Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography

When Tony wishes to show solidarity with Sid he slaps him on the back with a triumphant, ‘Sid, you’re a White Man. When they made you, they threw away the mould.’ In the blood donor clinic the question of his nationality brings out a primitive nationalism: ‘Ah, you’ve got nothing to worry about there … British. Undiluted for twelve generations. One hundred per cent Anglo-Saxon with perhaps a dash of Viking, but nothing else has crept in … You want to watch who you’re giving it to. It’s like motor oil. It doesn’t mix, if you get my meaning …’ As Ray and Alan have observed, in those days no one batted an eyelid at material that would today be considered squirm-inducing: there were other things to worry about, not least ‘the threat of annihilation by a nuclear holocaust’. It was also a time when ordinary decent people were unconsciously fed the prejudices that emanated simply from feeling different from what they were not. And who is to say that the expression of such a difference could not then be channelled in the direction of comedy?

Hancock, as a gauge for the human condition and the worst excesses of its folly and aspirations, remains timeless. However, now – or in a hundred years’ time – it is conceivable that anyone from another time or place wanting an inkling of what it was like to live in the Britain of the 1950s could do worse than listen to Hancock’s Half Hour. It is certainly significant that as the man for his day he should reflect the three key prime ministers of the decade as colourfully as he did. We have already seen he was capable of a sly impression of Churchill when the mood took him. The bulldog image fitted all his own delusions of political grandeur, although these were not given full rein until May 1955 when in one episode Galton and Simpson exchanged No. 23 for No. 10, at least in Hancock’s dreams, by which time another Anthony, namely Eden, had been in office for two months. His espousal of the Homburg as his favourite headgear first reached television screens in July 1956, the month that Eden, with whom the style had long been associated, was confounded by Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company. Hancock later claimed, ‘Homburg hats have always struck me as the acme of self-importance.’ Most significantly Hancock’s peak period coincided with the period of office of the politician dubbed by Enoch Powell as the last of the old actor-managers, Harold Macmillan. If Galton and Simpson have a fondness for one facet of the Hancock characterisation, it is for the faded thespian reduced to dragging his threadbare cultural offerings to the far reaches of the kingdom. That tedious train journey to the Giggleswick Shakespeare Festival readily comes to mind. Later when Hancock finds himself reduced to appearing in a commercial for pilchards he sighs for the past: ‘Oh for the days of the actor-manager, me own theatre and that [the thumb goes to the nose] to all of them.’

Away from the political arena Denis Norden’s notion of the ‘Hancock’ canon as a novel sends one scurrying for literary parallels. The naïve, pompous, lower-middle-class Pooter from the George and Weedon Grossmith comedy classic, The Diary of a Nobody, is an obvious link. Significantly it began life as a Punch column, a device not a million miles away from the half-hour situation comedy device of sixty years later. Here the house in suburbia again backs onto a railway line, the curate calls, albeit not played by Kenneth Williams, and social aspiration dictates the life of the chief resident. A more complex character is Kenneth Widmerpool from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music ofTime. Military man and politician in a way that Hancock could only pretend to be, he is revealed by turns through a twelve-volume cycle as villain and victim, manipulator and fool in a way that chiefly serves to remind us of Hancock through the sympathy Powell manages to engage on his behalf, from his very first appearance at school wearing ‘the wrong kind of overcoat’. At times pompous to the point of ridicule, he gets by like Hancock, blustering against fate, cushioned by speeches of windy verbosity. A more light-hearted literary character has an equal claim to be considered Tony’s alter ego. In formulating the Hancock character Galton and Simpson found themselves reversing the anthropomorphism of Kenneth Grahame’s enduring creation from Toad Hall. In a television interview, Bill Kerr catalogued the similarities: ‘The bluster, the pomp, the dignity, the frailty.’ But more than that he looked like Toad. Once in a while television companies raid the current stock of familiar comic faces to cast the classic afresh. It is a tragedy that nobody gave Hancock the chance. Bubbling over with his own self-importance, all airs and graces, he would have made it impossible for another actor to follow in his amphibious tracks. To hear Toad rhapsodising on the prospects of motor travel, one might well be travelling with Hancock, tooting along on the open road to the Monte Carlo rally in one of his early radio shows: ‘The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today – in next week tomorrow! … O poop-poop!’ They could have changed places. The thought of ‘Toad’s Half Hour’ and a dressing room with his name on the door would have puffed up the creature’s ego even more.

