Show time. Daily London fix time.
Yes, here we go again, London Walkers.
And today, well, here’s how you make an exit.
Friday night.
October 13th, 1905.
Bradford.
An old actor is onstage at the Theatre Royal.
He’s 67.
His health is shot.
Emphysema.
A damaged lung.
He’s exhausted.
But the curtain goes up and somehow, as it always has, the illness disappears.
The old magic takes over.
He’s playing Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in Tennyson’s Becket.
And at the end Becket goes to his death.
His last words are:
“Into thy hands, O Lord, into thy hands.”
Curtain.
Applause.
And those are the last words Henry Irving ever speaks on a stage.
Now, there’s a wonderful story that he actually collapses there and then, onstage, immediately after saying them.
Too wonderful, unfortunately.
It didn’t happen.
What did happen is almost as dramatic.
Irving leaves the theatre.
He chats for a while with his business manager.
His business manager happens to be Bram Stoker.
Yes.
That Bram Stoker.
The man who wrote Dracula.
Then Irving returns to the Midland Hotel.
He gets into the lobby.
And collapses.
He dies there shortly before midnight.
October 13th, 1905.
The curtain has come down for the last time.
And London goes into mourning.
Because this isn’t just an actor who has died.
This is Henry Irving.
The most famous actor in Britain.
Quite possibly the most famous actor in the world.
The first actor ever to be knighted.
The man who, more than anybody else, had dragged acting out of the social shadows and made the theatre respectable.
More than respectable.
Grand.
Important.
An art.
You can still meet him.
Walk round the back of the National Portrait Gallery, just off Charing Cross Road, and there he is.
Bronze.
Larger than life.
Long coat.
Head held high.
Sir Henry Irving.
The actor as public monument.
And that in itself tells you something.
Actors had been adored before Irving.
But you didn’t put them on pedestals quite like this.
And the funny thing is, Henry Irving wasn’t Henry Irving.
Not originally.
He was John Henry Brodribb.
Born in Somerset in 1838.
Spent much of his childhood in Cornwall.
Methodist upbringing.
Teetotal.
Austere.
Acting?
Forget it.
Acting was not what respectable Methodist boys did.
But this boy knew.
He wanted the stage.
And London made him.
He came to London in 1849, aged eleven, and lived with his parents at 65 Old Broad Street.
The City.
Right in amongst the money and the merchants.
He went to the City Commercial School, where the headmaster had the bright idea that boys should be taught elocution.
And young Brodribb was a natural.
The star turn.
There it is.
The first little crack of light through the door.
School finishes when he’s thirteen.
And now comes the life he’s supposed to have.
Clerk.
First in a solicitor’s office in Milk Street, Cheapside.
Then East India merchants in Newgate Street.
Desk.
Paper.
Ink.
Accounts.
A respectable future.
And then he goes to Sadler’s Wells.
He sees Samuel Phelps playing Hamlet.
And that does it.
Game over.
The clerk is finished.
The actor has been born.
He takes elocution lessons.
He starts haunting private theatres.
Rather wonderfully, these were places where an ambitious amateur could actually pay to play a part.
Richard III?
Two pounds.
Buckingham?
Fifteen shillings.
And at one of these slightly rackety little theatres in Soho, John Henry Brodribb first goes onstage as Romeo.
Using a new name.
Henry Irving.
And then?
Nothing much happens.
Which is worth dwelling on.
Because when you look at the statue, when you hear “Sir Henry Irving”, when you hear “greatest actor of his age”, it all sounds inevitable.
It wasn’t.
He spent fifteen years slogging round the provinces.
Sunderland.
Edinburgh.
Glasgow.
Manchester.
Liverpool.
Oxford.
Dublin.
The Isle of Man.
More than 700 parts.
Seven hundred.
Sometimes he’s the heavy.
Sometimes the walking gentleman.
Sometimes Bill Sikes.
Sometimes Shakespeare.
Sometimes he’s an Ugly Sister in Cinderella.
