MISTAKEN IDENTITIES

‘The middle classes, in England as elsewhere, under democracy are morally dependent upon the aristocracy, and the aristocracy are morally in fear of the middle class which is gradually absorbing and destroying them. The lower classes still exist; but perhaps they will not exist for long. In the music-hall comedians they find the artistic expression and dignity of their own lives…With the dwindling of the music-hall…the lower classes will tend to drop into the same state of amorphous protoplasm as the bourgeoisie. T.S. Eliot, MARIE LLOYD, 1923

When I was a teenager in the ’50s

BBCTV, as if to prove

vaudeville were dead, would feature, at peak hours

music-hall acts in ‘variety shows’.

One such was G.H. Elliot, the self-styled

‘Chocolate Coloured Coon’. That a white, light tenor

and tap dancer should put on black-face, or rather,

brown-face, hence the ‘chocolate’, seemed no more strange

to my adolescence than Nuclear Tests,

Suez, Hungary, and the slowly emerging

truths about the Holocaust. In school,

about this time, we read The Journey

of the Magi – which prompted, sotto voce

at the back of the class, the cod carol,

‘We three kings of Warrington are, two

in a bottle, one in a jar’ –  and I thought,

possibly with youth’s wishful thinking,

the poet and the song-and-dance man were one.

I marvelled how the same person found time

to be both a ‘variety star’

and a ‘serious poet’, never mind

acquire the necessary know-how.

The poet has a plaque in Poets’ Corner,

Westminster Abbey. His ashes are buried

in East Coker, Somerset, from where

his ancestors moved to pillage and rape

the New World – and his anti-Semitism

has been duly contextualised.

The artiste’s headstone has been removed

from his grave in the parish churchyard

in Rottingdean – on England’s south coast

near Brighton, once popular with show-biz types –

pro tem, because of its ‘offensive language’,

which a stone mason will eradicate.

White, Christian entitlement, with its

patrician, imperial longings,

refreshing its lipstick…