George Beauchamp (music hall)

He was born in Southwark, London, the son of a policeman, and in early life worked at a printing company, eventually becoming a compositor.

[1] By 1879, he joined a theatre company specialising in melodramas and Shakespeare, and in 1882 promoted himself as an "eccentric vocal character comedian".

[2] He appeared in shows and pantomimes in the north of England, and then in London, and made several visits to perform in the United States as well as one to Australia in 1898.

[3] In the biography of Charles Morton, "The Father of the Music Halls", Beauchamp was described as "very eccentric but otherwise estimable..... [a] really droll comic-singer, who had the funniest of faces..".

Lucas, who saw him perform in Oxford, described him as, … a confidential and apparently half-witted droll, with an enormously wide mouth and a foolish smile, who had he succeeded in resisting the temptations besetting such a career, would have been a great success in London … coarse though he was, or perhaps because he was, … My mind is full of snatches of his songs … There was one about discovering after marriage that his wife had a wooden leg, the kind of brutal fun we English like.