WRITING about a figure from recent history can be difficult without a portrait. In our obsessively visual age, we are spoiled by instant online access to images on pretty much any subject we might want to read or write about. But what if there isn’t one, anywhere? In the course of years researching the Britannia, a famous music hall in nineteenth-century Glasgow, first for a PhD, and then for a book exploring its influence on entertainment culture in the city, I had never come across an image of the hall’s key manager and impresario – Hubert (H.T.) Rossborough.

Rossborough was one of the fathers of music hall in Scotland, an astute impresario who helped shape the entertainment tastes of Victorian Glasgow. Canny and innovative, he trod a fine line between giving his demanding public the sort of riotous acts and entertainments they wanted whilst reassuring influential middle-class opinion that he shared its progressive concern for the morals and conduct of working class audiences. Refurbishing the Britannia, he introduced new standards of dress and behaviour, winning the trust of the police and licensing authorities and allowing him to embark on a long and lucrative proprietorship that made him a fortune out of the hall.

Not that there was much information on Rossborough anyway: born in the United States, to an Irish-American family, but a naturalised British citizen, he took over the Britannia in 1869, having managed it for several years for the previous owner. Like most music hall entrepreneurs he had a background in the drinks trade, in his case as proprietor of a nearby theatrical bar, Rossborough’s Spirit Vaults. Victorian impresarios were usually high profile figures, hands-on purveyors of popular entertainment, well known to their audiences, who were flatteringly depicted on programme covers and in dashing pen and ink portraits in popular journals; so no shrinking violets. But although the Vaults, a meeting place for visiting pros and a shrine to the rising entertainment industry, boasted "Portraits of all the popular Theatrical and Music Hall Celebrities of the present Age", the owner himself remained elusive.

So it seemed extraordinary when a photograph appeared out of the blue on Ebay, just listed as "Rossborough, Britannia Glasgow". A small 2½ inch by 4 inch studio portrait mounted on stiff card – known as a carte de visite – of Mrs and Mrs Rossborough, by a Glasgow photographer, and even signed on the back in beautiful copperplate.

I had mentally pictured Rossborough as a raffish buccaneer, but the couple shown are the epitome of respectability. In fact what appears the stiff formality of the composition – Hubert seated at a desk, while his wife, Lizzie, stands with a solicitous hand on his shoulder – flatters to deceive. The portrait is a fascinating insight into a leading power couple of the entertainment world of Victorian Glasgow.

The couple seem very stylish, their dress and hairstyles reflecting the fashions of the day: Rossborough has a side-parting and whiskers, and wears a frock coat, and a polka-dotted waistcoat and cravat, with a decorative watch chain and day trousers with a fashionable striped pattern. His wife wears a day dress and has her hair in a chignon, both typical of the late 1860s, and bang on trend for 1869, the probable date of the photograph. In a composition that is both domestic and enigmatic, Rossborough faces out towards the camera, as if interrupted in thought, while his wife, a book in her left hand, focuses on her husband’s work, looking over his shoulder at the papers he holds, unusually animated for a spouse in such compositions.

The only feature that hints at irregularity is that the table is strewn with documents, while various papers – including a folded poster or playbill, along with letters and envelopes – are scattered on the floor at his feet, in a strangely disordered and random effect. Did this intimate a man of business used to dealing with the press, whose work involved contracts and correspondence? Notwithstanding the formality of the composition, was this hint of chaos a way of implying the dynamism and creativity of a theatrical impresario?

In fact Lizzie’s focus on the papers on the desk anticipates what was to be her own active involvement in the business. When Rossborough died in 1887, at Luss on Loch Lomond at the age of just 49, Lizzie, who was the widow of another well-known Glasgow music hall figure, the saloon singer Paddy McGowan, took over the Britannia and reopened it with her son, Alex McGowan, as acting manager. While the knockabout world of music hall management might sound a very male domain, Glasgow featured several prominent women managers who similarly inherited halls from their husbands. The most famous was Christina Baylis, who following her husband’s James’ early death in 1870 took over and ran the nearby Scotia music hall with great success for more than twenty years. The reappearance of the Rossboroughs’ portrait therefore not only provides an image of Hubert Rossborough: by, literally, restoring Lizzie to the picture, it also goes a little way to correcting the gender balance of the story of nineteenth century popular entertainments, in which women’s role is only now beginning to be recognised.

Paul Maloney is Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast. His book, The Britannia Panopticon Music Hall and Cosmopolitan Entertainment Culture, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.