Featured Image: Dundee People’s Palace Programme 1891 (with thanks to Billy Rough)
A recent exhibition in the Dundee Central Library highlighted the past importance of music halls to the City. This Soundyings post pulls together some relevant information and resources inspired by this event. Those involved in curating the exhibition (Dr Billy Rough, MLitt student Ombeline Picat, and 4th year student Nicole Entin from the University of St Andrews School of Art History, and Dr Erin Farley from the Dundee Libraries) did a splendid job with printed material from the Dundee Libraries’ Local History Centre, particularly the archive of posters and other printed ephemera that show the kind of entertainments that were to be had. Additional support was available from the British Music Hall Society, whose Vice-Chair Alison Young delivered a talk to open the exhibition. Local newspaper publishers DC Thomson gave permission to use some of their historic material.
Image: Dundee Music Hall Poster, 1871 (with thanks to Billy Rough)
Like many working-class cities in 19th century Britain, Dundee had a range of venues from the “People’s Palace” (which sat behind the Queen’s Hotel and which burnt down in the 1970s) to “McFarland’s Theatre of Varieties’. These were commercial venues, often operating on a precarious profit margin basis, and played an important role in connecting local identities with wider British culture. Audiences were more working class and male than otherwise for most of the 19th century. Health and safety often led much to be desired: a terrible crush at Dundee’s Springthorpe Music Hall on the 2nd January 1865 led to 20 deaths (see Rough, 2023).
Music Hall songs were important reflections, for better or worse, of national identity in the Victorian age: the kilted highlander performance by artists such as Harry Lauder shaped how Scots and the rest of the world thought about national identity, and many studies have followed Hugh MacDiarmid in questioning that particular topic and its legacy. However, the entertainments played a valuable role in connecting folk who could pay a few pennies for cheerful entertainment and some warmth on a winter’s night. The circuit of touring acts that played in Dundee’s halls linked working class England with venues around Scotland, although careful searches can also identity more local acts: see the Dundee library for more information about the local resources available.
Further Reading / Resources
- Billy Rough, Ombeline Picat and Nicole Entin, ‘Remembering Dundee’s Music Halls: Entertaining Dundee from the 1840s to the Great War – exhibition April/May 2024 https://www.leisureandculturedundee.com/news/remembering-dundees-music-halls
- Ruth Forbes, ‘Music and the People: Dundee, c1914-39’ chapter 9 in p.220-245
- Ruth Forbes, ‘A Study in Music, Community and Identity in a late nineteenth-century Scottish town’, in Journal of Victorian Culture 11(2), (2006), pp.256-280 https://doi.org/10.3366/jvc.2006.11.2.256
- Paul Maloney, Scotland and the Music Hall, 1850-1914 (Manchester University Press, 2003) – particularly good on Glasgow’s Music Halls.
- Billy Rough, ‘Frightful Catastrophe in Dundee’: The Tragedy of Springthorpe’s Music Hall’, in History Scotland, 23(1), 2023, pp.18-20.
- Billy Rough, ‘Fun Without Vulgarity’: A brief history of Dundee’s music halls, from the 1840s to the Great War: working, schooling, eating and entertaining. In A. H. Society (Ed.), A Dundee miscellany. Publications of the Abertay Historical Society, Abertay Historical Society 64, 2023, pp.105-140.