Another performer who began in the Music Hall but made the transition to Variety was Stanley Holloway. An English actor, comedian, singer and monologist. He was famous for his comic and character roles on stage and screen, especially that of Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady. He was also renowned for his comic monologues and songs, which he performed and recorded throughout most of his 70-year career. (I am including these monolgues because they are recited to music.)
Born in London, Holloway pursued a career as a clerk in his teen years. He made early stage appearances before infantry service in the First World War, after which he had his first major theatre success starring in Kissing Time when the musical transferred to the West End from Broadway. In 1921, he joined a concert party, The Co-Optimists, and his career began to flourish. At first, he was employed chiefly as a singer, but his skills as an actor and reciter of comic monologues were soon recognised. Characters from his monologues such as Sam Small, invented by Holloway, and Albert Ramsbottom, created for him by Marriot Edgar, were absorbed into popular British culture, and Holloway developed a following for the recordings of his many monologues. By the 1930s, he was in demand to star in variety, pantomime and musical comedy, including several revues.
After The Co-Optimists disbanded in 1927, Holloway played at the London Hippodrome in Vincent Youman’s musical comedy Hit the Deck as Bill Smith, a performance judged by The Times to be “invested with many shrewd touches of humanity”. In The Manchester Guardian, Ivor Brown praised him for a singing style “which coaxes the ear rather than clubbing the head.”
Holloway began regularly performing monologues, both on stage and on record, in 1928, with his own creation, Sam Small, in Sam, Sam, Pick oop thy Musket. Over the following years, he recorded more than 20 monologues based around the character, most of which he wrote himself. He created Sam Small after Leslie Henson had returned from a tour of northern England and told him a story about an insubordinate old soldier from the Battle of Waterloo. Holloway adopted a northern accent for the character.
When The Co-Optimists re-formed in 1930, he rejoined that company, now at the Savoy Theatre, and at the same venue appeared in Savoy Follies in 1931, where he introduced to London audiences the monologue The Lion and Albert. The monologue was written by Marriot Edgar, who based the story on a news item about a boy who was eaten by a lion in the zoo. In the monologue, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsbottom react in a measured way when their son Albert is swallowed. Neither Edgar nor Holloway was convinced that the piece would succeed, but needing material for an appearance at a Northern Rugby League dinner Holloway decided to perform it. It was well received, and Holloway introduced it into his stage act. Subsequently, Edgar wrote 16 monologues for him.
