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:
“The wonderful scope and variety of female loveliness, if too long suffered to sway us without decision, shall finally confound all power of selection. The confirmed bachelor is, in America, at least, quite as often the victim of a too profound appreciation of the infinite charmingness of woman, as made solitary for life by the legitimate empire of a cold and tasteless temperament.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)