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…
David Alexander
December 31, 2025We were all just waking up to the world back then. But in many ways it was a strangely innocent era.
I was telling one of my grandsons recently about a massively popular weekly radio show, Educating Archie, which had 16 million loyal listeners, including the Queen and starred Peter Brough and his ventriloquist’s dummy Archie Andrews.
Harvey Lillywhite
January 2, 2026Into the fluster of good and evil wrestling until they become a single thing this poem, maybe, shows us how far we have come, increasing our ‘sensitivity’, since we grew up in the ‘carefree’ 50s. To recognize our entitlement is a big step.
David Press
January 2, 2026Your poem eloquently reminds me of recent visits to Dunham Massey.
In front of the main Dunham Massey house with an inscription on its facade ‘a ma puissance’ there used to be a statue of a black man (presumably a slave) on his knees.
Last few times I’ve been the statue has been absent and the explanation from a staff member was that some visitors had found it upsetting!
Not woke, but somnolent!
Raji Davenport
January 4, 2026Powerful, moving words.
Jeff
January 4, 2026Brighton buses are named, as were my old-friend steam locomotives of our shared 1950s era after famous places and people, but in Brighton, the far less-romantic buses are named only after the famous people who actually lived there.
Last time, while riding on ‘Dame Vera Lynn’ in driving rain and steamed-up windows, I think ‘GH Elliott’ came the other way and stopped opposite, outside the new IKEA (ex-trainspotters apparently notice the irony of such things – filthy locomotives carrying wonderfully sounding brass nameplates of sunny places like ‘Swaziland’ and ‘Tanganyika’, but seen thundering by in dull places like Crewe and Preston) and taking aboard, likewise-drenched, Christmas shoppers outside the shopping centre..
It’s a Funny Old World… as they say in the Private Eye column of the same name, my copy by then damp and dropping to bits in the inside pocket of my supposed water-proof coat…
I also noted that the Brighton IKEA is not a patch on your ‘We Three Kings of Warrington-are’ original store, which is what made me first think of all this, although the immense photos in it picturing a sunny and wooded Småland are the same, this, a small patch of bright Scandinavian sunlight pasted onto a Swedish cafe wall on the south coast, seen on the grey wet wave-sprayed way back from Rottingdean.
Again David, your poetry has a way of winkling out these thoughts and memories. Thank you, again.
PS A case of mistaken identity re the Brighton bus/GH Elliott response, I realise on reflection. It was possibly ‘HV Elliott’, the English divine, and VERY wet with steamed-up glasses!
Neil Jackson
January 12, 2026Wow!