Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Quiz

Answer: Flying Trapeze

Léotard, the son of a gymnastics teacher, invented the flying trapeze act in the late 1850s and performed it first at the Cirque Napoléon in Paris. He soon became an international celebrity, but his reign was brief: he died in 1870, possibly from smallpox.

The music-hall song was written and performed by George ("The Great") Leybourne in 1868. Leybourne (who also came up with "Champagne Charlie") was one of the first superstars of the music hall, and reputedly earned £500 a week at a time when many of his audience were lucky to get much more than £1.

Answer: jingoism

"We don't want to fight, but by Jingo! if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too.
We've fought the Bear before, and while we're Britons true
The Russians shall not have Constantinople!"

Opinion on the "Eastern Question" was divided in Britain, but many people saw Russia as a continuing threat to British power in India and British ambitions in the Middle East, and they therefore supported Disraeli's action in sending a British fleet into Turkish waters to protect Constantinople from the Russians.

The expression "By Jingo!" goes back to the seventeenth century. After it was used in this song, it was immediately associated in the press with the sentiments that the song expressed.

Answer: The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo

Jagger, an engineer who knew a thing or two about spindles, observed the numbers that came up on the wheels at Monte Carlo, and realized that one of the wheels must be defective. By betting for several days on the numbers that were turning up most often, he won something like two million francs (£80,000 sterling in his day, or about six million pounds in early 21st-century purchasing power). He didn't actually bankrupt the casino, but he certainly embarrassed the management for a few days.

The song, written by Fred Gilbert, was performed by Charles Coborn.

Answer: a bicycle built for two

With the invention of the pneumatic tyre and the development of the safety bicycle in the late 1880s, cycling became a popular recreation. Like all the latest crazes, it soon became a subject for the comic music hall song.

Answer: The Old Bull and Bush

The Old Bull and Bush is one of several pubs around the heights of Hampstead Heath which are traditionally favourite haunts for Cockneys on Sunday or Bank Holiday outings.

Answer: Knocked 'em in the Old Kent Road

The singer's uncle has left him a donkey shay, i.e. a light open carriage, in which he and his wife show off to the neighbours.

The Old Kent Road, as its name indicates, is part of the main road to Dover via Rochester and Canterbury, and cuts through what has long been one of the poorest parts of London.

Answer: Henry the Eighth

The singer claims to be the eighth husband of a widow, whose spouses have all been called Henry.

Long after the demise of the music hall, the song was revived by Joe Brown and by Peter Noone (formerly the lead singer of Herman's Hermits).

Other successes for Harry Champion included "Any Old Iron?" and "Boiled Beef and Carrots."

Answer: follow the van

The singer and her husband have done a "moonlight flit" (i.e. decamped at night from lodgings where they owed rent). When they've packed all their belongings in the horse-drawn removers' van, there's no room for the singer, and so her husband tells her to follow on foot and not to hang about. Alas, the lady can't help "dilly-dallying" and taking "the odd half-quartern" (an occasional treble gin), and she is soon hopelessly lost.

Answer: Burlington Bertie

The aristocrat and the tramp were perennial sources of popular humour, and Miss Shields' act managed to combine the appeal of both. Since the Victorian poor were often dressed in the cast-off clothes of their social superiors , the idea of a tramp dressed in what had once been fashionable gear might not have been utterly incredible.

Answer: Harry Lauder

Although he was Scottish, Lauder began his career in the halls as a comic Irishman, before switching to singing sentimental Scottish songs, many of which he wrote. He was knighted for his services in organizing entertainment for the troops in World War I.