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Updated: June 10, 2025
From that moment Cennick was known as "Swaddling John";120 and his name was introduced into comic songs at the music-halls. As he walked through the streets he had now to be guarded by an escort of friendly soldiers; and the mob, ten or fifteen thousand in number, pelted him with dirt, stones and bricks.
Very often, too, the stranger falls a victim to the Irishman's love of fun, and goes back hopelessly 'spoofed' and quite unaware what nonsense he is talking when he lays down the law on Ireland far from that perplexing land. 'Don't you want three acres and a cow? asked an enthusiastic tourist from Birmingham, soon after Mr. Jesse Collins had provided the music-halls with the catch-phrase.
Madame, whom I now present to you, is herself an artist, and I must not omit to state, a better artist than her husband. She also is a creator; she created nearly twenty successful songs at one of the principal Parisian music-halls. But to continue: I was saying you had an artist's nature, Monsieur Stubbs, and you must permit me to be a judge in such a question.
An original and cultured gentleman of my acquaintance has a habit of visiting suburban music-halls, and deriving therefrom a delight exquisite beyond the dreams of the artists who forgather at the Wormwood Scrubs Empire.
The crushing of his rivals, the homage of his less successful competitors, the grosser pleasures of wine, the music-halls, and the unlimited spending of money amongst people whom he despised had long since palled upon him. He had a keen, strong desire to escape once and for ever from his surroundings.
That as a result of being thus lionized, many of these ignorant and mercurial people became fault-finding and overbearing, there is no denying. Nor can it be truthfully gainsaid that, for a year or more after the war began, there hung about the London restaurants and music-halls a number of young Belgians who ought to have been with their army on the firing-line.
At the time of the great invasion the music-halls dominated England. Every town and every suburb had its Hall, most of them more than one. The public appetite for sight-seeing had to be satisfied somehow, and the music-hall provided the easiest way of doing it. The Halls formed a common place on which the celebrity and the ordinary man could meet.
'I prefer the air of Throgmorton Street to any air in the world, he observed. 'I am unhappy if I leave it for a day. So far as knowledge of or interest in London went, he was not a whit better than poor shabby Arrowsmith. His London stretched no further than from the Bank to Oxford Circus, and the landmarks by which he knew it were restaurants and music-halls.
He no longer limited his patriotism to the roaring of truculent choruses at music-halls, or the decorating of his bicycle with the flags of the Allies. He went and enlisted instead. Now he has faced Death in person and outfaced him. He has ceased to attach an exaggerated value to his own life.
The long lines of London buses, that last year advertised soap, mustard, milk, and music-halls, and which now are a decorous gray; the ambulances; the great guns drawn by motor-trucks with caterpillar wheels, no longer surprise him. The English ally has ceased to be a stranger, and in the towns and villages of Artois is a "paying guest." It is for him the shop-windows are dressed.
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