| Orchestra or Band | The Southern Syncopated Orchestra |
| Set List | 10:00 Dancing (until 05:00) |
| Performance Notes | The coming of peace coincided with the Jazz Age, with its new styles, rhythms and sense of fun. The early anniversaries of the Armistice were often marked up by riotous 'booze ups' and 'knees up' like this ball. But in the late 1920s celebrations were seen as inappropriate and were quitely dropped in favour of more sedate commemorations such as the Festival of Remembrance.
Film footage of the event is available from British Pathe (Film ID 1928.16 and Film ID1904.07). Running time 1min 23secs and 1min 4secs.
The event required guests to wear costumes.
Supper was served in the gallery.
There were two kiosks in the Hall from which poeple could buy tickets costing 5s each for the Victory chance, the purchaser standing to win a motor-car, a box of jewellery and other prizes. Balloons and streamers were also for sale.
Soldiers, sailors and women in uniform were able to purchase gallery viewing tickets for the ball for a reduced fee of 5 shillings.
"The Albert Hall has rarely presented a more brilliant sight than on the occassion of the Victory Ball on Tuesday night. Those who came early, before 10.30, had plenty of time to book their dances and take tickets for the Victory chance. Searchlights picked out a perfect colour scheme of blue background with Allied flags glowing against the boxes. Never did the hall look so distinguished or so beautiful. By 10.30 there were over 2,000 people swaying to a dreamy waltz, and nurses and boys in blue looked happily down from seats behind the orchestra at the strangely dressed crowed below. It was the jolliest crowd imaginable. Hunting pink was perhaps the most charming male dress of the evening. The lady who came as an aeroplane was the most original but not the most attractive figure. Time-honoured costumes - pierrots, Mephistos, Turks, Chinamen, Saracens, lawyers, apaches, Carlovingians, all rustled in as the hour grew late. The lady as a powder-box had many admirers. Cowboys were effective if ordinary, but the strange couple in black and white, he with tiger splashes and she with wired panniers, excited much curiosity. Long before the Southern Syncopated Orchestra came in, their perch in the centre of the hall was a fine vantage for those who preferred to watch than to dance themsleves. The boxes filled slowly up to midnight and some were empty until 12.30. Everyone was watching the thousand guinea one with its graland of flowers. As the hall grew more and more packed the reason it had been impossible to hire a costume the day before became apparent. Every known and unknown fancy dress had been booked, and was on its way, after some victory dinner or other, and only dominoes were left. About 11.30 there was a store when Lady Diana Duff-Cooper was wheeled in in a bath chair, looking luminously beautiful in a Pompadour dress, and made a round of the hall apologizing to those whose movements her progress disconcerted. The Russian ballet had a strong influence on the dresses, as also had the trouser dances of Elsie Janis in Hullo America!. As the boxes filled, many of them with eight or 10 friends dressed alike, one thought how much milk had been earned for the poor babies of the poorer centres by Sir Arthur Stanley's Committee."
(The Times, 13 November 1919) |
| Related Archival Material | Handbill (RAHE/6/1919/9) |
| Ticket Prices | 10s (gallery viewing only), £3 (single admission), £5 (with gallery supper), £25-£500 (boxes) |