Owners / Managers

Sir Oswald Stoll

The romantic invasion of London by the managers of the syndicates in the northern counties was carried out with overwhelming success and resulted in knighthoods for the men who were responsible for this achievement. Sir Oswald Stoll and Sir Edward Moss were its most prominent figures. 0swald Stoll was of Irish blood and was born in Melbourne. When his mother's second husband, Roderick Stoll, an entertainer and manager, died, Oswald, still a boy, assisted his mother in carrying on the stepfather's property, the Parthenon, at Liverpool. His business genius was first exerted in the. conduct of a small music-hall agency, and he prospered so rapidly that at the age of twenty-three he had already acquired Levine's Music Hall in Cardiff, which he renamed the Cardiff Empire. He extended his activities to other western towns, when, coming into competition with the Moss and Thornton circuit, he achieved a working arrangement with them which eventually developed into the famous partnership.

The descent on London by this firm began with the formation of the Finsbury Park and Stratford Empires. In 1901 the London Hippodrome was opened. Five years later Stoll retired from the combine and built the London Coliseum. After two or three years of uncertain existence during which a policy of spectacular revue was found to be un-prosperous, the enormous building achieved popularity as a variety theatre somewhat in the manner of the Alhambra, and for twenty-five years was conducted in this way with enormous success; a success based upon the complete absence of those questionable elements which had characterized the latter house.

During his management of the Coliseum, Stoll rebuilt the Middlesex Music Hall, embarking the house upon its career as a theatre. He linked the Coliseum with a large circuit of provincial music halls, forming the largest of all music hall syndicates.

Oswald Stoll has, throughout his career, proved his vivacity and versatility as a manager in numerous ways but in none more than the manner in which he terminated the career of the London Coliseum as a variety house in 1931 by the production of the elaborate German operette White Horse Inn, which was performed twice daily for over a year.

The same success attended, for a time, a similar policy at the Alhambra, of which he had been for some years the lessee. Stoll, a septuagenarian, still retained a quality of imagination in his theatrical management. He was an exceptional man with gifts outside the main channels of his work. He was an economist and something of a philosopher; in 1904 he published a book with the title, The Grand Survival; a theory of immortality by Natural Law. His great gift of managerial insight is exemplified, by the bold manner in which he rescued the music hall for respectability. The psychological acumen of this move won him an immense fortune.

From EARLY DOORS by Harold Scott