The Britannia Panopticon Music Hall and Cosmopolitan Entertainment Culture by Paul Maloney (review)

Paul Maloney’s book is the first full-length academic study of Glasgow’s Britannia Music Hall, later known as the Panopticon. Together with his previous volume, Scotland and the Music Hall, 1850–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2003), it builds upon the work of music-hall historians Jacky Bratton, Paul Bailey and Dagmar Kift. Developing further the argument made in his earlier work that Scottish music hall had a closer relationship to mainstream culture than was the case in other parts of the United Kingdom, Maloney uses the case history of this particular institution to explore Glaswegian popular culture between the 1850s and 1930s. He also reveals features shared with English and American entertainments as they were adapted to the demands of modern, industrialised society.

In chapters devoted to the venue’s two major incarnations, Maloney examines the different strategies employed by successive managements as responses to changing socio-cultural and economic conditions. In the earlier, nineteenth-century period, the Britannia functioned as a successful commercial business yet also expressed local working-class popular culture. Owner John Brand created respectability for his music hall by exploiting the vogue for temperance and eschewing the model of the older singing saloons with their emphasis on food and drink sales. Similarly, during its heyday, H.T. Rossborough capitalised on the Britannia’s aesthetics and positioned its entertainments as “improving”, thereby forestalling objections on the grounds of immorality. The venue’s later history provides an interesting contrast. In the period from 1906 to 1938, which Maloney identifies as a transitional era between the Victorian music hall and the dominance of mass entertainment (especially cinema), Pickard’s Panopticon operated in conjunction with a museum and waxworks as a purveyor of “commodified utilitarian, no-frills entertainment” (241). A. E. Pickard extracted maximum profit from his working-class audience by offering a bill made up of amateur nights, second-rate variety acts and film screenings. Maloney adroitly demonstrates how Pickard drew upon his experience as a fairground showman and contrasts his business with the contemporary management model of the syndicated variety halls.

The presence of diverse ethnic communities in Glasgow is explored in separate chapters concentrating on the representation of the Irish and Jewish in the city’s music halls. Maloney contends that the Irish figure was central to the integration of this immigrant population into Scottish urban life and that the national cultural identity it provided linked diasporic Irish communities around Britain and America. Drawing on the theories of Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha, he similarly argues that performances of Hebrew comedians were effective as acculturating agents in Scottish society despite the fact that some regarded them as encouraging anti-semitism. The Panopticon itself provided a place for encounters between immigrants and indigenous Glaswegians. The final chapter features oral accounts of attendees of the Panopticon. These fascinating memories are used to demonstrate the significance of locality and to provide access to children’s perspectives on the venue and other Glaswegian attractions in the inter-war years.

This book makes a valuable contribution to music-hall scholarship. Its strength lies in Maloney’s nuanced arguments and skilful intertwining of localised detail with the wider context of developments in the entertainment industry.