Dancing London (1902): 'riotous hilarity' and 'rhythmic revolution'

'Living London: its work and its play, its humour and its pathos, its sights and its scenes,' edited by George Robert Sims, is a remarkable attempt to give an overview of London life at the turn of the 20th century (it was first published in 1901). All the volumes can be browsed on archive.org, and provide a great resource for historians of this period.

There are a number of chapters dealing with London nightlife. One on 'Midnight London' (in this volume) by Beckles Wilson concludes:

'Such, then, is Midnight London. In all the world's capitals is dissipation found under the name of pleasure; Britain's Metropolis is no exception. The gaudy and glittering throngs swarm over the pavements; and to the midnight sightseer there is a novelty in the spectacle of brilliant toilettes and ravishing complexions now visible at the tables of the brilliantly-lighted salons, which are crowded to the doors by Pleasure's laughing votaries. To such as these mid-day London has no attractions — is dull, tame, stupid. It is not until the mighty electric flare which distinguishes modern London bursts upon the city that they feel, with Edgar Allan Poe, that " the sun mars the ecstasy of the soul "; their pulse beats quicker by gas-light, if they do not hold that "Life is diviner in the dark." London in the twentieth century, however, is never dark, and the interval seems to be growing shorter and shorter  when it is ever quiet'.

The chapter on Dancing London by C. O'Conor Eccles (in this volume) surveys social dancing from
Mayfair Balls to poor children dancing in the streets. There are Highland Gatherings, Irish dances organised by the Gaelic League and a fancy dress ball at the German Gymnasium in Pancras Road. Here's a few extracts:

'When gaslights twinkle like stars, and  arc lamps shine out like moons, Dancing London bestirs itself. Dancing London!  What a vision the words call up of life, of movement, of riotous hilarity. Dancing London, of course, is young; is largely, though not exclusively, female; and is of all classes, from the fashionable debutante revolving to the strains of the Blue Hungarian Band to the coster girl footing it merrily on the pavement to the mechanical beat of a piano-organ. Men in general share in the amusement with less enthusiasm — under protest, as it were, and as a concession to the wishes of their womenkind — though amongst them devotees of the dance are to be found...

Dancing, as already indicated, is by no means confined to one class, or any degree of wealth. Indeed, it is generally found that the less this enjoyment costs the more heart-whole and satisfying it is. Quite as much pleasure can be purchased by a modest expenditure as by the most extravagant outlay. If we desire to see dancing less hampered by financial considerations than that hitherto noted, let us take a bird's eye view of Holborn Town Hall any evening, during the winter months, when the popular Cinderella dances are in progress. Despite a good floor and good music the price of admission is low. The entertainment of the season is the fancy dress ball, to which men are expected to come in cycling, boating, or other costume associated with some athletic sport, while the girls wear any pretty, light dresses at their disposal. Conventional evening garb alone is conspicuous by its absence...

English girls are exceedingly fond of dancing as a recreation. If anyone doubts it, let him visit the girls' clubs in Stepney, or Hoxton, or the Mile End Road. After a long day's labour in a mineral water factory (whose employees are sometimes distinguishable by their bound-up hands, or faces scarred by bursting bottles), in a match factory, a jam factory, or a tailor's shop, they will start to their feet at the first sound of the piano, and circle with an activity fairly surprising. They dance with each other, and seem to desire no other partners. Typical East-Enders are these lasses, with a shock of dark hair combed forward and forming an arch from ear to ear. Their dresses are bright blue or purple for choice, but often the original colour is only to be guessed at... 

...there  are penny dances in rooms at the back of public-houses, where the coster and his "pals" male and female disport themselves. There are also dances " free, gratis, and for nothing," when weather permits, in any asphalted side street with a convenient public-house at the corner where refreshment may be obtained in the pauses. The girls are the first to start. Their "young men" lounge around and guffaw until they are pulled or pushed into the circle and compelled to take their share, which they do after a fashion more uncouth than the girls, some of whom waltz admirably. A Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath affords, too, an excellent view of this side of Dancing London. Here many such groups may be seen, groups beguiled from the fascinations of "kiss in the ring" by the superior charms of rhythmic revolution. And thus goes it through all classes, from lords and ladies to costers and their "donahs".'

Music for the Middle of the Night

From Haruki Murakami's 'After Dark', 2004:


'The record ends. the automatic turntable lifts the needle, and the tone arm drops on to its rest. The bartender approaches the player to change records. He carefully lifts the platter and slips it into its jacket.  Then he takes out the next record, examines its surface under a light, and sets it on the turntable. He presses a button and the needle descends to the record. Faint scratching. The Duke Ellington's 'Sophisticated Lady' begins to play. Harry Carney's languorous bass clarinet performs solo. The bartender's unhurried movements give the place its own special time flow.

