Fallen stars in disguise?

Some 125 years ago, buskers were a familiar and thriving presence on Brighton’s seafront. Their popularity was such that The Era - a long-running theatrical weekly founded in 1838 - felt moved to puncture a persistent myth: that the musicians and singers scattered along the promenade were fallen stars in disguise, disgraced actors, or even incognito aristocrats turning a penny between scandals. On 1 September 1900, the paper published a faintly sardonic survey of seaside performers under the headline ‘Buskers on Brighton Beach’, written by a ‘special correspondent’.

‘Quite an interesting fallacy exists in the mind of the casual holiday maker,’ the writer begins, ‘as to the identity of many of the performers at the seaside, on sands and beach’. Brighton, like Margate and other resorts, was awash with rumours of ‘Mysterious Musicians’ and ‘Promenade Prowlers’, supposedly hiding ruined careers beneath false beards and cheap costumes. The correspondent treats this with amused scepticism, mocking the idea that royalty might secretly be busking ‘to meet the demands of uxorious creditors’.

The article’s first task is to insist that busking itself is not disreputable. On the contrary, it is presented as honest labour, particularly for performers between engagements: ‘There is nothing discreditable in “busking”, and when out of a shop we see no reason why an actor, if he thinks fit, should not turn his singing or reciting talents to account until the tide turns.’

But this defence is immediately followed by deflation. The correspondent claims that most stories of famous actors ‘buskerading’ on the beach belong ‘chiefly to the region of fiction’. Having taken the trouble to observe performers on the Brighton front, the writer reports that, with one or two exceptions, they were not fallen professionals at all but lifelong street entertainers, ‘to the manner born, and had been street entertainers since childhood’.

What follows is a brisk, sometimes sharp-eyed catalogue of Brighton’s beach entertainments at the turn of the century. Originality, the correspondent complains, is scarce. Music-hall songs dominate, endlessly recycled for undemanding holiday crowds. Even variety, once sampled, soon palls.

Yet Brighton still stands out. Among the many acts observed ‘down at London-on-Sea’, it is Brighton’s Pierrot band that earns unqualified praise: ‘At Brighton the Pierrot band is far and away the best, the selection and the execution being above the average.’

The Pierrots - already an established Brighton fixture by 1900 - represent, here, the high-water mark of beach performance: disciplined, musically competent, and recognisably professional. Other named troupes fare less well, dismissed as ‘customary’, misnamed, or only intermittently entertaining. Ballad singers are ‘most plentiful’, leaning heavily on the popular composers of the day - Tosti, Molloy, Maybrick - while jugglers are ‘scarce’.

The most striking passages are reserved for the marginal figures of beach performance: blind musicians, paralysed instrumentalists, labouring hard for meagre rewards. Their presence reminds the reader that the beach economy was not merely comic or picturesque, but precarious and often harsh. Alongside them, older forms of popular entertainment persist: Punch and Judy drawing ‘crowds of willing customers’, marionettes and fantoccini keeping pace with what a wag calls ‘the origin of the drama’.

The conclusion is deliberately sour. Whether through genuine decline or the jaundiced eye of the observer, the correspondent finds Brighton’s beach entertainments wanting: ‘On the whole, however, the beach entertainments are deteriorating; they are not what they were, or else we are not.’

Conversation with performers yields little insight. Questions are suspected of being veiled appeals for money. And the final judgement is blunt: ‘real “buskers” seem to be dying out, and, perhaps, ’tis well’.

Sources: Editions of The Era can be accessed online via the British Newspaper Archive and Internet Archive. The photograph above - dating from the summer of 1899 - is courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. See also Busking on the seafront - yes please and The Punch and Judy tradition.