There’s a sentence I wasn’t expecting to say this morning.
Sir Henry Irving, first actor ever to be knighted, was once an Ugly Sister in Cinderella.
He played an ogre.
He played a wolf.
He played just about anything they threw at him.
And he was criticised.
His gestures were odd.
His speech was odd.
His legs were too thin.
Success did not come knocking.
At one point his pay could fall to twenty-five shillings a week.
He knew hunger.
One Christmas, the gift of a suit of warm underwear from a better-off friend was a major event.
That’s how far down we are.
And remember that when we get to the champagne.
Eventually London calls him back.
And in 1870 he lands a part in Two Roses.
Nearly 300 performances.
Now London knows who Henry Irving is.
Then comes the great turning point.
The Bells.
November 25th, 1871.
The Lyceum Theatre.
Small audience.
Cheap production.
Irving has driven the rehearsals.
And over the next few days the London critics start saying the same thing.
We have seen a great actor.
Bang.
There it is.
Years and years of failure.
Seven hundred parts.
Cold lodgings.
Bad notices.
Twenty-five shillings a week.
And suddenly the door flies open.
And what happens next is one of those stories you couldn’t put in a novel because an editor would tell you it was too much.
Irving is married.
Badly married.
Florence Irving does not think much of the theatrical life.
After the triumphant first night of The Bells, they’re riding home together in a brougham.
Irving, flushed with success, says something along the lines of, well, my dear, soon we’ll have our own carriage and pair.
And Florence replies:
“Are you going to go on making a fool of yourself like this all your life?”
Silence.
Irving tells the driver to stop.
Gets out.
And never goes home again.
Never speaks to his wife again.
That’s not a marriage ending.
That’s a curtain coming down.
And now the extraordinary years begin.
Hamlet.
Two hundred performances.
Unheard of for Shakespeare.
And there’s more Shakespeare. The great roles.
Richard III.
Shylock.
Macbeth.
And he’s not just Shakespearean.
There’s Mephistopheles.
Louis XI.
Yes, Louis XI.
That’s a part you probably haven’t heard of. So we’ve got a teaching moment here.
Louis XI was the fifteenth-century French king, nicknamed “the Universal Spider” because of his elaborate political intrigues.
The play offered Irving a wonderfully theatrical character: cunning, suspicious, manipulative, ageing and increasingly frightened of death.
A splendid part for an actor who could make an audience hang on every gesture. A 15th century French king nicknamed the Universal Spider. Boy does that get Henry Irving’s range and power into focus.
And on that note, let us go then, you and I, from 15th century France to mid-Victorian London. In 1878, Irving takes over the Lyceum.
And for the next twenty-three years he doesn’t merely act there.
He creates a world.
This is where I think we really have to see him.
The Lyceum glowing in the London night.
Carriages drawing up.
Gaslight.
Crowds.
Silk hats.
Evening dresses.
And inside, Irving is controlling everything.
Sets.
Costumes.
Music.
Lighting.
Movement.
Atmosphere.
He hires some of the finest artists in Britain.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema designs for him.
Edward Burne-Jones designs for him.
Arthur Sullivan writes music for him.
Charles Villiers Stanford writes music for him.
Irving is obsessed with the picture.
With the total effect.
And he becomes a master of stage lighting.
He actually prefers gaslight to the new electric light because he can manipulate it, colour it, soften it, make magic with it.
Dangerous?
Yes.
Beautiful?
Very.
And it was Irving who finally established the custom of darkening the auditorium so the audience’s attention was concentrated on the stage.
Think about that.
Every time you sit in a theatre and the house lights go down, there’s a little bit of Henry Irving in that moment.
And beside him, for a quarter of a century, Ellen Terry.
One of the great actresses of the age.
Irving dark, sardonic, strange, hypnotic.
Terry warm, luminous, expansive.
What exactly went on between them?
Nobody really knows.
Probably lovers for a time.
Certainly one of the great theatrical partnerships.
