‘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…
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By David Selzer