Maria asks the bartender, 'Don't you ever play anything but LPs?'

'I don't like CDs', he replies.

'Why not?'

'They're too shiny'....

'But look at all the time it takes to change LPs', Mari says.

The bartender laughs. 'Look, it's the middle of the night. There won't be any trains running till morning. What's the hurry?'

Karou cautions Mari, 'Remember this fella's a little on the weird side'.

'It's true, though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night,' the bartender says, loudly striking a book match and lighting a cigarette, 'You can't fight it'.

... The sound of the needle tracing the record groove. The languorous, sensual music of Duke Ellington. Music for the middle of the night.'

Night stirs the trees

Night stirs the trees
With breathings of such music that they sway,
Skirts, sleeves, tiaras, in the humming dark,
Their highborn heads tossing in disarray.

A floating owl
Unreels his silence, winding in and out
Of different darknesses. The wind takes up
And scatters a sound of water all about.

No moon need slide
Into the sky to make that water bright;
It ties its swelling self with glassy ropes;
It jumps from stones in smithereens of light.

The mosses on the wall
Plump their fat cushions up. They smell of wells,
Of under bridges and of spoons. They move
More quiveringly than the dazed rims of bells.

A broad cloud drops
A darker darkness. Turning up his stare,
Letting the world pour under him, owl goes off,
His small soft foghorn quavering through the air.

'By Achmelvich Bridge' Norman MacCaig (1910-96)

Image: The Sleeping Shepherd, Samuel Palmer (1805-1881)

The poem also put in my mind of a song title by Of Montreal - At Night Trees Aren't Sleeping

Night is not an object

"When [...] the world of clear and articulate objects is abolished, our perceptual being, cut off from its world, evolves a spatiality without things. This is what happens in the night. Night is not an object before me; it enwraps me and infiltrates through all my senses, stifling my recollections and almost destroying my personal identity. I am no longer withdrawn into my perceptual look-out from which I watch the outlines of objects moving by at a distance. Night has no outlines; it is itself in contact with me and its unity is the mystical union of the mana. Even shouts or a distant light people it only vaguely, and then it comes to life in its entirety; it is pure depth without foreground or background, without surface and without any distance separating it from me." (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945)

Isn't this quality of night part of what makes people interact differently after dark? The light reinforces our sense of separate identity, watching the world from our personal lighthouse, the dark begins to dissolve it.

Photo by Anthony Rahayel at Picable, taken at BO18 club in Beirut. Quote sourced from Documents.

The Nighttime's Mine

All I need in this creation

Is 3 months work, 9 vacation

Tell the boss, any old time

The daytime is his, but the nighttime's mine

Photo: Saturday night juke joint outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi Delta, November 1939 - taken by Marion Post Wolcott; Lyric: Green Corn, from the singing of Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival, 1960s - (not sure of exact date).

The Night Shadows

Chapter 3 of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is entitled 'The Night Shadows' and opens with reflections on night, sleep and its secrets:

'A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

Picture credits: Sleeping Beauty by Edward Burne-Jones (top); photo titled 'Sleeping Dancer' sourced from here. Unfortunately I don't know anything more about the photographer, who seems to be called Matilde, but check out the site for some good pictures.

Paris by Night - Brassaï (1933)

In 1933, the photographer Brassaï (real name Gyula Halász, 1899–1984) published Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night), a remarkable photographic record of his wanderings through the night time city in the company of, among others, Henry Miller, Raymond Queneau and Jacques Prevert. The book was reprinted with the photographer's commentary in 1976, in which he sets out his perspective on the nocturnal underground of the city:

'Just as night birds and nocturnal animals bring a forest to life when its daytime fauna fall silent and go to ground, so night in a large city brings out of its den an entire population that lives its life completely under cover of darkness. Some once-familiar figures in the army of night workers have disappeared…

The real night people, however, live at night not out of necessity, but because they want to. They belong to the world of pleasure, of love, vice, crime, drugs. A secret, suspicious world, closed to the uninitiated. Go at random into one of those seemingly ordinary bars in Montmartre, or into a dive in the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood. Nothing to show they are owned by clans of pimps, that they are often the scenes of bloody reckonings. Conversation ceases. The owner looks you over with a friendly glance. The clientele sizes you up: this intruder, this newcomer – is he an informer, a stool pigeon? Has he come in to blow the gig, to squeal? You may not be served, you may even be asked to leave, especially if you try to take pictures…

And yet, drawn by the beauty of evil, the magic of the lower depths, having taken pictures for my ‘voyage to the end of the night’ from the outside, I wanted to know what went on inside, behind the walls, behind the facades , in the wings: bars, dives, night clubs, one-night hotels, bordellos, opium dens. I was eager to penetrate the other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts. Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colourful faces of its underworld there had been preserved, from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its most remote past’

The book includes photos and descriptions of people socialising and dancing in bars, shows and lesbian and gay clubs - I will feature some more of this later.

