At 16, he won a scholarship to the prestigious St Martin’s School of Art in the West End of London and became part of the hip Soho crowd. He changed his surname to Bart in 1950 after returning from service with the RAF then found work at the Stratford theatre. He also began writing songs. At a Soho party he met the 20-year-old Tommy Steele, Britain’s first rock ’n’ roll star. He wrote Rock With The Cavemen for Steele in 1956. It spent five weeks in the charts. He then co-wrote songs for The Tommy Steele Story, which won him three Ivor Novello awards.
In 1958, Bart discovered the teenager Harry Webb, later known as Cliff Richard, in the 2Is, a Soho club, where technically Cliff Richard was not allowed on account of his age. He recruited Cliff and his band, The Drifters (later The Shadows), to sing three of the songs he had written for a forthcoming film. One of them was Living Doll. Lionel wrote it in ten minutes and it became a No 1 hit in August 1959. It was successfully revised and re-released two decades later by the then cult comedians The Young Ones.
Despite his chart success, he always wanted success in the theatre. His break came at the Stratford Theatre in East London with a comedy musical called Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be.
It opened in Stratford in February 1959 and was an immediate hit, transferring after a year to the West End. The Lord Chamberlain, who was then in charge of the censorship of public plays, wrote a letter demanding: ‘The builder’s labourer is not to carry the plank of wood in the erotic place and at the erotic angle that he does, and the Lord Chamberlain wishes to be informed of the manner in which the plank is in future to be carried.’ It was ignored, as were most of the noble Lord’s proscriptions.
In 1959, Bart began work on the songs and story for what would become his masterpiece, Oliver! But to his dismay, no theatre would touch it because, with its tale of orphans and poverty, it was considered too ‘downbeat’. The spirit of Dickens was sure to have been outraged anew.
Eventually, one producer agreed to stage it on a shoestring budget. After promising preview performances, on the conclusion its first night in the West End, the audience were on their feet, clapping deafeningly. There had been 23 curtain calls. The reviews were ecstatic. The show ran for six years, then a record for a British musical.
Photo: Allan Warren / CC BY‑SA 3.0
Almost overnight, Lionel Bart became phenomenally wealthy. At one point, his song-writing earned him as much in a minute as most people earned in a week. His parties were legendary. He had a long-term boyfriend, then a series of casual lovers, but he did not publicly come out until 1971, four years after homosexuality was legalised. He also became an alcoholic.
In 1962, he wrote another musical, Blitz!, based on his wartime childhood in the East End. It had an 18-month run, but neither Blitz! nor his next musical, Maggie May, came close to the success of Oliver! Another musical, Twang!!, based loosely on the story of Robin Hood, closed within a few weeks of opening.
Within six years, Lionel had gone from boom to dust. No producer would touch him. In 1967, however, Oliver! was turned into a film, released in 1968, was a big hit, and won six Oscars — including Best Original Score. He also wrote the lyrics for the James Bond theme music “From Russia with Love.”
He wrote another musical, La Strada — based on the Italian film of the same name that was written and directed by Federico Fellini — which opened on Broadway in December 1969 and closed after one night. If the Sixties had been Lionel’s decade of success, the Seventies were one long downward spiral.
To clear his debts, Lionel made his worst financial decision. In April 1970, he sold the rights to his published music , and the stage and film rights to Oliver! to a production company for a fraction of the price they were worth. He lost a great deal of current and future money in this way. The money he collected from the sale simply propped up his drinking habit for a while as he continued to decline while the money ran out.
Cameron Mackintosh, who as a young man had admired Oliver!, understood the disaster and gave Bart an unpublicised and private monthly stipend, with no conditions attached. Mackintosh later said he felt Bart deserved dignity, and that Britain owed him more than the industry was prepared to give. That support kept Bart going for years when he was too ill, too fragile, or too defeated to work.
Just as importantly, Mackintosh kept Bart connected to the theatre world. He made sure he was invited to rehearsals, opening nights, and industry gatherings — not as a charitable concession, but as the creator. Mackintosh refused to let Bart disappear, although he couldn’t undo the catastrophic mistake of the rights sale even as the songs of Oliver were quickly becoming treasured English anthems.
Mackintosh produced the 1994 revival of Oliver! in London, placing Bart back at the centre of the story. Bart was honoured publicly, celebrated in interviews, and treated as the rightful author of a national landmark musical. It allowed Bart to understand, before his death, that his work had endured.
Bart helped ignite a distinctly British musical tradition at a time when the West End was dominated by American imports. Andrew Lloyd Webber said he was “the father of the modern British musical.” Perhaps he wasted much of his talent and sold off his songs, but even so, he has a very good claim to be Britain’s most under-rated artist.