watch her funeral cortege and 120,000 people visited her grave in the following weeks, with queues stretching from the gates of the cemetery.

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‍ Mary Lloyd was always controversial and always good copy for the Express. When she performed her song ‘What’s That For, Eh?’ she sparked an outcry from some strait-laced Victorians who complained it was vulgar.

‍ It led to the song being cited as evidence in an 1896 court hearing as police and magistrates tried to have the Oxford Music Hall shutdown and its licence revoked.

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‍ The song told of a schoolgirl who, when she asks her parents awkward questions about sex, gets unsatisfactory answers. So, she asks her friend Johnny Jones for help, and he teaches her the facts of life. Marie performed the song winking to the audience and gesturing.

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‍ She was always gesturing and wore a gold watch on her ankle, baring her leg to read the time on stage. Men loved her innuendo, and London adored her. Her songs were to stand the test of time and echoed cockney, ‘My Old Man (said follow the van)’, and ‘A Little of What You Fancy Does You Good’’

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‍ Married three times and beaten by all three husbands, Marie turned to drink and lovers for solace. Sometimes she was beaten so badly that it took her twice the normal time to put on her makeup before going on stage. She suffered nervous breakdowns; faced scandals about her love life and was shunned by some of her peers.

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‍ She was born Matilda Alice Wood in Hackney, London on September 12, 1870. Her father was a flower arranger and part-time waiter. Her mother was a dress designer who taught her to make her own outfits. She loved them dearly.

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‍ She was a loving and cheeky Tom girl, and her father got her a job at the local Eagle pub as a table singer where he was a waiter. At the back of the pub was a music hall and it wasn’t long before she did her first professional solo performance there as singer Bella Delmere.

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‍ She brought the house down with her humour, cheekiness, flirty ways and songs, despite not having a good voice. She was on the road to stardom.

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‍ After changing her name to Marie Lloyd … Marie because it sounded sexy and French and Lloyd because she noticed Lloyd’s List on a table that day she went on to perform all over London. And London loved her. She captured the heart of the people, especially the little man, said T.S.Eliot.

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‍ One of her favourite performances was skirt dancing … a bit of a risque act where she would lift her long skirt, show a bit of leg and wiggle it about a bit, finishing off with a wiggle of her bottom.

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‍ By 1891, as the population rapidly grew, she became a household name, pulling in large crowds at halls across Britain, and starring at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.

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‍ But there was nothing more she loved than going off script and annoying writers and producers. And she developed an exaggerated wink that became her trademark. It was mimicked all over the land. But underneath there was a deep sadness that all her marriages had failed. It seemed the husbands only wanted her money.

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‍ Marie’s fees rose. From £10 a week at the start to over £700 a week at the height of her career and her songs became household favourites … ‘The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery’ and ‘Wink the Other Eye’

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‍ Her first husband was Percy Courtenay, a drunken racecourse ticket tout, in 1887. She was just 17. The marriage was violent, and Courtney was jealous of her famous friends. They had a daughter, also named Marie.

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‍ They divorced after Courtenay discovered his wife in bed with actor Alec Hurley. The scandal led to her being barred from working in America, which upset her deeply. She was heartbroken too when she was banned from appearing at the Royal Command Performance in front of King Edward because she was deemed “too lurid” for families.

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‍ She went on to marry Hurley, but he too was a drunk who beat her and the couple divorced in 1894. Marie’s last husband was Derby winning jockey Bernard Dillon, yet another drunk who was to land her in debt and ruin her with his gambling. He even beat up her father. Often the show cast heard her quietly sobbing in her dressing room.

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‍ Marie never forgot the plight of the homeless and poor in Hackney. In 1906 she was elected the first president of the Music Hall Ladies Guild which helped wives of artists unable to earn a living, by providing food and resources for their families.

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‍ On October 4, 1922, Marie was performing against her doctor’s advice, at the Empire Music Hall, Edmonton, where she sang “I’m One of the Ruins That Cromwell Knocked About a Bit”.

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‍ She was unsteady on her feet, eventually falling over on stage, which was met with laughter from the audience, who thought that it was all part of the act. She was taken home with the sound of applause ringing in her ears and died from heart and kidney failure four days later. Almost penniless.

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‍*****

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‍DID YOU KNOW?

‍THAT 150 years before the advent of texting, the small ads of the Evening Standard were used by Victorian lovers to send each other illicit messages, beg forgiveness and arrange trysts?

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‍ Here are a few from the archives, wonderful reading:

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‍CAD: ‘Utterly miserable and broken-hearted. I must see you, my darling. Please write and fix time and place, at all risks. Can pass house, if necessary, unseen, in closed carriage.’