Of course, Hancock had the advantage over any fictional character in that on television he could look you in the eyes. As Duncan Wood, his principal television producer, said, ‘He looked like a beaten-up spaniel – even if the dog bites you, you still pat it on the head again.’ Alan Simpson risked stating the obvious on the matter: ‘He was a very sympathetic performer. Certain people on television – irrespective of how good they are – if they don’t like the look of you, you’re dead. The character of Hancock was such a terrible failure at everything he did, everybody felt sorry for him, even though he was very arrogant, very pompous.’ But there was another quality. For all he may have played a ‘mug’, and an often unpleasant one at that, there always bubbled beneath the surface of his BBC portrayal a level of charm, intelligence, not to mention enjoyment in the task at hand. Intuitively an audience picks up on such qualities and subconsciously enters a sharing game with the performer. It was partly in the words, but it was entirely in the playing. Dennis Main Wilson, who knew the man as well as anybody professionally, once said that ‘to be a great clown you have to have vulnerability and indeed humility and if you ain’t got them as a clown, you ain’t gonna be a star – no way!’ In its inner self the great British public sensed this in spades.

In time this book will address how much of the Hancock image was rooted in reality, how much the fictitious accretion for laughter’s sake alone. For the moment it is enough to know that Hancock himself had the full measure of what was going on. As was so often the case, it seemed to come back to the feet. He told a reporter on the Coventry Evening Telegraph, ‘You can’t get away from it – underneath the handmade crocodile shoes, there are still the toes.’ He saw the pretensions with which people clothed themselves as the key to his humour, his role being to puncture them. Six years later that was still his credo. In an interview in Planet magazine he explained, ‘What I portray is what I find pretentious in myself and others. I play up pretensions, pomposity and stupidity in order – I hope – to destroy them. Who first decides about the position of the little finger when you’re drinking a cup of tea? Or who first decided the correct way to hold your soup bowl? Let’s say we did a comic skit where two people had a great barney about the right way to hold a soup bowl, showing up the stupidity of the whole thing. After the show the audience might go somewhere for a meal and remember the skit when they started on the soup. The impression might not last very long, but it would be there.’ It is reassuring to know that he and presumably Alan and Ray were ahead of Denis Norden on that one. But he was always at pains to point out the one thing he was not. As he emphasised to Russell Clark on Australian television a few months before he died: ‘I wasn’t a little man fighting against bureaucracy. This is nonsense. I was always trying to make life a little less deadly than it really is, and a lot of it was extremely belligerent comedy.’ As Philip Oakes noted, ‘Hancock, far from being the classic figure of the clown (that is, he who gets slapped) was the first to slap back.’ But there was always the suggestion of uncertainty in the aggressiveness. It was inevitable in the case of a character that wanted the whole world and yet had no means of achieving it except on the cheap.

Chapter Two (#uf3f81074-2b6e-5857-afb1-fffe41bac34d)

‘YOU’LL GO FAR, MY SON’ (#uf3f81074-2b6e-5857-afb1-fffe41bac34d)

‘A double feature, half a bar of Palm toffee, and three and a half hours in the dark – that was my idea of fun.’

He always claimed that his earliest recollection was of an egg timer. Later in life he went on record as being able to boil ‘a very good three-and-a-half-minute egg without having to glance at my watch once’. Eggs, with the attendant ‘soldiers’ to dip into their soft-boiled interiors, would provide a comfort factor – and at one point a professional windfall – in a life that began as Anthony John Hancock at 41 Southam Road, Hall Green, Small Heath, Birmingham, on 12 May 1924. The more grandiose middle names met in the previous chapter were the stuff of comic fiction. The house with its bay windows and turreted chimneys was the sturdy type of semi-detached that helped to define the identity of the British lower middle class between the wars and beyond. The ‘lower’ may be misleading in that the Hancocks were able to afford a nanny and a cook, whom Tony remembered as ‘a painfully thin woman who, no matter how much food she consumed, never put on a single pound’. The Hancocks were the original residents of the dwelling purchased new for the sum of £400 shortly after the arrival of their first son, Colin, in March 1918. By the time of Tony’s birth his father, John Hancock, had progressed in status to branch manager for the Houlder Brothers steamship line, which he had joined as a messenger boy in 1900, although his heart beat faster when he applied himself to his avocation as a small-time entertainer with a welcome entrée into the round of clubs, smoking concerts and masonics that thrived throughout the city. It is appropriate that in heraldic circles the name of Hancock did originally mean ‘son of John’, ‘Han’ being a Flemish form of John, ‘cock’ an affectionate term sometimes used to mean ‘son of’.

