Dance Halls - 1888

1889 – Dance Halls

       On Tuesday January 8, 1889, Nellie Waters and Ellen Garbutt appeared in Hamilton’s Police Court charged by their parents with vagrancy. Their parents had laid the charges in order to keep them off the streets and hopefully check the immoral conduct :

        “They both were employed as servants at respectable houses where they had little work to do, but they foolishly left the situations and roamed about the streets, associating with girls whose reputations were bad and keeping company with fast young men.”

        “Girls Going : the Bad Influences of Tough Dances Attended by Little Girls”

        Spectator. January 9, 1889.

        Magistrate Cahill told the girls that they were free to go after giving them a stern lecture and warning them that if they did not improve their morals they both would be sent to the Mercer reformatory.

        A few days after the police court case involving the Garbutt and Winters girls, Chief McKinnon was interviewed by a Spectator reporter on what was termed “the decadence of youthful immorality as the result of the low dance halls:”

        “The dance halls of which the chief complained are amongst the worst forms of social evil in the city at present. There are a large number of such places and they do a thriving business during the winter months. The dances are generally held under the auspices of some club bearing a ‘hilfalutin’ name. The “club” is composed of a few young men who put their heads together, hire a hall, send printed invitations to all girls and fellows they know or don’t know, and assess them 25 cents a brace at the door. Out of the proceeds they pay the hall rent and for the music, and pocket the balance. The attendance ranges from 50 to 200, and the dance does not get into full swing until near midnight. The brightly lighted windows of the dance halls seem to attract the giddy throngs of young people on the streets at that late hour as an electric light attracts swarms of moths.”

        “Should Be Suppressed : Disreputable Dance Halls and Their Evil Work”

Spectator.  January 11, 1889

According to Chief McKinnon, the usual pattern by which young girls get into trouble was that they would be drawn into a dance by older girls or persuasive young men. Before they knew what had happened, midnight had passed and they were afraid to go home, and, yielding to the pressure of their friends, they would spend the night in a low class hotel:

        “These hotels are chiefly to blame for the ruin of hundreds of young girls every year. The proprietors must know when a young man comes there at one o’clock in the morning, accompanied by a girl of 16, and registers as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith,’ that all is not right, and that he stood take steps to prevent his hostelry being turned into a house of assignation.”

        Spectator. January 11, 1889.

In fact, many of the lower class hotels held their own dances on the premises. A young man told the Spectator of his experiences at one of the hotel dances :

        “I was going home with a companion the other evening about 11 o’clock when we stepped into a certain hotel to get a drink and were told that their was a dance going on upstairs and were invited to go up. We did. In an upper room we found seven young girls sitting at a table drinking, and they all were about ‘half shot.’ They could not have been more than 15 or 16 years of age. Just as we got there a row occurred on the flat above and two men came rushing down and clinched in a rough-and-tumble fight on the floor. A crowd of men and girls came downstairs after them, and in a few moments there was a sort of free fight. The air was filled with curses, the combatants rolled over each other, and one young virago jumped on the table and began to lay about her with a large tray.”

        Spectator. January 11, 1889.

        The class of girls who frequent the tough dances were mainly servants and factory girls. A police officer told the reporter of his experiences with the girls who attended tough dances :

         “There are fully 500 young girls in the city who are regular attendants at the different dance halls, and they are all in a fair way to become regular prostitutes, if many of them are not already. That an immediate and effective remedy is needed for the suppression of the ‘tough dance’ evil no one can doubt who has read the recent police court disclosures.”

        Spectator. January 11, 1889