The Mile End road, says Sir Walter Besant, runs through a region, “less known to Englishmen than if it were situated in the wildest part of Colorado or among the pine forests of British Columbia.” Ever since that was written Colorado and British Columbia have been becoming better known, and now some of us will have to make the attempt to penetrate into these greater wilds and thicker backwoods of our own native London.



The Observer, 25 September 1921.

For somewhere along that line of highway lies the People’s Palace. It is thirty-four years since Queen Victoria made her little excursion into that distant and unknown part of her Empire, and opened there, in solid brick and mortar, the imagined “Palace of Delight” of Besant’s novel, “All Sorts and Conditions of Men.” Nowadays you can easily reach the Palace in twenty-five minutes from Oxford Circus, or if you prefer you can travel on the Underground, booking to Mile End Station.

It is Mr. Adrian Boult (writes a special correspondent) who gives me this practical information for enterprising travellers. It seems that he has himself actually been, and has even planned to spend there alternate Sunday afternoons for some little time to come. The People’s Palace already has, I think, a choral society, and a great annual musical competition; moreover on Sunday evenings the Sunday League holds concerts, and on alternate Sunday afternoons there are free, chamber concerts. It is on the remaining Sunday afternoons that Mr. Boult will come in - and with him will come the British Symphony Orchestra.

Fine programmes and low prices

“First question, Mr. Boult. What are going to be your programmes? Second question, what, are to be the prices?”

“I’ll answer the second question first, if you don’t mind. The prices will be such as just to cover expenses. The scheme is not yet fully worked out in every detail, but this I can promise you - there’ll be plenty of shilling and sixpenny seats, and some free.”

“And the programmes?”

“Why, naturally; the same sort of thing as we should give if we were running a series at Queen’s Hall. Every programme will contain something from the classics, including a symphony or a concerto; every programme will give something of the modern; and in every programme will be represented the British composer of today.”

Here Mr. Boult took out of his pocket a typed sheet and put it before his interviewer. First concert - a Brandenburg Concerto, Butterworth’s “Shropshire Lad,” Brahm’s Second Symphony. Second Concert - Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave (too much neglected to-day, those Mendelssohn overtures!). Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Russian Ballet’s Scarlatti-Tommasini suite (“The Good-Humoured Ladies”), and Armstrong Gibbs’s recent Gaiety Theatre music to the Maeterlinck play, “The Betrothal.” And so on - including in the programmes of the seven before-Christmas concerts: Schubert’s C major Symphony, Mozart’s E flat, one of Haydn’s and Elgar’s Second (with which Mr. Boult made such a stir at Queen’s Hall last year), Elgar’s Violin Concerto, Holst’s “Beni Mora” Suite, Strauss’s “Don Quixote”, Bliss’s “Mêlée Fantastique” (now, why a French name for a British work, dear Mr. Bliss?), and Frederick Laurence’s “Dance of the Witch Girl.” And, in addition to all these, the usual, and ever welcome, “Egmont,” “Freischutz” and “Mastersingers” Overtures, and their like. It certainly looks a feast for the Mile Enders. This is a bit of genuine “decentralisation.”

The People’s Palace, Mile End Road, East London, January, 1891. The Queen’s Hall and Music Hall were destroyed by fire in 1931. Photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

Here is a big mass of people who, for reasons of distance and of domestic finance, cannot come to Queen’s Hall, so Queen’s Hall will go to them. The Queen’s Hall patrons now have quite as much orchestral music as they can consume, and that is what has set Mr. Boult, as he says, “hunting the suburbs” for a new constituency for the best orchestral music, well performed.

A conductor who can talk

But one additional thing the People’s Palace is going to have - something that the Queen’s Hall has not, though it often seems badly to need it. The Queen’s Hall has its shilling annotated programmes (and does not always read them): the Palace is going to have in every concert ten to fifteen minutes of “talk”

“To begin with,” Mr. Boult explained, “I am printing on the programme a brief general statement, as a little guide to musical construction. From this I shall branch out, giving a few minutes’ explanation before each work. I shall talk a little about the form of a classical symphony; when we play ‘Don Quixote’ naturally I shall say something about Cervantes’s story and the incidents from it that Strauss has illustrated, and there will be times when I shall have certain instruments play alone, so that everybody may learn to know their tone. Perhaps, too, I shall give a little special explanation about some of the more modern composers and what they are aiming at.

The Orchestra

“Now about the orchestra, Mr. Boult?” “Well, of course, its history is pretty well known. Raymond Rose founded it entirely of men who had done service in the war, but though it quickly gained ground he died before the first difficult period had been passed. With perhaps two exceptions our men are still ex-Service men. Mr. Cruft, our leading double-bass, is secretary, and everyone in the orchestra respects him and works with him in a wonderful way; he is really a great organiser. When at fullest strength we have eighty men and we shall play sixty strong at the People’s Palace.”

Sir Adrian Boult and Edward Elgar at Abbey Road recording studios, London. Photograph: Hudson/Getty Images

Of what fine playing the British Symphony Orchestra is capable readers of THE OBSERVER are aware. The Quinlan series of last season revealed at its opening a splendid body of orchestral material that still needed refining and welding into shape. Every concert that followed showed a big gain in orchestral technique, and before the end of the series came Mr. Boult had under his baton a body of men who could carry out his ideas both as to the general spirit and the detailed performance of any work that he put before them. These men are keen, and mean before long to rank with any orchestra in the kingdom. “At rehearsal they are always asking ‘Can we do letter S again?’”laughingly complained Mr. Boult, “and when I called a special rehearsal of wind instruments only, and spent from 10 a.m. onwards on the wind parts of the one work, Debussy’s ‘La Mer,’ they wouldn’t stop when, at 12.45, I put down my baton, but they made me take it up again!”

All this promises well for Mile End, does it not? Think of all the comfortable and respectable suburbs of London, from Norwood to Golder’s Green, and try to find one with a series of concerts like this.