Hancock was what might be called a deadline baby, in that his father left it forty-two days before registering the birth of his second son at Kings Norton register office, the maximum period allowed by law. When the child was three years old, the family, prompted by medical advice in the matter of his father’s bronchial troubles, relocated to the purer air and more temperate, more genteel climes of Bournemouth. In later times Hancock would recall the event with typical deadpan insouciance: ‘What a brave band we were, striking south that summer morning. Every hamlet, every village, every town we passed through accorded us a truly remarkable lack of attention, exceeded only by the complete anonymity of our arrival in Bournemouth itself.’ By all accounts his father was a thrifty soul, refusing to buy enough petrol to take them beyond Bath, where they had to refuel for the final leg of the momentous journey. He had an automatic refrain when questioned why he didn’t fill the tank up completely, the same words of morbid circumspection he used when his wife constantly queried his purchase of one Alcazar razor blade at a time, rather than a packet of six: ‘You never know.’ The move was made viable by the monetary support of Tony’s maternal grandfather, Harry Samuel Thomas, an enterprising printer and lithographer whose success provided him with the financial cushion to serve for twenty-one years as a director of Birmingham City Football Club. His photograph is contained in the handbook published to mark the opening of the St Andrew’s ground in 1906. It was said of him by Harry Morris, a chairman of the club in the 1960s, that ‘he was always a very good judge of a footballer’. His daughter, Lucie Lilian, had married her husband eighteen days after the outbreak of the World War on 22 August 1914 at the parish church of St Oswald’s, Bordesley. On the marriage certificate she is recorded as two years younger than her partner, the son of William Hancock, a foreman builder. The Hancocks originally hailed from a family of stonemasons in the West Country. John, or Jack as he became known, was born in the Bedminster district of Bristol on 14 December 1887 to William, a carpenter and joiner, and his wife, Elizabeth. The family subsequently relocated to Sutton Coldfield. Tony’s mother entered the world on 4 September 1890 at 323 Cooksey Road, Small Heath, the child of Harry and his bride, Clara Hannah née Williams.

The search by Tony’s parents for a combined work and investment opportunity – subsidised in part by a £950 profit on the previous sale and in part by Thomas, who also fancied the idea of Bournemouth as a retirement prospect for himself – resulted in the purchase of an unlikely business in the northern hinterland of the resort. The Mayo Hygienic Laundry was situated on the south side of Strouden Road at Nos 144 and 146, washroom and shop respectively, with living accommodation over the latter, in the district of Winton. Hancock found himself genuflecting to this aspect of his heritage only once in his comedy career. As he settles down on his flight to an alpine vacation where the yodelling Kenneth Williams will prove particularly irksome, he stresses, ‘I needed this holiday – it’s been hard work in the laundry lately.’ In spite of the enthusiasm Lily expressly put into what had been an ailing business – a secondary outlet to receive and redistribute washing in the centre of Bournemouth being a decided asset in this regard – there was scant likelihood that the genial Jack would flourish in an environment which presented so little opportunity for the bonhomie of the social world. When, at the turn of the new decade, Strong & Co., the Romsey-based brewery, presented him with a chance to become the licensee of a central hostelry, little time was wasted. It may seem a big leap from running a laundry to managing a public house, but both were service industries and both left a pungent reminder on the olfactory sense of the future comedian: bleach and hops would provide him with a mental trigger à la recherche du temps perdu to the end of his days.

