Rebel Britannia

15th December 1809:

What would you do if you got to the theatre one day and found the prices had gone up? If you were a Londoner of the early 19th century, the answer is you'd spend the next sixty days rioting.

Theatres have always been vulnerable to fires - whether accidental or for insurance purposes - and within a few months of each other in the winter of 1808-9 both the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, and Drury Lane burned to the ground. These were the only two companies in London licensed to perform spoken-word drama, so the loss to the people of the city was great. Much greater than it would be today: theatre was immensely popular at that time, regularly attended by people from all ranks of life.

Within nine months Covent Garden had been rebuilt and was ready to reopen; an impressive achievement by entrepreneurs and patrons of the arts, but one which came with a cost. To help pay for the resurrection of the theatre, ticket prices went up. And they went up a lot: in the pit, for instance, a ticket rose from three-and-a-half shillings to four.

Perhaps even more provocative was a redesign of the auditorium, which now gave more space to private boxes for the rich at the expense of the gallery where the cheapest seats were found. Indeed, the redesigned gallery was said to afford such a restricted view of the stage that only the actors’ legs could be seen.

The opening night saw a performance of Macbeth, the title role taken by John Philip Kemble, actor-manager and part-owner of the theatre. As soon as he appeared on stage the audience set up such a loud and sustained barrage of shouting, singing and hissing that the show was unable to continue. Kemble called out the magistrates to clear the rioters, but they were unable to do so - and that was the first and last help management got from the authorities. Apart from any political considerations, there was a strong case to be made that ticket-holders were legally entitled to boo a performance which they had paid to attend.

Night after night from then on, angry theatregoers who called themselves OPs (supporters of the Old Prices) made it impossible for the actors to act. They played "rough music" on pots, pans, horns and rattles, paraded banners through the house, and sang patriotic songs. They stood and made speeches about the ancient liberties of the Briton. They staged mock fights. There was an important principle at stake here, the OPs insisted: that entertainment should be available to everyone, not just the better-off. The people had a right to be at the theatre, and the management had attacked that right.

Because history is always complicated, it's no surprise that there were also reactionary sentiments on display; some of the OPs' opponents were attacked specifically for being Catholic, Jewish or European. Many protestors wanted the theatre to stick to traditional British fare, popular with the working and middle classes, and not chase the posh audience with trendy foreign rubbish. For some, a patriotic and class-conscious defence of their own culture could slide into xenophobia.

Kemble and his fellow shareholders did fight back. They brought in bailiffs to arrest leading OPs, they hired private police forces, and at one time employed a gang of bouncers composed of professional boxers. Everything they did just made things worse; the press and the public were on the OPs' side while the OPs themselves were strengthened in their determination by every move made against them.

As a visiting Swedish writer noted "There were hats with O.P. on them, an O.P. medal was struck worn on the breast. There were O.P. fans, O.P. handkerchiefs, O.P. waistcoats and caps. O.P. was inscribed on all the walls of London, O.P. was put by the tradesmen into their advertisements along with other rigmarole to capture John Bull's credulity. There was an O.P. dance which consisted of jumping backwards and forwards on the benches. There was O.P. music for this dance. It was printed. I have it. It has an accompaniment of rattles. I have heard children hardly yet able to speak amuse themselves by screaming O.P."

The OP riots had become a cause of the parliamentary Radicals; it meant the defence of British freedoms, the need for middle-class values to dominate over upper-class ones, perhaps even a safe flirtation with the ideas of social equality.

It took a long time for the theatre's owners to understand that they simply couldn't win a war against their own customers, but finally, on December 15, Kemble took to the stage to apologise for the changes, and to announce that they would be reversed. The Old Prices were back. Someone in the audience held up a placard reading "We are satisfied," and Kemble was cheered as loudly as he had been booed.

*

Sources:

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/t46qFF0xP57v5GLSj26j2c/the-ticket-price-riots-of-1809

Hogarth to Cruikshank by M. Dorothy George (Walker & Co 1967)

www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/v/object-95461/the-op-riots-at-covent-garden/

History Today 4 April 1975

A People’s History of London by Lindsey German and John Rees (Verso 2012)