Alexander Hurley (24 March 1871 - 6 December 1913) was best known for being Marie Lloyd

Marie Lloyd

Matilda Alice Victoria Wood was an English music hall singer, best known as Marie Lloyd. Her ability to add lewdness to the most innocent of lyrics led to frequent clashes with the guardians of morality...

's second husband, though he was also a successful and talented performer in his own right.

He went from working in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

's docks as a tea packer to boxing

Boxing

Boxing, also called pugilism, is a combat sport in which two people fight each other using their fists. Boxing is supervised by a referee over a series of between one to three minute intervals called rounds...

 in fairground booths, before moving on to the music hall

Music hall

Music Hall is a type of British theatrical entertainment which was popular between 1850 and 1960. The term can refer to:# A particular form of variety entertainment involving a mixture of popular song, comedy and speciality acts...

 as a coster

Costermonger

Costermonger, or simply Coster, is a street seller of fruit and vegetables, in London and other British towns. They were ubiquitous in mid-Victorian England, and some are still found in markets. As usual with street-sellers, they would use a loud sing-song cry or chant to attract attention...

 singer with the song The Strongest Man In The World. He also sang a song called The Lambeth Walk, though this is not the version later made famous in the musical Me and My Girl

Me and My Girl

Me and My Girl is a musical with book and lyrics by Douglas Furber and L. Arthur Rose and music by Noel Gay. It takes place in the late 1930s in Hampshire, Mayfair, and Lambeth....

.

He was also an early keep-fit fanatic. He listed among his spare time activities sculling

Sculling

Sculling generally refers to a method of using oars to propel watercraft in which the oar or oars touch the water on both the port and starboard sides of the craft, or over the stern...

, ball punching, going for long walks and jogging on Hampstead Heath

Hampstead Heath

Hampstead Heath is a large, ancient London park, covering . This grassy public space sits astride a sandy ridge, one of the highest points in London, running from Hampstead to Highgate, which rests on a band of London clay...

.

He met Marie Lloyd in 1901 and went on a tour of Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

 with her and several other music hall acts. By the time they returned to England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 they were definitely an item, and they were married in 1905, shortly after Lloyd's divorce from her first husband, Percy Charles Courtenay (1862–1933).

At first their marriage was happy, but relations became increasingly strained when work took them to opposite ends of the country for weeks on end, and Lloyd started drinking heavily and gambling at the races, where she met a jockey called Bernard Dillon

Bernard Dillon

Bernard Dillon was born at Caherina in Tralee. In 1901 he joined his older brother Joe, both of them being apprentice jockeys at the famous Druids Lodge training establishment in Wiltshire England...

, who she moved in with, leaving Alec to tour alone.

Hurley died at Jack Straw's Castle, Hampstead on 6 December 1913 aged 42, after a short illness, which his friends said was caused by taking to the bottle after Marie broke his heart. He was buried in Tower Hamlets Cemetery

Tower Hamlets Cemetery

Tower Hamlets Cemetery is a cemetery located in the East End of London; its nearest tube station is Mile End. The cemetery opened in 1841 and closed for burials in 1966. It is now a nature reserve, and other land has been added to the park, including "Scrapyard Meadow"...

 in east London .

In the 2007 BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 drama Miss Marie Lloyd - Queen of The Music Hall

Miss Marie Lloyd - Queen of The Music Hall

Miss Marie Lloyd – Queen of The Music Hall is a British television drama first shown on BBC Four in 2007. It was produced by Hat Trick Productions....

, he was portrayed by actor Matthew Marsh