A valuable eye-witness to these times was the aforesaid nanny, Elsie Sparks, who joined the family at the age of seventeen on a salary of £1 10s. a week. More than sixty years later in an interview for the Bournemouth Evening Echo she recalled Tony as ‘a lovely chubby little chap’ who wouldn’t let her out of his sight, although ‘you could always tell when he’d been naughty or done something he shouldn’t have done because he’d hide under the table. And if you ever took him to the park and there were other boys around, he’d run off and bring their caps back to you!’ Tony, like herself, was not too happy with his first impressions of the holiday town: ‘He couldn’t understand the accent, and the sea frightened him.’ It was through Sparks that Hancock had been christened Anthony: long before he was born she could not stop talking about the previous charge she had left in order to attend initially to his brother, Colin. Lily was convinced her second child would be a boy and made a promise that if correct she would call him by the same name to keep her happy. As his brother surged ahead of him, Anthony redivivus became her sole charge. On nature walks in the lanes and fields that encroached upon the new home, she soon observed an introspection and lack of confidence that she sensed was set off by the move south: ‘He disliked meeting anyone new, trying anything new … he couldn’t wait to get home. In fact, the only place he was really happy and relaxed was in the small, fenced-in back garden.’

By Christmas the unhappiness and heavy heart had been joined by a physical setback. The doctor soon diagnosed the swelling around his wrists and leg joints as rickets. Not funny at the time, the disorder left him with that hollow-chested, hunched-shoulder look that became part of his comic vocabulary throughout his adult life. An attempt in childhood to straighten himself out led to exercises that involved hanging from a bar until his arms gave way. The procedure came to an abrupt end the day he caught sight of his shadow: ‘I looked like a bloody great bat,’ he grumbled. It is also the consensus of opinion that he grew into an untidy child, a fact with which Hancock concurred: ‘Mother would take us out on a shopping spree and set us up in smart new suits, but so far as I was concerned she was wasting her time. Colin and Roger would arrive home looking as spruce as you could wish, but I always let the side down. My suits had a way of looking old and ill fitting the moment I got into them.’ The uneasy feeling with clothes persisted through the years of his greatest success.

In retrospect the move to Bournemouth with its bustling entertainment industry both in and out of season provided Hancock senior with the ideal milieu in which to vent his frustrated skills as an entertainer. He would soon be caught up again in the whirl of concerts, ladies’ nights and private bookings that had made life in Birmingham more bearable, culminating in November and December 1923 in two broadcasts, billed first as a ‘humorist’ and then as an ‘entertainer’, on the radio station 5IT that broadcast from the city between 1922 and 1927. Now as the landlord of the Railway Hotel at 119 Holdenhurst Road, near to Bournemouth’s town centre, he had discovered the perfect environment in which to combine business, the entertainment of others and the ability to socialise with the colourful parade of theatricals that frequented the venue, both as occasional drinkers and overnight guests. The hostelry epitomised the racy side that between the wars bristled alongside the more respectable image the resort has always seemed anxious to cultivate. In many respects it may be no different from other South Coast seaside towns with their palm court and putting green aspirations to genteelness, but where else but Bournemouth do you discover illuminations that still shun neon-lit vulgarity in favour of a flickering wonderland of candles each lit by hand in its coloured glass jar?

Remembered from his Birmingham days as great company – ‘he always had three words to your one,’ recalled Harry Morris – Jack Hancock, in the few photographs that survive, is revealed as a worldly cross between the music-hall lion comique tradition of ‘Champagne Charlie’ and his fellow coves, and the debonair, dapper precision of a Jack Buchanan. One picture shows him in the convivial company of that definitive boulevardier from the halls, Charles Coborn no less, immortalised in song as ‘The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. Another image, posed as a publicity shot, reveals a slim, sharp-eyed alertness as he looks into the camera. His black bow tie and white wing collar stand to attention, and one can almost hear the overture playing. Everything is right about him. One line in his act is still lodged with affection in the comic lexicon of his youngest son, Roger, who was only four when he died. He would swagger on stage with a folded copy of The Times, then acknowledge an invisible presence in the wings: ‘Put the Rolls in the garage, George. I’ll butter them later.’ The act then segued into a succession of stories and topical comments that he would read from the newspaper – a device not dissimilar to that used in the breakfast-oriented openings to his son’s radio series – in addition to monologues and impressions.

