What A Wonderful World
Pub 26th October 2006
I did an interview for television with Mr James Corrigan just a few weeks before he died. Mr Corrigan was arguably the greatest of all music and showbiz entrepreneurs in Yorkshire. In the middle of the 1960’s he bought a piece of derelict land in Bradford Road, Batley which had once been the site of a municipal sewage works. He had a vision to create an entertainments venue to rival anything in the West End. Within sixteen short weeks he had built, opened and recruited thousands of members to what became world famous as the Batley Variety Club. Mr Corrigan was impressed first of all by supermarkets that were springing up in every Northern town. He thought that the pile it high and sell it cheap principle could be applied to showbiz. If you had a big enough revenue, a long enough residency and plenty of willing punters you could bring in big stars at reasonable ticket prices.
Batley variety club opened with The Batchelors. Within months it was attracting the likes of Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones. In 1969 Mr Corrigan pulled off his biggest coup. Along with a colleague he travelled to New York with a case of pound notes to visit the office of Joe Guy. Now Joe Guy was a hard-nosed showbiz agent with a roster that read like a who’s who of jazz music; Billy Holiday, Lional Hampton, Roy Eldridge, Benny Carter and the man Mr Corrigan was interested in, Louis Armstrong. A deal was struck to bring Louis, the greatest trumpeter in the history of jazz to Batley, a place that Joe Guy and Armstrong had never heard of.
At the time of the three week residency, the song “What A Wonderful World” was riding high at number one in the charts. The club was packed every night.
With a twinkle in his eye in his last ever interview Mr Corrigan told me about a joke they played on Louis Armstrong. They picked him up from Leeds Airport in a Rolls Royce and chauffeured him to Batley. In the middle of town the driver stopped outside a badly derelict mill. The roof was falling in, all the windows broken. In the street outside mucky kids were playing with busted footballs and rusting bikes. “Welcome to Batley variety Club” said Mr Corrigan. Louis Armstrong and his team looked aghast. Mr Corrigan smiled and said “only kidding” before instructing his driver to continue on to the real club. They say Armstrong’s face was a picture. What a wonderful world!
