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79:, moving on in 1877 to Edinburgh where he tried a number of ventures including its Gaiety Music Hall and renaming it Moss's Theatre of Varieties. For 27 years he presented the Annual Carnival at Waverley Market. He bought a new site and opened his first Empire Palace Theatre in 1892, designed by Frank Matcham who designed many of the group's theatres, as did Bertie Crewe. He was knighted in 1905 for his services to charity and entertainment, the first variety impresario to be honoured this way.
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Empire
Holloway, London, Empire New Cross, London, Empire Stratford, London, Empire Shepherd's Bush, London, Empire Dublin, Empire Belfast, Empire Coventry, Empire Sunderland, Palace Hull, Palace Leicester, Palace Bordesley, Palace Camberwell, Granville Walham Green, Manchester Hippodrome, Glasgow Coliseum, Olympia Liverpool, HM Theatre of Varieties Walsall, Reading Theatre, Richmond Theatre, Philharmonic Hall Cardiff, Zoo and Hippodrome Glasgow.
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then operating in Wales. From its start and during the 20th century Moss
Empires remained the largest group of variety theatres in Britain, with over 50 venues at its height, and was regarded as the largest in the world. It was he who, in 1904, introduced a "four shows a day" system at some of his
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London
Hippodrome, Empire Glasgow, Empire Edinburgh, Empire Newcastle, Empire Leeds, Empire Bradford, Empire Sheffield, Empire Birmingham, Empire Liverpool, Empire Cardiff, Empire Swansea, Empire Newport, Empire Nottingham, Empire Ardwick, Manchester, Empire South Shields, Empire Hackney, London,
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King George V commanded a public Royal
Variety Performance to be directed by Sir Edward and held in the Edinburgh Empire in July 1911 as part of the Coronation celebrations that year. This would be the first such production in Britain, confirming the new respectability of Music Hall. However the
71:, the son of James and Martha Moss. His father James Moss was a fiddler and character singer in singing saloons. He was educated in Edinburgh and Glasgow, where he received his own musical training. In 1872 he became the pianist and manager of his father's Lorne Music Hall in
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He married twice: firstly to Ellen Alice
Bramwell (1856–1892), with whom he had two sons: James Edward Moss (1880–1904), and Charles Sommerville Moss (1883–1931). On Ellen's death he married Florence Craig née Crawford, daughter of Robert Crawford one of the founders of
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theatre burned down a few months before the
Performance, and Sir Edward's health deteriorated. Instead, a Royal Variety Performance was arranged for the following year, being held in the
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Ltd theatre combine which he created in 1899, and floated on the Stock
Exchange, after first joining forces with Richard Thornton of Newcastle and later with
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In 1905 the Moss combine had 37 variety theatres of which the flagship was London
Hippodrome. The company advertised its list as follows:-
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146:, close to the cemetery entrance. Sir Edward was succeeded by Frank Allen as chairman and managing director of Moss Empires Ltd.
38:(12 April 1852 – 25 November 1912) was a British theatre impresario and the founder chairman and joint managing director of the
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Twentieth-Century
British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire, by Claire Cochrane published by Cambridge University Press, 2011
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Arthur Lloyd website and its full display of the Moss
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theatres; he was also the first to allow advance booking of seats in a music hall.
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He died on 25 November 1912 at his mansion and estate of Middleton Hall,
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H. E. Moss, known as Ted to family and friends, was born in
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59:Edward Moss standing, and Richard Thornton seated
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195:UK public library membership
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253:– via Newspapers.com.
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209:"Death of Sir Edward Moss"
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332:Encyclopædia Britannica
335:(12th ed.). 1922.
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142:in eastern
89:Alfred Butt
344:Categories
249:20 October
221:20 October
197:required.)
150:References
132:Gorebridge
69:Lancashire
28:The Sketch
144:Edinburgh
136:Edinburgh
65:Droylsden
185:18 April
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