George Fairweather, his friend and fellow semi-professional, recounted his first impression of the tall, handsome figure in top hat and tails, with white scarf and silver-topped cane to complete the image: ‘he was over-dressed even for a formal night out, but within seconds the audience identified with him … he may have been dressed as a toff, but there were no class barriers … he joked about the same things and poked fun at the same people as they did.’ This in part confirms his middle son’s recollection of him as ‘a dude entertainer’ with an upper-crust stage voice. According to George, there was more than a touch of the Terry-Thomas about him, right down to the elegant holder from which he would chain-smoke the Du Maurier cigarettes he kept in their gold case. Tony himself identified show business as ‘undoubtedly the real love’ of his father’s life: ‘He enjoyed nothing better than making people laugh … Mother used to accompany him at the piano. I am told that she laughed so much at his gags, however often she heard them, that she could hardly play a note. That must have been a great comfort to him on the odd occasions when things weren’t going so well with the audience.’ The act often included a monologue about a lonely old man and a little dog. It would reduce his wife to hysteria with tears irrigating her cheeks. When in later years she recalled it for her famous son, it produced an equally convulsive effect. Their marriage was strengthened by his gift for comedy. ‘She could never stay cross with Dad for long,’ remembered Tony. ‘He would pull a funny face, or use a silly voice, and that was that.’

When she was not wiping her eyes from laughter, the hotel gave his mother a new sense of purpose. She soon revealed herself as her father’s daughter as she set about capitalising on its unique situation. Only a hop, skip and a jump from the main railway terminus, it quickly became a magnet for the business customer out of season as much as for the holidaymaker and day-tripper within. In the spring of 1931 press advertisements announced the opening of the New Palm Lounge within the hotel: ‘The ideal rendezvous for ladies and gentlemen, and the most up-to-date retreat in central Bournemouth.’ The tag that followed was a product of Jack’s own sense of humour: ‘It is said that trams stop by request – others by desire!’ He was himself an integral part of the attraction. Peter Harding, a Bournemouth journalist who included the hotel in his regular round, was himself reported as saying that you never saw Hancock’s dad working behind the bar. He always had his regular place at one end where he held court, occasionally leaving it to greet someone he knew, but only to bring them back to his corner: ‘By the end of the night he would be surrounded by a group of laughing men and women and always with a household name among them.’ The presence of the theatrical profession only emphasised the overall ambience of the place, the spiritual ancestry of which would have suggested the cheery backchat and cheeky banter of the music halls.

The family were domiciled in the claustrophobic attic flat at the top of the building. Tony and his brother Roger, who was actually born there on 9 June 1931, have both admitted that a business with an often chaotic twenty-four-hour claim on the attention of its owners did not provide the environment most conducive to a traditional family life style. His mother once explained in an interview: ‘Tony once asked why he couldn’t have a home life like the other boys. But it was impossible – I was busy with the customers all the time.’ For Hancock the answer to the impersonal, though unintentional, disregard by his parents was to raid the petty cash and find escape in the silver screen: ‘Will Hay was my favourite. A double feature, half a bar of Palm toffee, and three and a half hours in the dark – that was my idea of fun.’ At a later time and in different circumstances Roger would cope with a similar situation in the same way, claiming that the constant exposure to the cinema taught him everything he knew about judgement and material, the grounding for his successful career as a literary and theatrical agent.

If Hancock took his theatrical flair from his father, his energy and strong-mindedness must have come from his mum. Known to all as Lily – and, to the annoyance of her family, to her husband as ‘Billy’ – she had denounced Lucie almost as soon as she could talk. Lily survived her son and therefore came within the acquaintance of many of those who figured in his career. To the writer Philip Oakes she was funny and racy, with a warm practicality that cut to the quick of her son’s excesses: when on one visit to the Oakes’ home Tony’s boozy obsession for conversation and music showed little respect for the midnight hour, she finally drew herself up and turned to Philip’s wife: ‘I’ll put my gloves on … it always worked with his father.’ It usually worked with Hancock too. His agent Beryl Vertue first met her on a Mediterranean holiday and was immediately impressed: ‘You could almost see where he got some of his mannerisms from in terms of delivery and everything … she would strut across the beach, full of funny anecdotes and with a kind of feigned vagueness about how to tackle any particular problem.’ As her son ribbed her about her food foibles they became like a double act together. Lily’s friend, the theatrical hairdresser Mary Hobley, recalled for Jeff Hammonds the suddenness with which she would go from being jolly and bright to being serious: ‘She’d talk about life and all that – she seemed a bit mixed up in some way, but she was fun … Tony was like her in a way – he was very bright, but underneath there was this sadness.’

