Money: Champagne Charlie still earns a bob or two

WHAT SORT of people would gather round the drawing room piano to sing songs about the crash of a Jumbo jet? Or President Clinton's peccadilloes? Or - here's a clue - romantic love at the Westminster Aquarium?

Victorian pictorial sheet music covers - one of the last cheap but truly historic collectables - reveal that the Victorians sang about virtually everything: disasters, wars, scandals, wonders of the age, romance, and everyday tribulations.

About 800 of the 3,000 sheet music covers being offered at Phillips' Bath saleroom on Monday - the biggest collection of them ever auctioned - are Victorian. Dating from the days of the pounds 10 piano when, as we say, people had to make their own entertainment, they are a vivid insight into a white-collar world that was cynical, insensitive, suspicious of authority, yet convivial and determined to look on the bright side. You not only get a glimpse of the Victorians, in the lurid lithographs on the covers, but you hear them, too.

Their echoes have not completely died away; who cannot hum the tunes of "Two Lovely Black Eyes", "If You Want to Know the Time Ask a Policeman", "Yes, We Have No Bananas", "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay" and "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze"?

Phillips' covers are from the private collection of Nancy Mortimer, a retired nursery nurse aged 70, who began picking up covers for pence after beginning piano lessons 20 years ago. She is one of only 10 or so collectors in the country - and the only one who lectures. She always gets a round of applause when she appears, usually before women's groups, dressed in a Victorian black velvet dress with tippet, poke bonnet, and a reticule made from jet beads. She displays her covers, plays tape recordings of songs such as "Champagne Charlie", and gets her audience to sing along to "Daisy, Daisy" and "Oh, Mr Porter".

"I've had such fun", she says. "At first, I thought how beautifully colourful the covers looked. Then I started getting interested in the events they commemorated, such as Captain Webb swimming the channel. I had never heard of him.

"It's a thrill in secondhand bookshops wondering what I might find. But when I ask for Victorian sheet music, a lot of them still do not know what I am talking about. I find them tucked away on bottom shelves."

You can still buy Victorian covers from their "golden age", 1860-1880, for a quid or two. Dealers who know what they are charge pounds 5-pounds 10. Victorian and Edwardian covers in the Phillips sale are mostly in lots of 25 to 50, estimated from pounds 60 to pounds 150. The musical sketch, "The Wreck of the Titanic", of 1912, in a lot estimated at pounds 100-pounds 150, contains a selection of ditties that round off with "Excitement on Board", "Lowering the Lifeboats" and "Buried at Sea". Drown in the comfort of your own home. Such fun.

The songs were first performed on the stage of Music Halls, in an engaging innuendo-style with plenty of audience participation that had originated in the old saloons and free `n' easies. They were therefore well suited to the intimacy of the home - especially piano duets of love songs.

There were songs in celebration of the Great Exhibition of 1851, of the Great Eastern steamship, of Royal weddings - even of the penny post. Some songs, such as "Let's Enjoy Life While We Can", popular in the 1850s and 1860s, were designed to uplift audiences who visited the pawnbroker as often as they did the Music Hall. They were sung in a style laced with irony. As for the "Westminster Aquarium" - it was a popular trysting place for lovers. "Three Nice Old Ladies Went to the Aquarium" is one of the risque titles on offer in the sale.

The male stars of the Music Hall adopted the role of monocled swells in evening dress, who epitomised the Victorian values of the songs they sang. They were a mixture of chumminess, vanity, sexism and jingoism. (The Great Macdermott, sang: "We don't want to fight, But by Jingo if we do," coining the word). The top stars were paid more than pounds 100 a week, provided with carriages by theatres and lionised by audiences.

George Leybourne was Champagne Charlie ("Champagne Charlie is m' name, Champagne Charlie is m' game"). He was suspected of accepting back-handers from Moet et Chandon. The most famous of them all was "The Great Vance", a versatile performer who died on stage. Ms Mortimer made contact with Vance's granddaughter who told her that her grandmother, Vance's wife, had never spoken of her husband's stage exploits. She considered them rather sinful.

Even in Victorian times, covers were collected for their artwork - Ms Mortimer's most expensive purchase was a leather-bound album of 20 songs, dated 1864, all with covers by the same early Victorian artist, the dandy and fop, John Brandard: she paid pounds 100. The other great sheet-music artist was another dandy, Alfred Concanen. At least 400 covers by him have been traced. He was a master of lithography who worked from photographs and is best known for outdoor scenes drawn with bravura and lavishly coloured.

There are plenty of Concanens in Phillips' sale. His work fetches higher prices, especially when it shows a famous performer. Two Concanens, one of The Great Vance, the other of Champagne Charlie, are in a lot of 25 covers with the highest estimate in the sale, pounds 150-pounds 200.

The London bookseller and ephemerist, David Drummond (the "doyen of Cecil Court"), says he could expect to sell a stunning Concanen cover for pounds 50, but his top price so far has been pounds 35. Most of his Victorian covers are priced pounds 5-pounds 12.50. Both he and Ms Mortimer emphasise that collectors should not break the covers from the music. All the sheet music in the sale is unbroken.

Ms Mortimer's covers, gleaned on outings to towns within reach of her home in Melksham, Wiltshire, is an example of what the pocket-money collector can achieve, even today. Few other collectables mirror so accurately the mores of a bygone age.

At present, their fascination exceeds their investment value, but the standard textbook on them, Ronald Pearsall's Victorian Sheet Music Covers (David & Charles, 1972), now out of print, is changing hands among enthusiasts for over pounds 20, which must mean something. Snap up these Victorian gems whenever you spot them. Their time will come.

The Nancy Mortimer collection of coloured sheet music (1830-1970), Monday 14 September (11am): Phillips, 1 Old King Street, Bath, Avon (01225-310609). David Drummond, 11 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, WC2. (0171-836 1142)