OTD in early British television: 9 January 1939
John Wyver writes: AP’s evening of Monday 9 January 1939 featured two contrasting musical offerings: Schubert Night, which combined a biography of the composer with performances, and Lambeth Keeps on Walking, a similarly hybrid feature and variety line-up presented by Tom Harrisson (above) with composer Noel Gay about ‘the career of “The Lambeth Walk”‘.
‘The Lambeth Walk’ was a song from the hugely popular musical Me and My Girl that opened at London’s Victoria Palace Theatre in December 1937. The show’s star Lupino Lane developed a kind of confident strut on the stage, and this was formalised, to a degree, by the dance-hall instructor Adele England. Starting out at the Locarno Dance Hall in Streatham, where it was promoted by impresario C.L. Heimann, this became a craze that swept the country.
Later in 1939 the BBC’s outside broadcast cameras would twice visit the Victoria Palace to transmit the full show of Me and My Girl, but Lambeth Keeps on Walking was a studio production combining performance with fragments of narrative by Harrisson. There were demonstrations of dance precursors, including the lancers, waltz and foxtrot, followed by Adele England and Jimmy Quinn doing the Lambeth Walk, and then a culminating sequence titled ‘the Lambeth party’, with renditions of ‘Knees up, Mother Brown’ and ‘Liza, you are my Dinah’.
There were film sequences too, borrowed from British Movietone newsreels, including Lupino Lane in Lambeth and Lambeth Walk in New York, which I think must be this clip:
Also featured was the intriguingly titled newsreel item H.M. the King Doing the ‘Chestnut Tree‘, which frustratingly seems not to be available online. It complemented a demonstration by England and Quinn of ‘The Chestnut Tree Dance’, which the programme seems to have proposed as a likely successor to the Lambeth Walk.
As ballet pianist Jonathan Still writes in a fascinating 2016 blog post, this was ‘a bizarre bit of British dance history’. At the end of the 1930s there were those concerned about the influence of American jazz, cosmopolitan modernity and multiculturalism on English social dance. So the man who had helped popularise the Lambeth Walk came up with a response:
The result was the ‘Chestnut Tree Dance’, invented and marketed in 1938 by a dance hall impresario, C. L. Heimann. As a press bulletin of the time stated, this dance was a conscious revisiting of past epochs…
“The musical basis . . . is an old-time melody—this and the Dance itself is severely ENGLISH. So many of the new and short-lived dances that have been introduced in recent years have been American, and based upon Negro rhythms that have not been suited to English temperament.”
What could be more English than a chestnut tree, what could be more unlike a nazi Salute than raising both arms to symbolise it’s branches? And of course, if you did this in a dance hall, you’d be reasserting your national identity through the medium of dance.
Jonathan Still further quotes a terrific 2007 [paywalled] article by Rishona Zimring from Modernism/modernity, “The dangerous art where one slip means death”: dance and the literary imagination in interwar Britain’
‘The Chestnut Tree’’s flexibility as a symbol made it especially resonant as a potential icon of social coherence to counter the hybridity of jazz that threatened the dance halls. Mass-Observation assiduously collected responses from volunteers about ‘The Chestnut Tree’; it was the dance whose impact they most doggedly pursued (to discover, through interviews, that the majority of dance hall attendees found it fairly silly).
Note too that Zimring has subsequently written a richly interesting book about this and much more, Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain (Routledge; 2016).
Mass-Observation, the pioneering social research project begun in 1937, devoted a chapter to the Lambeth Walk and the Chestnut Tree in their 1939 book Britain written by poet Charles Madge and… anthropologist and Lambeth Keeps on Walking presenter, Tom Harrisson. His Wikipedia entry calls him a polymath and lists his occupations as ‘an ornithologist, explorer, journalist, broadcaster, soldier, guerrilla, ethnologist, museum curator, archaeologist, documentarian, film-maker, conservationist and writer’.
He made a number of appearances on pre-war television,. including being interviewed on Picture Page and contributing to Guest Night talking about what he did in his spare time. Lambeth Keeps on Walking was his first outing as a presenter, and he followed this up with fronting the studio documentary East End in July 1939.
Harrisson also wrote about the Lambeth Walk in the Winter 1938 edition of the journal New Writing, just before Lambeth Keeps on Walking, but here are quotes from Britain, presumably penned by him:
That this mass-dancing accepts and glorifieds the Lambeth Walk is significant of the nature of its social appeal, and makes it much more than a piece of middle-class romanticism about working-class condition.
It proves that if you give the masses something which connects on with their own lives and streets, at the same time breaking down the conventions of shyness and stranger-feeling, they will take to it with far more spontaneous feeling than they have ever shown for the paradise drug of the American dance-tune…
It is no more about reality than Hitler’s speeches are. Ballroom dancers sleep-walk to its strains with the same surrender of personal decision as that of uniformed Nazis. These Lambeth Walkers are happy because they find they are free to express themselves without the hypnosis of a jazz-moon or a Fuhrer.
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