Fred Barnes (1885–1938)
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Fred Jester Barnes, not to be confused with songwriter Fred James Barnes, was born in Birmingham, the son of a fairly prosperous butcher. As teenagers, he and Dorothy Ward were great friends, and her success inspired him to attempt a show business career.1 His first appearance in a London Music Hall, in 1906, was an immediate success, and he continued to enjoy popularity on stage for the next dozen or so years. Music Hall historian W. Macqueen-Pope says that Barnes “had a good voice, good looks, an easy manner and was always well dressed.”2 Another chronicler of the times, Theodore Felstead, describes him as “[a] man with first-class melodies and the voice to sing them.”3 Among his better songs were There’s A Friend In Every Milestone, The Same Old Park, On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep, and The Black Sheep Of The Family.
Both Macqueen-Pope and Felstead note that Barnes faded out early, but what they do not say is that he was unabashedly gay. Known to his friends as “Freda,” he was regarded as scandalous even by the relatively tolerant world of show business, and he was increasingly shunned in his later years. His fondness for alcohol also limited his ability to perform as time went on. Barnes ended his sad life by gas poisoning in the Southend-on-Sea flat of his friend and manager. (For some of the biographical details on Fred Barnes, I am indebted to the website http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biob1/barnes04.html.)Fred Barnes recorded only a handful of songs, none of them by Fred Godfrey, but he appears from sheet music covers to have performed the following Godfrey songs on stage: You’ve Got Me And I’ve Got You (1914); They All Did The Goose-Step Home (1915); Tommy’s Learning French (1915); and You Can’t Fool Around With The Women (1920). One source (Charlton 1988) says that Barnes also sang Godfrey’s We’re All Scotch (1917).
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Notes
1 Norman Quilliam, “Remembering Fred Barnes,” The Call Boy [British Music Hall
Society] 31 (4, 1995), p. 16.
2 W. MacQueen-Pope, The Melodies Linger On: The Story of Music
Hall (London:
W.H. Allen, 1950), p. 393.
3 S. Theodore Felstead, Stars Who Made the Halls: A Hundred
Years of English
Humour, Harmony and Hilarity (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1946), p. 177.