Thomas Barrasford

Thomas Barrasford (1859–1910) was a 19th-century English business entrepreneur and entertainment impresario, who owned and built a number of theatres across Britain under the Barrasford Halls brand.

Born in South Shields, County Durham, the son of a Newcastle upon Tyne publican, Barrasford attended the Royal Scotch Arms pub, and noticed its transformation under his later competitors Moss and Thornton into the Empire Music Hall in 1890. In 1895, in partnership with a man named Varah, Barrasford took over the wooden circus on the Ormond Street, Jarrow, turning it into a music hall, known as the Jarrow Palace of Varieties.

Expanding his empire quickly from 1899, he acquired the Leeds Tivoli theatre, renaming it the Leeds Hippodrome on 20 March 1899. This was his first encounter with fellow impresario Sir Oswald Stoll, whose chain had just opened the Leed Empire theatre, whose features and scale had, less than two months later, brought about the failure of the lessor and resultant sale of the Tivoli to Barrasford. Barrasford noticed that fellow impresario Frank MacNaughten in Bradford had countered the opening of the Stoll Bradford Empire in January 1899, by using an idea pioneered by George "Champagne Charlie" Laybourne in 1870 in his Wear music hall, offering a "twice nightly" performance schedule. The formula proved so successful at not only countering the drop in attendance figures normally experienced in existing theatres facing competition from a new Stoll theatre, but actually increased revenues. Barrasford borrowed MacNaughten's Bradford theatre manager to replicate the system in Leeds, with the choice proving so successful and lucrative, that Barrasford moved his home and the operational headquarters of his business to Leeds.

The form of entertainment contract at the time was called a "tour," whereby an impresario would book an act to tour all of his venues. Barrasford had noticed that Stoll would try to run his theatres cheaply, by booking foreign acts on a one-week trial contract to fill-in for his headline British acts: if they were a success then they got a tour, if not their contract would terminate at the end of the week. Barrasford hence started to attend Stoll's theatres in competition to his on a Monday, and if the act proved a success would then find them and sign them to a tour of his theatres. This skull dugery as far as Stoll was concerned was immoral, and after he banned Barrasford and his employees from the entire Stoll empire, so began a long term battle between the two impresarios.

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