Expert’s Choice
Vanessa Toulmin, the National Fairground and Circus Archive ( sheffield.ac.uk/nfca)
This is another subject where arthurlloyd.co.uk really comes into its own. This excellent website was originally set up by Matthew Lloyd, the great grandson of the Scottish singer, songwriter and variety performer Arthur Lloyd (1839–1904), to celebrate Arthur and his theatrical family. However, it has since developed into a treasure trove covering the wider music hall scene, boasting “over 1,500 pages of information and nearly 15,000 images on the history of music hall and theatre in the UK and Ireland”.
The site is very useful for researching travelling musicians or individual venues, and you can read surveys of the performing scene in specific towns and cities. These are listed on two pages – one for London, the other for the rest of Britain and Ireland. So if you go to arthurlloyd.co.uk/britainsprovincial theatres.htm and click ‘Perth, Scotland’, for example, you will find an article documenting the city’s numerous theatres and concert halls featuring maps, photos, blueprints and playbills.
Elsewhere on the website are articles exploring variety acts and pantomimes in the 1940s and 1950s, while a page of links leads to resources for finding Victorian song sheets and music, postcards and historical maps, plus similar websites about particular theatres or performers. There is also a ‘People’ section including a list of the resting places of many music hall and variety artistes of the Victorian and Edwardian era, and a detailed timeline from 1800 to 1919 covering Arthur and his family’s life and other theatrical events.