Herbert Campbell

Born in Lambeth, Campbell started his performing career appearing in amateur bands and quickly toured London's music hall's during the early 1860s.

In 1882 he formed a successful association with the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where he appeared alongside Dan Leno in the annual Christmas pantomime, every year until his death in 1904 at age 59.

Campbell left school at sixteen and worked as an office boy for Murdo Young McLean,[1] a journalist at The Sun newspaper in London.

The following year, he decided to pursue a career as a comic vocalist and made his first solo appearance at the Alhambra in Shoreditch and Collins's Music Hall in Islington.

[1] Impressed at his performance in this piece, George Conquest hired Campbell to appear in the Christmas pantomime at the Grecian Theatre, Shoreditch, playing the same role.

Campbell weighed 256 pounds, was over six-foot tall and vocally, like "a powerful accordion which some miracle-worker had got into tune"[5] alongside the diminutive and whimsical Leno.

The English essayist and parodist Max Beerbohm thought of Campbell as "the offspring of some mystical union between beef and thunder" and regularly took French visitors to see him "as a liberal education in the character of this island".

[4] This view was also shared by critics, one of whom wrote: I am inclined to think "the cake" for frolicsome humour is taken by the dapper newcomer, Mr. Dan Leno, who is sketched as the galvanic baroness in the wonderfully amusing dance which sets the house in a roar.

[7]Among the productions were: Babes in the Wood (1888), Jack and the Beanstalk (1889 and 1899), Beauty and the Beast (1890 and 1900), Humpty Dumpty (1891 and 1903), Little Bo-peep (1892), Robinson Crusoe (1893), Dick Whittington and His Cat (1894), Cinderella (1895), Aladdin (1896) and the Forty Thieves (1898).

Released primarily as an advert for that year's Drury Lane pantomime, Jack and the Beanstalk, he played an over-indulgent man dressed in Victorian clothing, eating excessive amounts of food and drinking alcohol.