Inside the Royal Albert Hall's secret archive
Emily Baldwin Anything and everything has been seen at the Royal Albert Hall, from Bjorn Borg to a Shakespeare ball, seances to Sumo. But such is the focus on live performance that the building has tended to take its history for granted. It was only ten years ago that a serious effort was made to catalogue and digitise its own archive.
And what an archive it turns out to be. Its 100,000 items include programmes from the opening in 1871 through to last night’s live recording by Ed Gamble and James Acaster of their Off Menu podcast. There are also photographs, posters, artwork and, since 1990, autograph books signed by performers. “This will be the nearest I ever get to working with Vladimir Ashkenazy,” wrote Victoria Wood in 2001 on the page opposite the pianist.
The archive’s oldest item is the first of its council minutes, which records a visit to Queen Victoria in the Isle of Wight to show her the model of a central hall to promote arts and sciences building. There are still some archival gaps. If anyone has ephemera relating to Captain Scott’s fundraiser in 1910, or Janis Joplin’s only solo headline performance in the UK in 1969, the Hall’s archivists would love to know more.
Even after the archive began to be organised, it was stored in random and appropriate spaces, some prone to flood, none climate-controlled. Now, in a £1 million redevelopment, the archive has been brought together in one location, enabling researchers and members of the public to visit a designated reading room to leaf through its treasures. Among them are these eight treasures which merely hint at the rich variety of the Royal Albert Hall’s history.
Unseen Beatles photograph
The Beatles first performed at the Hall on 18 April 1963 as part of an event titled Swinging Sound ’63. A fan snapped the band at the stage door before joining the screaming throng who heard them perform Please Please Me, Misery, Twist and Shout and From Me To You. At the end they took part in a mass performance of Mack the Knife. Also in the audience was a 17-year-old Jane Asher, who was there to interview the band for the Radio Times. This was the night she and Paul McCartney met. The Rolling Stones visited the Beatles backstage and were amazed at the female frenzy they inspired. The Beatles performed at a second time, whereafter the council minutes record the decision of the Hall to call a halt to the pandemonium and bar them.
Hammercloth
The Hall was paid for by private subscription, Queen Victoria taking the 20 seats that now comprise the royal box. In front of it, whenever royalty visits, the Hammercloth is hung. First known as the Tapestry, this heavy velvet curtain bears the Royal Coat of Arms and the initials of the reigning monarch of Great Britain and the Commonwealth. It takes its name from a reference in the 1903 council minutes, and is thought to allude to the toolbox which sits under the coachman’s fabric-covered seat on a state carriage. Following the death of Elizabeth II, the Hall was quick to approach the Royal School of Needlework, which made the Hammercloth in 1878. At its embroidery studio in Hampton Court Palace, the E was removed within weeks and replaced with a C.
The UK’s first sci-fi convention
Over the years many have confidently booked the Hall and lost their shirts. No event can have been as weird nor perhaps as wonderful as the UK’s first ever sci-fi convention. Edward Bulwer Lytton’s 1871 novel Vril: The Power of The Coming Race tells of an American adventurer who discovers a race of winged, subterranean super-beings known as the Vril-ya whose power, or vril, was akin to electricity. The six-day event in March 1891 attracted audiences in fancy dress, who found inflatable blimps floating beneath the Hall’s ceiling above a Column of Vril-ya, inspired by Cleopatra’s needle.
There were magic shows, stalls and a fortune-telling dog. It must have had limited appeal because Dr Henry Tibbits, advertisements for whose electrical massage corset pop up in the supremely odd programme, duly went bankrupt. But the Vril-ya might have been an inspiration for George Lucas when he came up with The Force. And they gave their name to Bovril.
A suffragette demonstration
In five years from 1908, the Suffragettes booked the Hall 16 times and came to regard it as their Temple of Liberty. On 9 December 1909 Emmeline Pankhurst, just returned from an American lecture tour, spoke alongside her daughter Christabel and handed medals to the brave hunger strikers who had been force-fed in prison. One of them, Mary Leigh, had just been released from prison and made a surprise appearance. Her presence helped to raise £2000. A resolution was passed: “That the action of the Liberal Government is refusing to women the right of voting for the representatives who decide the taxes which women have to pay is a breach of the Constitution.” After the event some Suffragettes attempted unsuccessfully to secrete themselves in the Hall in order to disrupt a Liberal Party meeting which would be attended by men only, including the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith.
Hiawatha costumes
Between 1924 and 1939, the venue’s most reliable customer was the impresario Charles Fairbairn, who for two weeks every June block-booked the Hall for a performance in the round of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song of Hiawatha. The trilogy of cantatas inspired by Longfellow’s poem was first unveiled at the Hall in 1900. The annual revival had wigwams, hand-painted backdrops, a real waterfall and a campfire, and a cast comprising the 1,000-strong Royal Choral Society, whose members designed and wore their own Native American costumes, as did many of the children who came to see it.
Albert Einstein’s first English address
Albert Einstein had only recently fled from Nazi Germany when on October 3 1933, at a fundraiser for the Refugee Assistance Committee, he gave his first speech in English, and his last in Europe before emigrating to America. The event is said to have brought in $500,000 in support of persecuted students, university teachers and scientists. Einstein spoke on science and civilisation, inspiring an audience of up to 10,000 to cheer wildly. “I could not believe that it was possible that such spontaneous affection could be extended to one who is a wanderer on the face of the earth,” he told a reporter afterwards. “No matter how long I live I shall never forget the kindness which I have received from the people of England.” The following day in Germany a new law placed the press under Nazi government control.
Programme with Picasso front cover
On June 24 1937, at the height of the Spanish civil war, the Hall played host to a fundraiser in aid of Basque refugee children. The star speaker at “Spain and Culture”, invited by National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, was meant to be Pablo Picasso. Unable to attend, he instead created the design for the programme, and fashioned a sketch from Guernica, which he was in the process of painting in response to the bombing in late April of the Basque town. It was unveiled in July at the Paris International Exposition, so Picasso’s programme design was the first glimpse of his most resonant work. The event raised £11,000, and among the attendees were Virginia Woolf, Henry Moore and CS Lewis.
The International Ballroom Dancing Championships
The International Ballroom Dancing Championships were first held at the Hall on a specially laid sprung floor in 1953. In 1959 the British winners were Doreen Casey and Harry Smith-Hampshire. Casey designed and wore her dress which, together her shoes and gloves, was donated to the archive 10 years ago.
The Lancashire-born winners would establish dance schools in the north and, in London, the Lambeth School of Dancing. They won again in 1960, where they were also crowned champions of Europe at Earl’s Court. The most recent championships were hosted by the Hall last week.
The Royal Albert Hall Archive is open to the public by appointment. To book, email
