St James's Hall - The Christy Minstrels

The Christy Minstrels

The hall became known for its continuous production of blackface minstrelsy from 1862 until 1904. Known as the Christy Minstrels and later the Moore and Burgess Minstrels, the Hall's resident minstrel troupe performed in one of the smaller halls located on the ground floor near the restaurant, below the main hall. Gilbert and Sullivan's 1893 comic opera, Utopia, Limited, contains a joke in which the Court of St. James's is purposely confused with St. James's Hall and its minstrel shows, and a parody of a minstrel number is included in the same scene.

In residence for the whole active life of the hall, the Minstrels had their permanent home there, but their interests often conflicted with those of the main hall. In January 1890, for instance, George Bernard Shaw wrote:

At the Hallé orchestral concert... I was inhumanly tormented by a quadrille band which the proprietors of St James's Hall (who really ought to be examined by two doctors) had stationed within earshot of the concert-hall. The heavy tum-tum of the basses throbbed obscurely against the rhythms of Spohr and Berlioz all the evening, like a toothache through a troubled dream; and occasionally, during a pianissimo, or in one of Lady Hallé's eloquent pauses, the cornet would burst into vulgar melody in a remote key, and set us all flinching, squirming, shuddering, and grimacing hideously.'

Only a fortnight later, the band, at first subdued, broke out in a 'wild strain of brazen minstrelsy' during the final bars of the funeral march in the Eroica Symphony. After the movement was applauded a member of the audience began calling out that a complaint should be lodged, and won general approval, hear, hear, and people standing up to look at him. On one occasion Lady Henschel and her daughter went to hear Joseph Joachim play at a Saturday 'Pop', but were so aware of the 'rhythmic gay sounds, thumping and shimmering away in a most enlivening manner', that they decided to go and hear Moore and Burgess instead.