Solo Men

Tom Costello 1863

If the title of lion cornique has ever been deserved, it is by Tom Costello. In the dramatic vein he is a lion in the comic, he has been among the first as dude, tramp or dame. From Birmingham, where he was born in 1863, he went to Wolverhampton to make his start on the stage, and arrived in London at the age of 23 to play a comic Mephistopheles in one of George Conquest’s pantomimes at the old Surrey."Comrades" definitely set him among the stars. Who will forget his forthright gestures as the cavalryman, wearing service grey shirt with braces hanging over the crimson trousers of his "Cherry Pickers" Hussar uniform, in the tale of a last good-bye on the battlefield? Now turn from this memory to that of him as the henpecked husband in "At Trinity Church" with a stump on one leg and the hip of the other standing out like a bustle, or as the red-nosed "fair charmer" of "Who’s Going to Mash Me To-night?"

At one time he was famous for his hoaxes. While singing about his desire to murder the originator of the phrase "There’s ‘Air," he declared he would shoot the next one to say it. A dandy in a box immediately did so, whereupon Costello "shot" him and the "corpse" was carried out through the audience. Once he challenged a heckler to "come up on the stage"; the man who did so presented Costello with a writ -and no one knew who was hoaxed and who was hoaxing.

From Romance of the Music Hall by M.Wilson Disher