In the 19th century, the music hall was the preeminent form of popular entertainment in Britain. At its peak, it employed over 80,000 and entertained 25 million people a year. Springing from the back rooms of pubs in the 1830s and 1840s, by the 1870s over 400 music halls could be found in London alone.
Yet, despite its immense popularity, only four original music hall buildings exist in Britain today and only one remains intact in Scotland: Glasgow’s Britannia Panopticon. Most have been demolished or converted into theatres and other buildings. Even harder to find is a record of the audiences of the halls.
Newspapers, however, can tell us much about a hall’s history. Advertisements tell us who performed and how much it cost to enter. In cases of accidents in halls, newspapers can provide invaluable information too.
A case in point is the almost forgotten story of Dundee’s Springthorpe Music Hall, the site of a dreadful tragedy on the evening of 2 January 1865, a crush involving over 100 people which claimed 20 lives on a cold winter night early in the new year.
Whilst undeniably tragic, the reporting of the Springthorpe catastrophe provides the historian with a valuable insight into Dundee’s music hall history and the general demographics of a mid-19th century hall. Newspapers recorded, amongst other details, the
