Florrie Forde’s cottage, Niarbyl, Isle of Man

On the pretext of fish soup at the excellent café at Niarbyl http://www.isleofman.com/business/n/niarbyl-cafe/, on the west coast of the island, my Isle of Man host-with-the-most John insisted we walk down from the café to the beach to see the point where North America joins on to Africa (see http://www.manxgeology.com/dalbygrp.html) and Florrie Forde’s cottage.

I tried to sound as if I knew at least something about Florrie Forde, but in fact I had to consult the wisdom of Wikipedia to discover that she was one of the most interesting – and now too much forgotten – figures of British entertainment in its transition from music-hall to variety.

Born in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy in 1875, she ran away to the Sydney music-hall at the age of sixteen, and five years later came to Britain where she started her music-hall career, thrice nightly, on August Bank Holiday 1897, began her recording career in 1903, and appeared in the first Royal Command Variety performance in 1912.

What attracted my particular interest was the list of her “hits”:  these are the songs my grandmother sang as she did her housework – ‘Down at the Old Bull & Bush’, ‘She’s a lassie from Lancashire’, ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag’.  One of the most poignant songs in Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War is ‘Goodbye-ee’, originally made famous by Florrie Forde.  Most people would link the Blackpool organist Reginald Dixon with ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’, but it was Florrie’s tune first.

And this towering figure in British entertainment, whose summer season for much of the 1930s was in Morecambe, apparently sailed across the Irish Sea on the Steam Packet, and must have used a motor-car to reach this remote spot, virtually beyond even Manx bus-routes, to gaze across the sea at sunset.

She died on tour, entertaining the troops in Aberdeen, on April 18th 1940.

Florrie Forde’s cottage is strictly private property.  When visiting Niarbyl, please do not disturb the owners.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Villa Marina, Douglas Promenade, Isle of Man

The Manx Government acquired their magnificent Wurlitzer organ in 1989 and initially installed it in the now-demolished Summerland centre.  At last it has been meticulously restored and rebuilt in the Villa Marina arcade, sandwiched between the Gaiety Theatre and the Villa Marina concert hall.  This 1929 instrument came originally from the City Cinema, Leicester, rescued by a wealthy organ-enthusiast, Allan Hickling, and installed in his home, Dormston House, Sedgeley [see http://www.villagaiety.com/ViewNews.gov?page=lib/news/villagaiety/allanhicklingand.xml&menuid=11570].

Len Rawle, who led the renovation project, demonstrated its range and power in a Saturday-evening concert in May after a week of maintenance work and before running a seminar for the island’s aspiring organists.  (Len’s website is at http://www.lenrawle.eu/scripts/Biography.html.)

You can’t argue with the power of the mighty Wurlitzer.  There is something unmistakable in the bravura playing-style that the instrument demands – accelerandi, rallentandi, arpeggii, swells and swirls and, as Len pointed out, early in his presentation, contrast.  People sometimes assume incorrectly that a theatre-organ is amplified, and Len showed how its core works perfectly well as a church organ playing classical pieces.  He gave an admirable conducted tour of the Wurlitzer specification – the stops designed specifically to create a “unit orchestra” to accompany silent movies, the additional keyboard links that provide bells, xylophone and vibraphone and the special effects for film accompaniment such as the motor-horn, the fire-engine and the birdsong which, he gently pointed out, should be used with discretion.

Noël Coward’s petulant line in Private Lives, “extraordinary how potent cheap music is” has the ring of truth.  Popular classics such as ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ and ‘When I Fall In Love’ scrub up to a high polish on a Wurlitzer, and Len’s repertoire included less familiar music of the period.  He brought his evening to a close with both the Manx national anthems, the nostalgic ‘Ellan Vannin’ and the staunch ‘Arrane Ashoonagh dy Vannin’ [‘Land of our birth, gem of God’s earth, O Island so strong and so fair…’].

There’s no following that with an encore.  What Len actually did was to shoo the audience away so that a young girl could have privacy to try out the Wurlitzer on her own.  As he said, that was what got him started a few decades ago.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.