New Year 1925: How Londoners Celebrated

History is made at the start of 1925.

Background image: Christine Matthews, creative commons licence.

“How did Londoners celebrate the New Year 100 years ago?” The question tickled my cortex yesterday evening, while I was formulating a topic for this last newsletter of 2024.

So I looked in the newspaper archives.

It turns out that 31 December 1924 was not only a riotous old duffel bag of fun, but also a multiply historic evening. A London sartorial icon was first glimpsed that night, and an important building you’ve probably seen on your telebox also had its genesis in the year’s end festivities.

But lets start at St Paul’s, which drew the largest crowds in December 1924…

Celluloid babies in plaid

“Most Intense Celebration Known in London for Many Years”

So read the headline on the 1 January 1925 edition of the London Daily Chronicle.

Uncountable crowds had gathered outside St Paul’s to welcome in the New Year. The cathedral had, for decades, been associated with Scottish Hogmanay celebrations, although by 1924 it seems the spectacle had become a Caledonian burlesque that few genuine Scots attended.

“The first piper arrived at 10.45,” the Chronicle informs us. “A stoutish man with a smile like a slice of melon and a desire to please”. His rendition of Men of Harlech entertained the gathering throng. By 11pm, Ludgate Hill was a “seething crowd from bottom to top, while outside the cathedral there was scarcely room to move”. Such was the crush, that the pipers could no longer find space to play. Still, “other barbaric noises were made by bugles, concertinas, mouth-organs and squeakers”.

A large crowd with nowhere to go will often find itself at the mercy of street hawkers, and such was the case here. Cheap Glengarry caps made of paper were the must-have item, along with “imitation red noses”. According to the Chronicle “the majority of people” had bought the novelties, though I sense exaggeration. Another hawker found plenty of customers for “celluloid babies clothed in plaid” (i.e. Scottish dolls, perhaps like this). He was “almost immediately submerged by people who wanted the favours, and there was one man selling balloons faster than three others with him could blow them up.” The gathering, it should be noted, included a large number of children, staying up late to see in the New Year.

The record breaking crowds almost didn’t happen. The south-east of England had suffered atrocious weather over the past 24 hours. The Guardian had reported “festoons of rain like the folds of a curtain moving in the wind” on Oxford Street that day. To the north of the capital, a new factory in Ponders End had been heavily damaged by a “tornado”, while a plate window was blown in at Crouch End. The Surrey Hills had received the first snows of the season, while Reading was severely flooded. More floods near Shepperton had seen one enterprising “gondolier” ferry commuters to their railway stations. Happily, conditions calmed down in the evening, allowing festivities to go ahead.

The crushed party atmosphere continued until midnight when “jigging and cake-walking” were at their height. The stroke of the hour was marked by the usual renditions of Auld Lang Syne, but the most popular chant of the evening seems to have been It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’; an apt ditty, given that 1924 was an unusually wet year that had ended with torrential rain in London.

Fireworks do not seem to have featured in the celebrations, either here or elsewhere in London. I wonder if they were withheld out of sensitivity to traumatised war veterans?

Two historic happenings

Crowds also gathered around the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields, beside Trafalgar Square. Here, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams led a sprawling choir of 600 students in a medley of folk carols. Many of the songs had been rescued from oblivion by Cecil Sharp. The great scholar of folk music had died in Hampstead six months before, and his friends were out fundraising for a memorial hall, to serve as a permanent home for English folk music and dance. They succeeded. Cecil Sharp House in Camden Town survives today, and can often be seen as a rehearsal space on the TV show Strictly Come Dancing. The hall had its genesis on that crowdfunding New Year’s Eve of 1924.

The Maison Lyons on Oxford Street also found a place in history that evening. Just before midnight, the waiting staff withdrew, and then reappeared in distinctive black-and-white uniforms, with “‘Peter Pan’ collars, pearl-buttoned blouses, low waist-line, and pleated apron”. This was the public debut of the “Nippy” uniform, which would become a much-loved feature of J. Lyons tea shops in the the coming years; one of the largely forgotten icons of London.