These photos were taken at La Bastoche, a bar in Rue de Lappe, in 1932. Gotta love those kiss curls.

I believe the book is still in print, at least it's available from all the usual book sites. If you are interested in nightlife, dancing, photography, social history and alternative cultures you should take a look - and let's face it if you are looking at this site you must be interested in at least a couple of these...

A Cultural History of Night

From 'The Minotaur & the Maze: A Cultural History of Night #1' by Darran Anderson:

'Night might well be just technically the period of time when the sun is below the horizon. Yet it is also another vast transformed world, one which has its own vast and myriad culture; in poetry alone, the Aubade and the Alba (shared odes between lovers who must be tragically separated at dawn), in music the Nocturne (a rhapsody of, and for, the night). For all their beauty, these forms do little to describe to us what the night truly is, what this curse is that afflicts us at the dimming of every day?

In a sense, night is another frontier, alongside space and the ocean depths, that we’ve yet to truly tame. We may have mapped the entire landmass of the earth with GPS but controlling the hours after sunset eludes us. We may throw up a 24-hour garage like some outpost of civilisation or lines of streetlights but they are merely train-tracks through savage country. The nocturnal walk through the streets, familiar by day but changed utterly by night, can be a disconcerting experience. The dark brings out the undesirables that dare not show their faces in the cold light of day. “All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal” in the words of that gentle misunderstood soul Travis Bickle. That is its curse and its glory, when buoyed by the dutch courage of drink we choose to embrace it and join the ranks of the damned. “Most glorious night!” Byron wrote, himself no stranger to hedonism, “Thou wert not sent for slumber!”'

Full article at 3am magazine

In the kitchen at parties

I like the places where the night does not mean an end

where smiles break free and surprise is your friend

and dancing goes on in the kitchen until dawn

to my favorite song that has no end

(Bonny Prince Billy, You remind me of something)

1950s couple by Elliott Erwitt found via A Cup of Jo

1966 U.S. house party by Guess Zoo at Flickr

2008 kitchen party in St Paul by Surlygrrrl at Flickr

1880s sheet music cover for songs by African American songwriter James A. Bland

The Light Behind the Curtains

The break of dawn is not always the end of the party, but it is usually the beginning of the end. If nothing else, the first rays of daylight are a warning that the spell is breaking and that the special quality of night as a period outside of the normal rules of daytime (work, school etc.) is fleeting. In the 1920s, Herman Hesse described a moment at a party when 'a feeling that it was morning fell upon us all. We saw the ashen light behind the curtains. It warned us of pleasure’s approaching end and gave us symptoms of the weariness to come'. For him this was a signal for a last joyful burst of energy 'we flung ourselves desperately into the dance once more'.

A more doleful image of a party's end occurs in great Sicilian novel The Leapoard by Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958):

'The ball went on for a long time still, until six in the morning; all were exhausted and wishing they had been in bed for at least three hours; but to leave early was like proclaiming the party a failure and offending the host and hostess who had taken such a lot of trouble, poor dears. The ladies' faces were livid, their dresses crushed, their breaths heavy. "Maria! How tired I am! Maria! How sleepy!" Above their disordered cravats the faces of the men were yellow and lined, their mouths stained with bitter saliva. Their visits to a disordered little room near the band alcove became more frequent; in it were disposed a row of twenty vast vats; by that time nearly all were brimful, some spilling over. Sensing that the dance was nearing its end, the sleepy servants were no longer changing the candles in chandeliers, and the short stubs diffused a different, smoky, ill-omened light. In the empty supper room were only dirty plates, glasses with dregs of wine which the servants, glancing around, would hurriedly drain; through the cracks in the shutters filtered a plebeian light of dawn. The party was crumbling away…'

This pessimistic perspective is in keeping with the theme of the novel. Its main character, Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, is dying and reflecting melancholically on the fading away not only of his own life but of a way of life as the Sicilian aristocracy decays in the face of Italian unification - the party is over in every respect. For him 'The crowd of dancers... seem unreal, made of the raw material of lapsed memories, more labile even than that of disturbing dreams'. A young couple dancing may be 'sweet and touching' but they too are mortal and doomed: 'his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other's. The black of his tail-coat, the pink of her interweaving dress, looked like some unusual jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other's defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors set to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script'.

