The Batley Variety Club was a variety club in Batley, West Yorkshire, England. It was financed and co-founded by the late Yorkshire showman and businessman Peter Fleming in partnership with James Corrigan. It had a capacity of around 1600 people, and when it opened offered cabaret with an inclusive dinner for 6s6d (six shillings and six pence). At the peak of its success, the club was said to have had 300,000 members. It closed circa 1978 and reopened as the Crumpet night club. It closed again shortly afterwards and its contents were auctioned off. It has since reopened as the "Batley Frontier Club".
The Variety Club of the 1960s was a step up from the traditional Working Mens Clubs, usually carpeted and with a meal included in the price of admission. The Batley club was fitted with plush velvet benches installed in a circular "pod" that could seat five couples, with an open end facing the stage. Hundreds of these pods were arranged in tiered rows. Food was served, typical fare being "chicken-in-a-basket".
During its heyday the club staged concerts by performers including the Bee Gees, Shirley Bassey, Tina Turner, Tom Jones, Roy Orbison, Eartha Kitt, Louis Armstrong, Olivia Newton-John, Morecambe and Wise, Alvin Stardust, Jim Bowen, Dusty Springfield, Guys and Dolls, The Brotherhood of Man, Ken Dodd and The Grumbleweeds.
Famous quotes containing the words variety and/or club:
“In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin,—seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.”
—Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971)