Margaret Hodge, the busy Minister for Culture, has found fault with the Proms. Apparently, the world's greatest music festival has not managed to attract a sufficiently diverse audience.

Perhaps there never was a time when a Proms season could pass without someone alleging a shortcoming, be it too much or too little British music, a deaf ear to experimental works or insufficient Beethoven.

But if Ms Hodge finds the atmosphere in the Royal Albert Hall socially stultifying, she might wonder what opportunities there were to enjoy affordable classical concerts before Robert Newman and Sir Henry Wood launched their first Promenade Concert in 1895.

The audience at London's principal music events, the annual summer season of Italian opera and the Richter concerts, was drawn overwhelmingly from the upper reaches of society. Music lovers on modest means generally made do with a few weeks in autumn when promenade concerts were performed for their benefit at Covent Garden.

There they were condescended to with a selection of light classics beefed up with brief excerpts from the more serious canon. “The popping of corks punctuated the music at frequent intervals,” noted Rosa Newmarch, the Edwardian music writer. Essentially, it was background music for indoor picnics.

Indeed, the Covent Garden management panicked when, in 1878, Sir Arthur Sullivan's conducting of all nine Beethoven symphonies actually got the audience paying attention. “The music was so good,” according to the Musical Times, “that it hindered the sale of refreshments, and the financial results were proportionately unsatisfactory.”

Many may have assumed Wood's efforts to perform Wagner or Richard Strauss in an informal “Prom” atmosphere at the Queen's Hall were doomed. Surely the cognoscenti would not wish to attend a concert in which the best area of the auditorium was reserved for those standing on a fourpence admission - when a packet of fags cost sixpence? Might not these “promers” be subdued by the weight of German composition and begin hollering for the band to strike up The Grand Old Duke of York?

Instead, promenaders increasingly stood still, transfixed by the quality of the performances. By 1904 it was noted how smokers “are acquiring consideration for their immediate neighbours. The striking of lights is now rarely heard, as in the earlier seasons, during a delicate pianissimo or impressive pause.”

Perhaps the Minister for Culture imagines the eclipse of Victorian concert-hall jauntiness has restricted Proms audiences to those interested in hearing the world's finest orchestras - to the exclusion of the far wider community looking for somewhere novel to pop a cork.

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