Still the end of the night doesn't have to signal despair. In Camera Obscura's great party song Let Me Go Home (a favourite floorfiller at How Does it Feel?), 'Daylight appears through the curtains and nobody cares, Supremes in our dreams, Do we quit bein' obscene on the stairs?'. Anyway, sometimes the end of the party holds out the promise of something more: 'Well the room goes boom to the sound of temptations and more, Twisting and turning that girl's looking good on the floor, Well the four walls they collide, Until the blue-eyed girl decides to let me go home'.

Image: from Visconti's 1963 film of The Leopard

Voilà notre nuit!

Au Petit Rocher (also known as Chez Dinocheau after its owner) was a popular tavern/restaurant frequented by Parisian 'bohemians' such as Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s and 1860s. It was situated in a cellar at the corner of rues de Navarin and de Breda.

Among the drinkers was the writer Fernand Desnoyers who would regularly sing there, his songs being published in his 1865 collection Chansons parisiennes('Parisian Songs'). One of his songs, 'Les rôdeurs de nuit' ('The prowlers of the night') is a celebration of staying up all night:

Quand le bourgeois dort,
Il fait soif encore,
Passon la nuit a boire!
La rue est toute noire;
Mais les vitraux des boulevards
Sont en feu, comme des regards.
Atmosphere enflammée,
Filles dans la fumée,
Eau-de-vie et bruit,
Voilà notre nuit!

(When the bourgeois sleeps,
We are thirsty, still;
Let's drink the night through!
It's quite dark outside;
But the windows on the streets are
Ablaze like people's glances.
Burning atmosphere,
Girls in the smoke,
Brandy and noise,
This is our night!)

Source: Paris: The Secret History - Andrew Hussey (London: Viking, 2006)

Night Haunts

In Night haunts: a journey through the London Night (Verso, 2007), Sukhdev Sandhu asks ‘Whatever happened to the London night?’, arguing that while in Victorian times ‘Gas lighting opened up the night’, nocturnal London was still seen as the other of daytime life: ‘The night was seen as lawless, foreign territory teeming with rogues and banditos… It was a hive of fascination and to it came a steady flow of gawkers, boulevardiers, solitaires, rubberneckers, slummers and sex tourists exercising their right to roam’.

Sandu suggests that the second world war ‘Blitz did for the London night. It produced life-threatening fear rather than flaneurial frissons’ and that is has been further killed off by ‘a slicked-up form of commodity urbanism… the ‘London night’ has morphed into, and been rebranded as, ‘London nightlife’’.

Night is no longer ‘a distinct, cordoned-off territory in which we may immerse ourselves in strange possibilities or make ourselves susceptible to off-kilter enchantments’. Instead it is a focus of a whole industry: ‘Fun – its conception, manufacture, and promotion – occupies hundreds of thousands of people… Night London is endlessly studied and written about – not for any mysteries it may hold, but because it is now seen as an economic unit… Acronyms clog the pages – TfL, EMZs, the latter standing for Entertainment Management Zones, a new term that describes areas in which large numbers of young people like to hang out in the evening’.

Nevertheless Sandhu still thinks it’s worth his while to explore, hanging out with nocturnal workers and other denizens of the dark – mini-cab drivers, office cleaners, nurses in a sleep clinic and Benedictine nuns at Tyburn Convent praying for the souls of Londoners in a ceremony called the Night Adoration. The image of prayer unites Sandhu’s night-time pilgrims: ‘Listen carefully. People are praying tonight. The blue-light ambulance driver tearing through the streets of South London in the hope that he can still deliver a hit-and-run victim to A&E before it’s too late. The young Chinese vendor who has spent the last few hours ducking in and out of New Cross pubs trying to sell knock-off DVDs, and who now sees a group of toughs looking enviously at his backpack… Prayer is the true language of the night. It is the sound of London’s heart beating. The sound of individuals walking alone in the dark’.

There is something seductive about Sandhu's prose and his argument about the taming of the London night certainly strikes a chord. Still he is well-enough read in Londonist prose to know that there is nothing new about lamenting for the glories of London 's nocturnal past. H.V. Morton, whose The Nights of London (1926) Sandhu takes as a model, mentions that 'Old men who drink port have told me, when warmed up, how beautiful London was at night in those [Victorian] days of side whiskers and plaid trousers and Ouida'.

It also seems to me that in eschewing London 'nightlife' as simply a managed industry, Sandhu has missed out on what is still exciting for many. Nocturnal London isn't just one long dark night of the soul, populated by lonely wanderers whistling in the shadows. There are surely still many making a collective journey on to the dawn and having adventures along the way.

Night, the beloved

'Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again'

(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

image is from a Los Angeles house club called Balance

Midnight Notes

Midnight

No Light

No Time

No Work

Midnight

Secret

Surprize

Power

Midnight

Quote: Midnight Notes
Photo: Singapore December 2006 by Abrilon