Celebrity for the week ending
Saturday, 14 September 2002
Fred Barnes (1885-1938)
English music hall character and comedy vocalist
Fred Barnes and Reg Ambo of the Gay River Company, 1909
(photo: unknown, England, 1909)
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Fred Jester Barnes was born in Birmingham on 31 May 1885, the son of Thomas William Barnes, moderately successful local butcher, and his wife Lady Alice (née Jester). He was educated at a school in Malvern, and made his first appearance at the Gaiety Theatre, Birmingham, in December 1907. His London debut was at the Empress music hall, Brixton, in March the following year, where his success was immediate. Afterwards he was featured at one time or another on the bills at almost every metropolitan and provincial music hall of note in the British Isles, as well those in Australia and South Africa; he also starred briefly in vaudeville in America. Fred Barnes made the occasional pantomime appearance, including as one of the Dandies in Cinderella at the Opera House, Middlesborough (Christmas, 1907), and was seen in the London Palladium revue The Whirl of the Town in 1915. Roy Busby (British Music Hall, Paul Elek, London and New Hampshire, 1976, p.21) has described Fred Barnes as ‘a polished artiste with a good light baritone voice, dashingly handsome and always immaculately dressed.’ Of the many songs he made popular ‘The Black Sheep of the Family,’ written by himself, ‘Give Me the Moonlight’ (originally introduced by Elsie Janis), ‘Give Me a Million Beautiful Girls’ and ‘Sally - The Sunshine of our Alley’ were perhaps the most frequently requested of his repertoire. The ten recordings he made between 1911 and 1922 for Columbia in London, most of which were issued on the Regal label, are disappointing for a star of Barnes’s magnitude and do not convey the depth of his charm and popularity.
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Fred Barnes with his father.
The two shared an uneasy relationship that was largely inspired by the
elder Barnes’s disgust for his son’s chosen profession. In August 1913 Tom Barnes
was found dead, killed by a self-administered wound to the throat with a butcher’s knife.
(photo: unknown, circa 1910)
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The latter part of Fred Barnes’s career was overshadowed by self-inflicted misfortune about which he wrote an article, ‘How Success Ruined Me,’ for Thompson’s Weekly News in 1932. Off stage he lived a scandalously carefree life, never hiding his preference for the company of other men. In an age when this was not openly tolerated he was increasingly shunned, even by friends in the music hall profession. A minor incident in a motor car, in which his passenger was a young sailor, in Hyde Park on the evening of 19 October 1924 lead to a charge of being drunk while driving and driving without a license, for which he was later imprisoned for a month and fined. Although Fred Barnes’s career continued, his fondness for alcohol rendered him unfit to perform on several occasions and by the mid 1930s he had all but dropped out of sight. Eventually suffering from tuberculosis he went to live with John Senior, friend and manager, in a small flat at Southend-on-Sea where on 23 October 1938 he was found dead from the effects of gas poisoning.
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Fred Barnes
(photo: Fielding, Leeds, 1929)
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‘Two of the last of the Lion Comiques were Fred Barnes and Randolph Sutton; both were excellent singers of songs and had excellent songs to sing. Fred Barnes was a very big star in his day and a certain top of the bill, for he had a good voice, good looks, and easy manner and was always very well dressed. Not many of his songs were memorable, perhaps, although all were good at the time… Fred Barnes met with misfortune and faded out long before his career should have finished.’ * * * * * * * * For further insight into Fred Barnes’s life, his career and downfall, see Paul Bailey’s recently published Three Queer Lives (Hamish Hamilton, London, 2001), and just issued in paperback (Penguin Books, London, 2002). See also the essay on him in the periodical Music Hall, available from its editor Tony Barker, 68 Hawkes Road, Mitcham, Surrey CR4 3JG, United Kingdom.
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Fred Barnes, ‘The Incomparable Artiste,’
(left) as he sang ‘The Black Sheep of the Family.’
(photos: left, Dobson Studios, Liverpool,
right, Campbell-Gray, London, both circa 1915)
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© John Culme, 2002