Their close relationship even spilled over into a mutual love of sport. He talked about her to the journalist Gareth Powell, in one of the last interviews he gave in Australia: ‘My mother is seventy-seven and a bit of a card. I telephoned her when I was sailing on the Andes. I said, “I think I’m going to play a bit of cricket with the Australians.” And she said immediately – and I’m talking to her on a boat, on the Andes – “Now I would suggest three slips, one gully, two short legs …!” and she went through the card on this bloody thing. And she’s got no right to do this. A very funny woman indeed. Seventy-seven years and fighting as she goes.’ Even sex was not off limits in their conversation. When, in an echo of Les Dawson’s hypochondriac travesty of a Northern housewife, she delicately referred in company to having something wrong ‘down below’ Tony couldn’t help himself. ‘Get your legs round a good man,’ he would guffaw. ‘That’ll put you right.’ Modesty dictated she would not be drawn further, although it is tempting to imagine the spirit of Tony’s friend Dick Emery, another fine comic transvestite, intruding on her behalf: ‘Ooh, you are awful!’ Indeed, looking at pictures of her in later life one surely gets some idea of how Tony would have looked in drag. The popping eyes and chubby cheeks are there, although school friend Ronald Elgood remembers the very domineering, almost Wagnerian presence of the lady who would collect her son at term’s end. Their love was unquestionable and she remained supportive of him until the end of his life, although others have referred to a negative side in their relationship. ‘She never let me grow up,’ he once said to Joan Le Mesurier. ‘Once we were out on a drive and she said to me, “Look at the choo-choo puff-puff.”’ When Joan queried what was wrong with that, he replied, ‘I was thirty-two at the time.’ Arrested childhood development would provide Galton and Simpson with another common trait in the years to come: finger games, matchstick men drawn on windows and the announcement of the sight of ‘Cows!’ as if they were Martians all dominate that wearisome television train journey to the North.

Roger was well aware of the closeness between Tony and his mother, and assesses his own standing in the triangle between them with honesty: ‘There was a sort of fixation there between the two of them and I was not part of that. It doesn’t worry me. I don’t feel any lack of affection. I think I’ve come out of this very well, actually. I could have been a screwed-up mess, but I’m not because I think I accepted the special relationship between them. It really was.’ Not that everything was always well between them. Lyn Took, Tony’s secretary at the height of his fame, found it hard to discern a maternal presence at all. His friend, the actress Damaris Hayman, thought she exerted a rather unhealthy hold on him: ‘He used to say that she was very fond of “my son, the celebrity” and she sort of dined out on it, to use the phrase.’ Roger is prepared to admit that she aggravated her son at times: ‘I can understand that, because she’d go off on cruises and she’d always sit at the captain’s table and she’d come home and say, “I don’t know why I’m sitting at the captain’s table.” And I’d say, “It’s because you’re always telling everyone who you are and dishing out signed photographs of Tony into the bargain. Why else do you think you are?” She was the cruise queen. He paid for them. He was wonderful to her and rightly so because she had been so wonderful to him. From my point of view it was totally understandable.’ Hancock became resigned to the humour in the situation: ‘One day I caught her in a pub distributing signed portraits of me all around the bar all in one quick, deft movement as if she were dealing cards at Las Vegas. There they were drinking their beer and playing shove-halfpenny and suddenly before I could do anything about it, they found a Hancock picture in their hands.’ More importantly, on his Face to Face interview with John Freeman Tony described as his most vivid memory of his mother ‘the encouragement she gave me to do what I wanted to do, though I showed no sign at all of being able to do it initially’. Roger is not prepared to admit that his mother may have seen more of the father – and the vicarious realisation of his father’s theatrical dreams – in her middle son. Tony, in the same interview, acknowledged the lead his father gave: ‘I think in many ways it was a deep thing with me to try and justify it. Because I believe he was pretty good.’

