Batley Variety Club: The story of how a man created 'Las Vegas in a Yorkshire mill town' and got Shirley Bassey and Louis Armstrong to perform

That “improbable oasis of glitter and excess” Batley Variety Club was built on top of a disused sewage works site on Bradford Road in the town.

“James had the charisma to eclipse the sun,” recalls Maureen Prest who became promotions manager shortly after it opened.

She is pleased to bits that this Spring a plaque will go up at the club, now a gym, remembering a true, local hero.

With his well spoken voice, she says, James could have come straight off the playing fields of Eton. He had a shrewd head for business: “He was the ideas man for the family – they always had to be one step ahead of the rest.”

The club opened in a blaze of publicity in March 1967. An instant success it oozed glamour over a town “which had never been showered with anything but smoke and soot”.

It cost 5s 6d a year to join, but beer came at pub prices and “basket” meals of chicken and chips made it affordable for workers on less than £20 a week who dressed to the nines for the night.

And James was prepared to go to huge lengths to secure the best talent – even though he didn’t quite manage to get his favourite Dean Martin to play Batley despite offering £45,000 – a huge amount of money in the day.

Maureen’s book King of Clubs tells the incredible rags to riches and back to rags again story of James and his equally remarkable wife Betty. It has some cracking tales: of Shirley Bassey’s bravura performance – and later how she was tricked by James into thinking she was going out for dinner. She set off in her fur coat in his Rolls Royce only to turn up at a fish and chip shop.

Maureen was deeply impressed by Louis Armstrong, a huge star who remained true to his roots. “What I found sad was because as a child he’d not been educated he couldn’t spell. I used to have to stand in his dressing room telling him how to spell his fans’ names. What a lovely man – so humble and you don’t associate humble with stardom.”

Maureen remembers James, who died in 2000, having made and lost his fortune, with huge respect. She is delighted that a plaque has been awarded by the British Music Hall Society, which will go up at a ceremony on May 16, which is Music and Variety Day: “I respect what he did for the area; he had wonderful spin offs for local businesses. He put Batley on the map. He gave an awful lot and got very little in return.

“They say if you can wish for the stars and capture the moon by accident that would be great - and that’s what James did.”