ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN defection to the Lord Chamberlain and jurisdictional transformation from a music hall to a theatre, the cancan reveals that the difference between the moral regulation of theatres and music halls was not so much a matter of audience standards, repertoire, or protection of the public good, but rather a question of the authorities’ habit, ability, and inclination to recognize certain types of problems and repress certain aspects of performance The Lord Chamberlain’s criteria and experience of impropriety were rooted in the written text Balletic plots were requested for a brief period following the Alhambra’s Wigan vs Strange case of 1865, but no more than four plots were ever submitted, nothing was detectable in them, and the practice was discontinued.33 For the Examiners of Plays, gestural infractions were anomalous and insuppressible without an accompanying text, whereas for the guardians of the music halls the suppression of texts was extremely problematic no matter how transparently objectionable the accompanying gestures were Bessie Bellwood’s song ‘What Cheer, ‘Ria’ (pronounced with selective elisions to sound like ‘watch your rear’) was far from subtle,34 and Kate Harvey’s ‘You see I’m but a simple Country Maid’ was a blatant untruth, but both songs were hugely enjoyed and tolerated in the halls Marie Lloyd followed in their tradition, but was much more restrained In 1896, she was summoned by the London County Council’s (LCC) Theatres and Music Halls Committee (which succeeded the Middlesex justices in 1888) when Carina Reed, a follower of Laura Ormiston Chant, complained about Lloyd’s song ‘Johnny Jones’ Reed was deeply offended by a verse that roused laughter in the audience: I don’t like boys, they are so rude, I would not like them if I could, Well Johnny Jones he’s not so low, He tells me things what I don’t know One day a rude boy pulled my hair, And though I cried, he didn’t care— He only laughed and went like so (business) — So I ran off to Ma to know— CHORUS What’s that for, eh? Oh tell me Ma! If you won’t tell me, I’ll ask Pa! But Ma said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing, shut your row!’ Well, I’ve asked Johnny Jones, see, so I know now.35 118