The advent of talking pictures saw a steady stream of theatrically-trained British actors quitting these shores for the warmer climes and potentially more lucrative prospects offered in California, but whilst our domestic stage might have lost the likes of Ronald Colman, C Aubrey Smith and George Arliss (the first Brit to win an Oscar), one full-blooded thespian chose not only to stay on his home turf but to keep the flame burning for a very particular species of theatre: the melodrama.
Norman Carter “Tod” Slaughter was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne in 1885, the son of a salesman who’d elevated the family’s social status when he took over the management of his own father’s lucrative advertising agency. Tod would later describe William Slaughter as “very distinguished but perfectly disreputable”,
The acting bug had struck at age nine, when Tod was attending the city’s Royal Free Grammar School. He’d joined the dramatic society and was cast in a minor role in Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’, but one of the elder boys was taken ill and Tod – extremely tall for someone so young – stepped into the breach. “I must have looked very funny with my thin long shanks in a pair of baggy white tights,” he told Roy Plomley during a 1955 edition of Desert Island Discs. “My proud Mama made it a sacred duty for me to entertain her guests every Sunday afternoon by reciting the whole of Julius Caesar, lying on my belly on a pouffé!”
Tod’s father was less impressed when this interest in the stage drew Tod’s attention away from his first job, clerical work for a wine merchant, and the pair argued frequently. Aged sixteen, Tod ran away from home to join the Carden Comedy Company, which provided several months of invaluable training but insufficient income, forcing a humiliating rapprochement with his father. Delighted to see an apparent end to “this play-acting nonsense”, William offered Tod a job with the family business – which lasted all of one week, until their next argument. “This time I knew it was the theatre or the river,” Tod confessed to Plomley, “and I joined a ‘fit-up’ company that specialised in rip-snorting tear-jerkers. One that plays in
It was gruelling work – setting up the scenery and promoting ticket sales whilst learning the various plays in the company’s repertoire – but also a fantastic training course, which Tod expanded when, after two years in ‘fix-up’, he joined Newcastle’s Olympia Theatre as its assistant manager. However, office work was not for this born showman, and in April 1905, the 20 year-old Tod made his first fully professional appearance, at the Grand Theatre and Opera House in West Hartlepool – with his parents in the audience.
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This was the peak of ‘popular theatre’, and Slaughter set up a small agency in the West End to scout for cheap talent, which in turn led to a fortuitous and eventually highly lucrative association with Sydney Bransgrove, a former chauffeur whose friends included Charles Gulliver, managing director of the London Palladium and a further 22 venues across the city. In the summer of 1912, Slaughter and Bransgrove pitched Gulliver the idea of taking successful West End productions out into the provinces. After running a series of matinee performances at the Palladium to prove their mettle, the pair were in business – and each was soon earning around £1500 per annum from an initial £600 investment. Tod also had another partner: the actress Jenny Lynn, 12 years his senior, who he’d married that September.
A total of 63 productions were launched over the following three years, usually with either Slaughter or Bransgrove in supporting roles, but Tod yearned to be a leading man and 1915 saw him opposite Jenny at Croydon, she in the title role of W Somerset Maugham’s early play ‘Smith’. Unfortunately, such theatrical enterprises were soon facing a threat other than the German Zeppelins now forcing many Londoners to seek shelter in underground stations: an explosion in the number of cinemas. When the Asquith government introduced an ‘entertainment tax’ in 1916, Slaughter and Bransgrove ended their partnership – and prepared to join the war effort, with Tod transferred to the newly-created Royal Air Force on 1 April 1918.
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It proved a short booking – he was back in ‘civvies’ by January 1919 – but Tod returned to find the theatrical landscape in as much turmoil as that of Western Europe: the craze for ‘moving pictures’ had taken off, and audience tastes had moved on, to more socially-conscious fare.
In November 1924, Slaughter followed a two-year engagement managing the Theatre Royal in Chatham by taking over London’s historic Elephant Theatre, but years of neglect led to a visit in 1927 from council health and safety inspectors, so he decided to combine the rebuilding work with a revival of ‘Maria Marten, or the Murder in the Red Barn’, a vintage melodrama based loosely on true events a century earlier, with Lewis Casson (husband of Sybil Thorndike) as the homicidal Squire Corder. To even Tod’s surprise, it proved a smash hit, leading to the release of a silent movie version the following year – an interesting hint at the next stage in Slaughter’s career.
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By his fiftieth year, Tod was well past playing romantic leads, but had carved out a popular stage career playing villains, not only taking over Corder but essaying the bloody barber in a 1933 production of ‘Sweeney Todd’, earning himself the chilling sobriquet ‘Mr Murder’.
Small wonder, then, that he was approached by British movie producer George King to recreate those roles on screen, beginning with Maria Marten (1935) and Sweeney Todd (1936). Just like the Victorian ‘penny dreadfuls’ which inspired them, these and those which followed – such as a crazed moneylender in The Crimes of Stephen Hawke (1936), a sinister killer in The Ticket of Leave Man (1937), a thinly-disquised William Hare (of ‘Burke and Hare’ infamy) in The Greed of William Hart (1948) – were unsophisticated crowd-pleasers, hugely successful “hiss the villain” adult pantomimes, frequently ignored by metropolitan critics but embraced by their target audience.
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It’s tempting to speculate how much better Slaughter’s reputation might have survived the decades had he joined Boris Karloff, Lionel Atwill and Frankenstein director James Whale in Hollywood’s ‘horror wave’. Sadly, Tod’s films fell into obscurity, although the recent Blu-ray release of eight early movies on the British label Indicator should help resurrect his profile.
As author and film critic Kim Newman observed, “Even in (Slaughter’s) heyday, he was a living fossil. Still touring with plays which had entered the popular consciousness generations earlier, delivering knowing winks and lurid thrills to audiences whose grandparents could have seen the originals.”
And loving every minute of it.
[A version of this article appeared as ‘Mr Murder!’ in Yours Retro #71, February 2024]