Roger scarcely knew his father. His only memory is a poignant one: ‘He was going upstairs and he paused half way up on his way to the top floor. I sort of indicated that I wanted to come up with him and he said, “No, don’t – don’t come up.” By that time he was dying, but I didn’t know. Why would I know?’ Jack Hancock died of peritonitis aggravated by both lung and liver cancer at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Boscombe, on 11 August 1935. He was forty-seven and had been ill for nearly a year, the last month in the hospital. By that time the family, spurred on by the resentment shown by the brewery to Jack’s extracurricular activities as an entertainer and promoter of his own shows around the district, had moved from the Railway Hotel to their own independent venture. By August 1933 they were installed at the Swanmore Hotel and Lodge at 3 Gervis Road East, a select but neglected property within easier reach of the sands huddled beneath the East Cliff. According to his youngest son, a piece of advice handed down in the family by his father over the years had been, ‘Whatever you do, it’s your face that matters, not your arse!’ The posher new address with its wide pavements and leafy feeling away from a bustling main road met the criterion. To make it sound even more exclusive it was rechristened the Durlston Court Hotel after the preparatory school in Swanage where the eldest son, Colin, was a boarder.

Designated by its proprietors as an ‘Ultra Modern Private Hotel’, the new venue boasted forty bedrooms. Private suites could be had for 12 guineas a week and ‘Residents’ were deemed a ‘Speciality’. The ambience now had less to do with the music hall and the saloon bar and was more, as Hancock pointed out, in keeping with a Terence Rattigan Separate Tables type of existence endorsed by ‘a solid core of elderly gentlefolk who have come to the coast to see out their days on their modest means’. But the theatricals, who continued to keep their allegiance to his father, were still welcomed. This was a world where Country Life and Tatler, in which his mother advertised assiduously, jostled side by side with TitBits and the Stage. The clash between the refined respectability of one outlook and the rorty raffishness of the other would inform Hancock’s comic outlook for the rest of his life. On 7 August 1935, sadly only four days before Jack’s death, a feature article on the recently reopened and refurbished premises appeared in the Bournemouth Daily Echo and singled out its ‘unrivalled advantage of a natural environment of extreme beauty without artificiality’, adding that ‘the tender green of the lawns contrasts pleasantly with the strong white surface of the building’. The article was accompanied by an advertising feature in which all who had been involved in the renovation work displayed their calling cards. Tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner of the page was a box that read, ‘The whole of the Electrical Installations for the above by R.G. Walker.’ It gave his address as 37 Palmerston Road, Boscombe. He would soon move back to the hotel in another capacity.

Tony was eleven at the time of his father’s death and his memories were more concrete. He confided in Philip Oakes the image he cherished of his father in the back of a taxi putting himself together in readiness for his act. It is easy to see why it appealed to him. To a man who was congenitally dishevelled like Hancock the idea that somebody could reassemble himself in the back of a cab as a paragon of wedding-cake elegance was heroic. When in 1967 David Frost asked him who had most influenced him as a comedian, Tony used the question to reminisce fondly about the one occasion his father managed to top the bill: ‘It was at St Peter’s Hall (in Bournemouth). In those days a semi-professional entertainer used to wear one of those collapsible top hats and a monocle, always! There was one entrance to the hall – through the front. And he was refused admission, in spite of his gear, because he hadn’t got a ticket! He explained that he was top of the bill, and they said, “Sorry, no ticket, no entry.” So he was out. In the end, he climbed through the lavatory window. The show must go on, you know. But it didn’t go on with him again. He never got a return date.’ On another occasion Hancock added, ‘If that had happened to me, I would have gone straight home and to hell with them! But I hope he brought the house down for his pains.’

Jack Hancock was a practical joker too. A story was passed down in the family concerning another car journey. Jack suddenly turned to his friend and fellow publican, Peter Read, and with reference to a prop basket on the floor of the car shouted out, ‘It’s gone again … quick, get the flute and play it, otherwise we’ll never get it back in the basket!’ The driver, increasingly agitated, pulled up on the verge: ‘Either you get that snake back in the basket or we don’t budge another inch.’ Other memories were more sombre. He proved a trooper to the end and even in the last stages of his illness, when he was severely emaciated, Tony remembered him wrapping a sheet around his jaundiced shoulders and regaling the patrons with an impression of Gandhi. As Eric Morecambe would have said, ‘There’s no answer to that!’ His last performance had been given at a midnight matinée at Bournemouth’s Regent Theatre the previous Christmas, when he shared a bill with radio favourite Ronald Frankau and his old friend George Fairweather and tore the place down with his impersonation of Stanley Holloway delivering the monologue, ‘Albert and the Lion’.