A Lyon’s corner house on Coventry Street in the 1940s. A ‘Nippy’ in her iconic uniform can be seen on the left. Image: Public domain

The fashionable gatherings

While the masses made merry at St Paul’s, Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, more refined revellers sought out exclusive party venues. “Among the up-to-date,” says the London Daily Chronicle, “it seems out of fashion to celebrate anything by the fireside in the old style. One must away to a dance, a dinner, a ball, a supper, an all-night cabaret — anywhere for novelty and unusual attraction.”

The New Princes Restaurant, for example, gifted an “enamelled French clock” to every lady. Each clock came with an alarm, set to go off at midnight. Over at the Hotel Russell, “a tiny child, Joy Blackwood [age 6], emerged from a monster cracker and announced the New Year”. The Berkeley mustered a band of crimson-clad trumpeters to its ballroom, which was decked out like an “oriental bower, illuminated with thousands of coloured lights”.

2,000 guests crowded into the Savoy. Come midnight, the main staircase saw a procession of news, as costumed actors recreated key events from the late year. One participant pushed a trolley with a giant pipe to represent Stanley Baldwin, who had served as Prime Minister twice in 1924. Another performer was somehow dolled up to resemble Wembley Stadium, recently opened for the British Empire Exhibition. The climax saw four belles dressed as bells, who sang Auld Lang Syne as they descended from the ceiling on wires.

The other big party in town that night was at the Royal Albert Hall. Every New Year’s Eve, Chelsea Arts Club hired out the hall for a lavish fancy dress ball. The 1924/25 celebrations were particularly extravagant. Some 4,000 revellers, representing all of London’s big art schools, danced around a 30ft-high wedding cake until either 3am, 4am or 5am (accounts vary). The costumes included several “giant monsters”, operated by a score of students each.

At the stroke of midnight, the cake came to life. The figure on top turned out to be a real lady, dubbed “Miss 1925”. Four genies emerged from the voluminous dessert to distribute boxes of chocolates to the crowd. Meanwhile, the music was amplified for the first time by eight “Marconiphone” loudspeakers arranged around the hall.

Tuning in to the New Year

The 1920s also saw the beginning of what is still an annual practice for many of us: living London’s New Year festivities vicariously in our living rooms. By 1924, around half of UK homes had a radio set. The New Year chimes of Big Ben were first broadcast at the start of that year over the British Broadcasting Corporation’s 2LO station. The feat was repeated for 1925, establishing an annual broadcasting tradition that continues today, now amplified around the world by social media.

The 1924/25 broadcast included a nod to the ghost of New Years past. After the bongs, an announcer read out the following speech, which had supposedly been favoured by London watchmen a century before:

From the London Daily Chronicle, 1 January 1925. Via British Newspaper Archive.

And so, as 2024 turns into 2025, may I also wish you a Happy and Joyful New Year, whether you’re joining the crowds on the Embankment, single-handedly resurrecting Hogmanay traditions outside St Paul’s, or stuck in front of Jools Holland’s Hootenanny in your in-laws’ living room. Happy New Year!

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Thanks for reading. As ever, please do leave a comment below or email me any time on matt@londonist.com. And if you’re trying to think of a New Year’s Resolution, then a really good one would be “Help out a struggling writer by recommending their Substack to all your history-loving friends.” 👇

All details discovered in the British Newspaper Archive and Newspapers.com.

Postscript: A few other London headlines from 1 January 1925

While compiling this article, I noticed a few other intriguing headlines from the newspapers.

• A human skull is unearthed in Mosedale Road, Camberwell.

• Ellen Terry becomes a Dame in the New Year’s Honours. Meanwhile, Miss Aldrich-Blake of the London School of Medicine for Women is now a Dame Commander.

• Eight-year-old Minnie Holt of Barnsbury dies after swallowing holly berries.

• Plans are revealed for Sir Edwin Cooper’s Lloyd’s Building, the neoclassical predecessor to the ‘inside-out’ marvel of Richard Rogers, which stands on the site today. Part of its facade still survives.