John Roy Major

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2044946.html

This is a detailed and yet very readable survey of the British music hall, from early days in the 1850s to death by competition from cinema and broadcasting after the first world war. I had not fully realised just how rooted British popular culture is in music hall, even today. It was the source of many well-known catch-phrases. Harry Champion sang "Any Old Iron", "Boiled Beef and Carrots", and "I'm Henery the Eighth, I Am". Harry Clifton wrote show more "Paddle Your Own Canoe", "Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel", "Up With the Lark", and "Where There's a Will, There's a Way". Major credits Dan Leno, "the Funniest Man in the World", with inspiring the surreal stream-of-consciousness humour of the Goons and Monty Python. Basically all later twentieth-century and twenty-first century British comedy draws from this well.

The book is neatly structured, looking at the origins of music hall from pleasure garden, glee clubs and legislative attempts at social control; then at the development of music hall culture, with particular focus on the most celebrated performers (Marie Lloyd gets a chapter to herself, Dan Leno and Little Tich share one), and he looks thematically also at female cross-dressers, comedians, blackface and various other styles of performance. At the end he devotes a short chapter to the career of his own father, who was half of a celebrated double act in the early twentieth century, until his co-star, also his first wife, died as the result of a scenery accident. The book movingly starts and finishes with the death in 1962 of 83-year-old Tom Major, his son and second wife at his side, also surrounded by the shades of his past in spirit and occasionally in body.

Major comments ruefully that "Whatever gifts my parents passed on to their children, the talent to entertain was not among them... although I often reflected that my chosen career was akin to show business." It is more than twenty years ago that he rose without trace to become prime minister of the United Kingdom, and served seven forgettable years in the job. Yet I always felt that he was probably the only British prime minister of my lifetime who would be genuinely pleasant company in person. and on the evidence of this book he is too modest about his own ability to entertain. It's a nice little gem of cultural history. show less

(19 August 2013, Arcadia Bookshop, Oxford)

This book was bought on the trip to Oxford detailed in this post. An excellent political autobiography that deserves its description as one of the best of the genre written in the 20th century. It’s very detailed and did take a long time to read (and I will admit to getting a big bogged down in all the mechanisms of the ERM) but very much worth it.

Major’s conservatism was of the socially responsible kind, in fact initiating many of the policies show more that New Labour took and ran with. He never forgot his own start in life and did seem to genuinely aim to lift people out of poverty, remove class distinctions and offer education of whatever kind people needed, while making public services more accountable (even if league tables obviously went a bit far in the end; he is clear-sighted on the propensity to ‘game’ these, however). He does make much of the fact that Blair decried his policies while in opposition then took them over when it power, with Blair even using pet words and phrases of Major’s in his own rallying calls, which seems a bit much, really. Having said that, he does have a decent word for Blair’s support during the Northern Ireland peace negotiations and subsequent work on this area. He is also generous about other characters’ actions, e.g. Heseltine’s decency during the last leadership campaign Major fought.

Major’s prime ministership fell during an important time in my life, when I was getting interested in party politics and voting for the first time, so it was interesting to read about the background to some of those seminal events. He clarifies why he has been said to have done too little in Yugoslavia (letting the UN get on with it rather than wading in), and he does admit his mistakes, although I have to say here that he does not mention his own contribution to the accusations of ‘sleaze’ levelled at the Tories after his ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, which was a bit disappointing. He’s very clear on Margaret Thatcher, both in power and after power, and quite scathing about her breaches of etiquette in openly talking about him and even campaigning against him – I had thought this would be more mealy-mouthed on that area. He paints amusing and affectionate portraits of his fellow politicians at home and abroad, and reprints his lovely eulogy for John Smith.

A humane and interesting book about a man who was perhaps more interesting than contemporary reports portrayed him. He seems to be a decent man who genuinely wanted to serve, and consulted his immediate family on the big political and career decisions. There’s an additional chapter in this edition which looks at ‘what next’ from 2000, which is a bit unnecessary now, as I don’t really remember the exact detail of what came true and what didn’t. But overall a fascinating and valuable read. show less

The subtitle of this book gives a very clear indication of the approach taken by John Major in this history. Major's parents were music hall stars (albeit in the twilight of that genre) who spent their whole working lives travelling the circuits. In an interesting and entertaining history of music hall Major revels in the stars and gives them all the same respect he feels for and believes is due to his own parents. He shows how big the big stars really were in Victorian times, how they show more conquered the world and how they appealed to and were loved by the lower layers of society (although not exclusively so). Music hall was live entertainment, driven by the immediacy and intimacy between the artiste and the audience. This makes it difficult to get a flavour of the top acts as even those few that were recorded sound stale and flat in the isolation of the recording studio. Not necessarily a rigorously academic history, this is nevertheless an entertaining tale and the heartfelt enthusiasm of the author comes through very strongly. show less

Trapped in between that of Thatcher and Blair, John Major premiership often tends to be overlooked and yet... He had managed to reduce both inflation and unemployment -then left by the traumatic Thatcher's era- leaving thus to his successor a sound economy, something which hadn't occurred in a long time. A brilliant politician (Thatcher saw that in him, she who had appointed him Foreign Secretary then Finance Minister), he here reveals himself in a biography written back in 1999.

What show more strikes first and foremost is his social background. Here is a man who left school at 16 and worked odd jobs from then on, an experience that made him more of a centre-right liberal than an ultra-Conservative, then multiplying within the Tories. It's also, somehow, ironic. He is often considered as Thatcher's heir (he carried on her privatisations campaigns) and yet he was the one to break away from many of her other controversial policies and views (e.g. he ditched the Poll Tax, and took a radically new approach towards the EU)!

But the book, of course, worth a read for his retelling of the major events that had shaped his leadership, from the signing of the Maastricht Treaty to his successful negotiating with the IRA, and from Black Wednesday (a crash that reads here like an epic thriller!) to his 'Back to Basic' slogan, an approach that -to put it mildly- backfired very badly. His downfall facing Tony Blair was brutal indeed, but it would be wrong to overlook him: here was a man who tried to stir the Tories away from many of their 'nasty' features (although guilty of embodying some himself) and who paid a heavy price for it.

Is it indispensable? I didn't feel so. Apart from his lampooning of Blair, there's not much controversies in here, the man being as humble as he can be funny at times. The work behind the scene surely is engrossing (personally, I was fascinated by how Black Wednesday unfolded...) but, frankly, there is not much to learn otherwise; the events in question having been recounted elsewhere and in more details. It still is a nice biography, if you care about recent British history... show less