Dr Laura Hamer has published a new Element within Cambridge University Press’s Women in Music Elements Series: Bandleader Mrs Mary Hamer and Her Boys: Popular Music and Dance Cultures in Interwar Liverpool. This Element is co-written with Dr Michael Brocken (Independent Scholar). The Element examines the career of professional bandleader, pianist, and ballroom dancer Mrs Mary Hamer (1904-1992) within interwar Liverpool. It is based on an examination of previously unconsidered archival sources which sheds new light on the rich dance music culture which flourished in Liverpool during the interwar period and helps to challenge the prevailing London-centric narrative of the development of popular music and dance cultures within earlier twentieth-century Britain.

The city of Liverpool is well known for its popular music, although the formidable hagiography which has developed around the Beatles tends to dominate historical considerations to the virtual exclusion of the many other varied popular music and dance genres which have flourished in the city before, during, and after them. Mary Hamer’s story of a remarkable woman musical leader working withing a male-dominated field is part of this partially hidden history of Liverpool’s much more diverse popular music past. Mary Hamer led the otherwise all-male dance band at Liverpool’s renowned Grafton Rooms dance hall for two decades, providing dancers with first-class dance music. The Element considers Mary Hamer within the rapidly evolving dance music culture of interwar Liverpool and discusses the different genres and sub-genres of popular music and dance presented at the Grafton Rooms and the role(s) of women in popular music and as bandleaders. It also considers her career as both a pianist and a professional exhibition ballroom dancer and the two men who she worked closely with at the Grafton Rooms, manager Malcolm Munro (1887-1971) and her husband Wilf Hamer (1907-1936, original founder of the house band which she took over following his premature death in 1936). The narrative is contextualised within the wider contemporary social anxieties which surrounded interwar popular music and dance cultures of sexuality, faith, class, and race.

As far as the authors are aware, Mary Hamer is not a relation of Laura’s.