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‍ LION TO LITTLE DARLING: Is it to be, as you say, I am never to see you again? I could part with the last drop of blood I have rather than see you hurt. I shall go abroad. Goodbye darling for ever, goodbye.

‍ ANNIE may return immediately. Come after dark.”

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‍ *****

‍NO FOOD, NO ROOF, NO HELP, ONLY A HOLE IN THE EARTH TO SLEEP IN

‍“THREE children were huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly, their little limbs, on removing a portion of the filthy covering, perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voices gone, and in the last stage of actual starvation.

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‍ “On some straw, soddened upon the ground, moaning piteously, was a shrivelled old woman, imploring us to give her something, baring her limbs to show how the skin hung loose from the bones.”

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‍ These were the words of Quaker William Bennett reporting on a suffering family in the Potato Famine of 1847, but the British public found them, and newspaper reports if they got them, hard to believe.

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‍ But this was the reality of The Great Hunger in Ireland where over one million people died of dysentery, scurvy, fever and typhus in the dark days of 1845-1850.

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‍ And The Times was not their friend. For Fleet Street was at war over the crisis. The paper described the Irish as the “laziest people on the face of God’s Earth”. And it demanded parliament only gave ‘minimalist’ government famine support because the Irish were “undeserving.”

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‍ The Economist agreed, reporting on October 10, 1846, that Irish distress was brought on by their own wickedness and folly.

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‍ The Daily News however criticised The Times for their harsh and racist portrayals of the Irish, although fell short of acknowledging the full extent of the suffering. Fleet Street was split on the crisis across the Irish Sea. Readers found the truth hard to find.

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‍ The crisis was caused by a fungus causing the potato crop, the main diet of the people, to rot. Whole families and villages fell to the aftermath of the disease that wiped out crops. Bodies lay by the roadside and families tried to shelter by living in holes dug in the Irish bog.

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‍ It was impossible to make enough coffins for burials. So special coffins were made with a trap door in the bottom. Once the coffin was placed over the grave a prayer was said and the trap door opened. The body would then drop into the hole, leaving the coffin ready for the next victim.

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‍ Tenants who were unable to pay the landlords found themselves evicted and their homes destroyed, so that they had no shelter as well as no food.

‍ The homeless, evicted from their small plots, died in fields and hedgerows. Those arrested for stealing food for their starving families were bound in chains on prison ships to Australia. And newspapers reported that over one million Irish emigrated as the birth rate plummeted. Irish life changed for ever.

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‍ Huge amounts of food were still exported from Ireland to England during the famine and London refused to bar it, which led to anti-Irish sentiment and calls for independence.

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‍ Many landlords reduced their costs of the potato disease by evicting tenants so they could knock down their cottages and convert the land to grazing. One mother even had her home knocked down around her as she lay dying with the fever.

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‍ The British Government, under Lord John Russell and the Whigs, did little to help the victims being evicted, believing in the property rights of landlords and free markets. They were underpinned by The Times. But like the Press in general, the Cabinet was split and beset with rows.

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‍ Government aid mostly came in establishing soup kitchens, poorhouses, and public works projects, which failed because they were too few and poorly managed. The main attempts to deal with the crisis came from The Quakers.

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‍ In England human stories of the suffering of the poor were hardly ever run, the poor were largely anonymous and only named if they went to court. They were referred to as the mass except a woman named Bridget O’Donnel, from Clare. Her name travelled worldwide after the Illustrated London News ran her story on December 22, 1849.

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‍ She told of her husband having four acres of land, and three acres of bog with a yearly rent of £7.4s but owed the rent in the famine. So, the landlord took away her corn.

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‍ She said: “Six men came to tumble my house; they wanted me to give possession. I said that I would not; I had fever and was within two months of my down-lying (confinement). They began to knock down the house, and women neighbours carried me out as the priest and doctor attended me.

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‍ “Father Meehan anointed me, and I was carried into a cabin, where my child was born dead. I lay for weeks after that. The whole of my family got the fever and one boy, thirteen years old, died with want and hunger while we were lying sick. The landlord took the corn into Dublin and sold it. I don’t know what they got for it. I had not a bit for my children.”

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‍ The story was used because it carried an image of Bridget who later died, and it was so well read that it opened a door for other human stories.

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‍ It wasn’t until 1997 that Britain apologised to the Irish for its response to the famine, admitting it had “failed their people.”

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‍TERRY MANNERS

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‍11 August 2025

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