“Jolly” John Nash

1828–1901

John Nash was a successful music hall performer who adopted the stage name “Jolly John Nash’’. He specialised in comic anecdotes and pioneered songs sung with a laugh in the voice. He could also play the cornet ‘brilliantly’ and was an expert in the concertina. He travelled widely with his own troupe, visiting America and Australia, and was later to boast that he had shook the hands of three Presidents and lunched with two. 

Jolly John’s journey started in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, where he was born to James Nash, a clothworker, and his wife, Martha Franklin. His father died when he was young and by 1841 his mother was supporting him and his three sisters by dress making. 

Jolly John’s next decade is a bit of a mystery. At some point either in the late 1840s or early 1850s he was granted a gale – the right to mine a small tract of land – for the Oaken and Churchway Level near Lydney, Gloucestershire. On his marriage certificate of 1854 to Margaret Brown Howell, a butcher’s daughter, his occupation is given as ‘colliery manager’. He reappears in the records in 1859 having applied with a business partner to dig and make clay bricks on land adjoining the mine and in the 1861 census he is described as “Coal master, fire brick maker and coal and coke merchant”. However, three years later, in 1864, Jolly John was declared bankrupt. 

In an interview with The Los Angeles Herald at the end of his life, Jolly John was to recall how this change of fortunes was the spur for him to pursue a different path. For many years, he had been performing locally, singing and telling stories at both public events and private parties, including those of local aristocracy. So he took a trip to London and presented himself to Charles Morton, a music hall impresario, who recognised his talent and from there Jolly John’s fame and success grew. Indeed, he was such a favourite of Prince Edward (later King Edward VII) that it was rumoured that Jolly John had apartments at the palace and was gifted diamond rings. He was one of the first English music hall stars to tour America (his first visit was in 1874 and his last in 1900) and the author of a widely read book of memoires and anecdotes titled ‘The Merriest Man Alive’ (1891). 

‘Jolly’ John’s family followed him to London, originally settling in Lambeth and then moving to Fulham, in the 1880s. Jolly John Nash died at his home in Racton Road in 1901 at the age of 73. The obituary in the Gloucester Journal stated that “when the grave closes over him in Fulham Cemetery we shall have seen the last of a man with whom “to laugh and grow fat” was an easy and natural process.” His wife, Margaret, is interred alongside him. His daughter, Sarah Ann 'Nancy' Oldfield, is buried in a different grave in the cemetery (Findagrave).

Sources

• Grantley, Darryll, Historical Dictionary of British Theatre: Early Period, (2013 United States)

• ‘Music Hall Celebrities: Mr Jolly John Nash’, The Era, 11 March 1899

• Oaken Level, Lightmoor Press

• ‘Death of ‘Jolly’ John Nash: A Celebrated Gloucester Humorist’, Gloucester Journal, 19 October 1901

• ‘An hour with Jolly John Nash’, Los Angeles Herald, Vol XXVIII, No 160, 10 March 1901

Photo and research contributed by Rebecca Thomas