Marie Lloyd

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Lloyd, Marie [ Matilda Alice Victoria Wood] (1870–1922), idol of British music-hall audiences for many years. She first appeared in 1885, billed as Bella Delmere, a name she soon discarded for the one under which she became famous. She made her first great success at the Middlesex, singing Nellie Power's song, ‘The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery’, and she was then engaged for a year at the Oxford. For three years, from 1891 to 1893, she appeared in pantomime at Drury Lane, but the ‘halls’ were her true home and she eventually returned to them for good. In her work she was wittily improper, but never coarse or vulgar, and her reputation for double entendre lay less in her material than in her delivery of it, with appropriate actions and an enormous wink. Her cheery vitality and hearty frankness won over all but the most captious critics. In her late forties she lost her looks, and went into semiretirement, emerging in 1920 to take part in a revival of old-style music-hall. Among her best-loved songs were ‘Oh, Mr Porter!’, ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’, ‘A Little of What You Fancy Does You Good’, and ‘I'm One of the Ruins that Cromwell Knocked Abaht a Bit’, which she sang on her last appearance a few days before her death.