When asked by the journalist Ray Nunn in the summer of 1962 whether he thought his father’s death had had a lasting effect on his personality, he replied, ‘I prefer not to answer that.’ With respect for the response, Nunn moved swiftly on to his next question, ‘What do you hate most of all?’ ‘Any form of cruelty,’ said Hancock. Osborne’s Jimmy Porter had been ten years old when his father had died: ‘For twelve months I watched my father dying … he would talk to me for hours, pouring out all that was left of his life to one lonely, bewildered little boy, who could barely understand half of what he said … you see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry – angry and helpless.’ It would be wrong to read such intimacy into Hancock’s situation, but Damaris Hayman, who sensed the love Tony had for him, recalled an emotional moment when he told her his father reminded him of the stag in Bambi, the moment when the young fawn acknowledges him as his sire and his mother explains, ‘Everyone respects him … he’s very brave and very wise. That’s why he’s known as the Great Prince of the forest.’ ‘Obviously,’ says Damaris, ‘his father was an almost god-like figure to him.’

On that same appearance with David Frost, Hancock reminisced about one of the songs his father used as a closing number. He couldn’t remember the words, but a member of the viewing public later obliged and he was invited back on the following evening’s show to interpret them. The song was called ‘First Long Trousers’ and it took the son some emotional effort to get to the end:

Say, young fellow, just a minute,

These are your first long trousers, eh?

Your little grubby knee breeches

Are for ever put away …

… Gee, you look well in them, sonny!

I can’t believe my eyes.

It doesn’t seem a year ago

When you were just – this size!

A little pink cheeked youngster,

Why, you toddled more than ran

Every night to meet your daddy –

Now you’ve got long trousers on.

Oh, I don’t know how to tell you,

But I want to, yes I do,

That your mummy and your daddy both

Are mighty proud of you.

And we’re going to miss the baby

That from us this day has gone.

But that baby we’ll remember

Though he has long trousers on.

By that time there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

It was only after his father’s death that Tony was sent away from home to school. He had spent the autumn term of 1929 at Summerbee Infants School, now the Queen’s Park Infants School, at Charminster, about half a mile from the family laundry. A conversation between Hancock archivist Malcolm Chapman and a fellow pupil revealed that he turned up in a smart brown suit, which was most unusual at a time when most parents in the area could not afford that kind of apparel. When the family moved into the hotel trade, his education climbed a notch up the social scale. Saugeen Preparatory School, founded in 1873, announced itself to prospective parents as ‘a preparatory school for boys for the Public Schools and the Navy’. It could boast of John Galsworthy as an old boy and had links with Robert Louis Stevenson (Lloyd Osbourne, the stepson for whom he wrote Treasure Island, had gone there as well). Coincidentally, the building in Derby Road is now occupied by another hotel, the Majestic. Coincidentally again, Treasure Island provided a leitmotif that would resonate in Hancock’s stage act down the years. The young Tony was now obliged to adopt a school uniform that comprised Eton collar, short jacket and black pinstripe trousers. The establishment provided the choristers, the young Hancock among them, for St Swithun’s Church only a few hundred yards away both from his parents’ second hotel venture and the school itself. In the spring of 1935 Saugeen School relocated to nearby Wimborne.

Events moved quickly in Hancock’s life after his father died. On 1 January the following year his mother remarried. A few days later he followed in the footsteps of his elder brother, Colin, and was enrolled as a pupil at Durlston Court School in Swanage. That he made the move halfway through the academic year suggests his mother may have needed to regroup and give herself the additional space to manage the business and her new life. It may merely signify that Saugeen School – had he continued to attend its new Wimborne location – closed down or was about to close down around this time. In his will Jack Hancock left the gross value of his whole estate of £13,961 to ‘Billy’ for ‘her unstintable [sic] and loving kindnesses during my life’. The remarriage so relatively soon after her first husband’s demise caused some consternation among many of the family’s friends. George Fairweather had little time for Robert Gordon Walker, twelve years his wife’s junior, the electrical contractor involved in the renovation of Durlston Court Hotel. A man of athletic appearance, he had played for Boscombe football club as a semi-professional for ten years. Within six months of the marriage he had sold his electrical company and was registered as a joint director of the hotel.