And running the business side of the Lyceum?
Bram Stoker.
The future author of Dracula.
For years Stoker is there, night after night, managing the machinery of Irving’s theatrical empire.
And Irving lives like a prince.
But here’s the lovely thing.
Not really on himself.
He pays his actors well.
He pays his staff well.
He keeps a whole list of pensioners.
Old actors.
Old friends.
Widows.
Families who have fallen on hard times.
One friend reckoned he was spending at least £50 a week supporting people.
He tips extravagantly because he remembers what poverty felt like.
Ellen Terry tells him his tipping is “common”.
He laughs.
And carries on tipping.
After first nights, the Lyceum stage can be transformed into a vast supper room.
Gunters comes in.
Lobster.
Chicken.
Champagne.
Actors.
Writers.
Politicians.
Artists.
London glittering away deep into the night.
The boy who once celebrated receiving warm underwear for Christmas is now throwing champagne parties on the stage of the Lyceum.
And then comes 1895.
The knighthood.
This matters enormously.
Not just to Irving.
To the whole profession.
Actors had long carried a whiff of social disreputability.
Irving had spent years trying to establish theatre as an art worthy of the same respect as painting or music.
And now Queen Victoria puts the sword on his shoulder.
The first actor ever knighted for his art.
She tells him:
“I am very, very pleased.”
Imagine what that meant to the boy whose Methodist mother had been appalled that he wanted to become an actor.
It wasn’t just Sir Henry Irving being knighted.
In a sense, the British theatre was being knighted with him.
But the great years don’t last.
Health fails.
A bad fall.
Pneumonia.
Pleurisy.
Emphysema.
Money troubles.
A disastrous fire destroys the scenery for forty-four of his productions.
The great Lyceum empire begins to come apart.
And here’s another extraordinary figure.
At his death, his estate was valued at £20,090.
A simple inflation comparison puts £20,000 in 1905 at something over £3 million today.
But that doesn’t really tell the story.
Irving had generated enormous sums of money.
He had also spent enormous sums.
On theatre.
On actors.
On productions.
On other people.
As he ruefully put it near the end, he had spent his life keeping an army.
And so back to Bradford.
October 13th, 1905.
Becket.
The old man somehow summons the actor one more time.
The last words.
“Into thy hands, O Lord, into thy hands.”
Then the hotel.
The collapse.
Death.
And the news travels down to London.
The response is extraordinary.
National mourning.
Irving is brought back to London.
And on October 20th he is buried in Westminster Abbey.
At the feet of Shakespeare’s statue.
Beside David Garrick.
Not bad company for John Henry Brodribb, the thirteen-year-old City clerk from Milk Street.
And there’s one final detail.
My favourite.
When Irving died, it was said that every cabman in London tied a black crepe ribbon to his whip.
Every cabman in London.
Now that tells you something no knighthood can tell you.
No statue can tell you.
No obituary can tell you.
The cabbies mourned him.
The Gov’nor.
Their man.
The great actor who tipped with an open hand because he remembered what it was like to have nothing.
And there he still is.
Behind the National Portrait Gallery.
Bronze Henry Irving.
Long coat.
That extraordinary face.
The actor standing there permanently in the London streets.
Which feels right.
Because Bradford may have got his death.
But London got his life.
A personal note here.
I sometimes think there’s a perfect time and place for listening to some of these London Calling episodes.
With this one, well, you could stand outside the Lyceum Theatre. Arguably the greatest of all London theatre frontages.
But if I had to choose, I’d listen to it in the company of Henry Irving’s statue, outside the National Portrait Gallery.
Thousands of people pass it every day. Most barely give it a glance. If that.
John Constable once said, “We see nothing till we truly understand it.”
And that’s what a story can do. It turns a bronze statue into a man.
Listen to Irving’s story there and you won’t just look at that statue. You’ll see it. You’ll see him.
That, for me, is the best seat in the house for this podcast.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
See you tomorrow.