Las Vegas, West Yorkshire
In 2016 the bulldozers moved in, and within hours the Las Vegas of the North, the Batley Variety Club, was a pile of old bricks and rubble. The club, tucked away in a tiny West Yorkshire mining town 230 miles from London, had risen from unpromising material. It was conceived and constructed in 1967 by James and Betty Corrigan – lovers of all things Las Vegas and with a dream to sprinkle some US stardust in this tiny part of God’s Own County just outside Leeds.
The couple visited the clubs in Vegas and wondered what would happen were they to bring a bit of the model back to Yorkshire. By the late ’60s and early ’70s, the club was hosting an array of US celebrities, all flown into a local airport, put up in the Corrigans’ luxury home, Oaks Cottage, and delivered to the local chip shop for dinner in the club-owner’s Rolls-royce.
What on earth did the stars make of humble Batley? Eartha Kitt, who came to perform in 1968, wasn’t keen on the local fish and chips – so she acted as chef for the Corrigans when she stayed over, cooking up a storm in their homely kitchen.
In the space of just a few years, Gene Pitney, Louis Armstrong, Roy Orbison and Neil Sedaka all had short residences at the Variety. Every show was a sell-out in front of 2,000 miners and their wives, attracted by the names and the cheap entrance price – which included a meal of chicken-in-a-basket complete with plastic cutlery. Press officer at the time Carl Gresham tells me the US stars added one ingredient: ‘They had charisma. The minute the curtain was even half-up, people were on their feet, cheering.’
The Corrigans had something of a stormy marriage. Gresham says Neil
Sedaka found their rows a bit much. One morning, he came down to breakfast and announced he had written a song that was to be a peace offering between the couple. It became a major hit. It was called The Hungry Years and charted the Corrigans’ journey from rags to riches: I miss the hungry years The once upon a time The lovely long ago We didn’t have a dime Those days of me and you We lost along the way. All too predictably, the riches in the end turned back to rags (although, just before his death, James Corrigan scooped over £2 million in the National Lottery).
Carl Gresham has tales about all the great Americans who came. Louis Armstrong was modest and kind, he says, and had a heart for the working-class miners and their families. Armstrong earned a whopping £27,000 for his short stay in 1968 (the equivalent of £500,000 today).
When that figure was somehow leaked, it was a millstone for the Corrigans. Other stars wanted a bit more than Armstrong. Corrigan offered Dean Martin’s manager £45,000 for him to come to Batley and was told in no uncertain terms that Martin wouldn’t even ‘piss in a pot’ for that. The writing was on the wall.
At its peak, right up until 1974, the club was rammed with fans. Coaches came from neighbouring pit towns. People dressed to the nines and glamour was the name of the game. It helped that the beer was cheap and the ticket price covered the meal.
In the end, economics sank the place. Corrigan was spending more than he was taking. Other mega-clubs opened up, offering luxury as well as the stars. Most of the stars deserted the Corrigans for bigger pay packets – though not all of them.
‘Jayne Mansfield wriggled around and sat on one of the miners’ laps’
But that wasn’t before some glorious nights, not least when Jayne Mansfield came to Batley for a week of shows in 1967.
‘The problem was she didn’t really have an act,’ says Gresham. ‘She sang some Marilyn Monroe songs. On the first night, she recited some Shakespeare and there was a mass walk-out. We had a word with her and the next night she changed everything.’
Mansfield had illegally smuggled her two pet chihuahuas into the country. The dogs were badly behaved. Jimmy Corrigan moved her into a hotel so that she could leave the room in a mess and not his bungalow.
After the Shakespeare fiasco, Mansfield came on stage at her most beautiful and glamorous. She was dressed provocatively.
‘She wriggled around and sat on one of the miners’ laps,’ Gresham remembers. ‘Then she said, “Honey, would you like to see my chihuahuas?” It brought the house down. At that point, an assistant brought her dogs on stage.
Those northerners loved her, and she loved Yorkshire.’
There is a poignancy in the fact that her week in Yorkshire saw Mansfield’s last public appearances before her death in a car crash in New Orleans in 1967, aged only 34. While in Yorkshire, she loved nothing more than going out for a walk in the hills and stopping for ice cream at the local ice-cream van. She was, at least for a while, normal.
Of course, it couldn’t last. Costs went up and takings stayed the same. In the mid-’70s, the club closed, and the glamour never returned. Jimmy and Betty never made much out of it and later in life struggled financially. The trips by Rolls-royce from the airport to this little town dried up. People went back to their normal lives – working in pits that just a short time later would be closed down and living in communities that would be torn apart. James Corrigan died in 2000; Betty in 2018.
These days the big stars travel by limo and play at arenas. The fans don’t get close and certainly don’t get cheap entry. It is almost impossible to conceive of global stars playing such modest places. Today, Batley is just Batley and the Variety is a distant memory.
But once, it was nearly the centre of the world. Once, it was dusted with magic. Carl remembers, most fondly, Roy Orbison, who played at the club on 9th May 1969:
‘He used to come with his wife and just bring his guitar. He was a sad sort of man. He never spoke to the audience. He told me that he didn’t need to, because his songs said everything he ever wanted to say.’
I ask Carl if he missed those days. ‘Yes and no. There were good times but, in the end, we didn’t really know our arse from our elbow and it all went tits up.’