Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography

According to Roger, however, there was little question of his becoming a major presence in the lives of the three brothers: ‘My mother always said, “You mustn’t have anything to do with him. You’re my son and I’m the one who makes all the decisions. You’re not to take any decisions from him.” She rather put him down.’ When years later Roger himself married, he took his bride down to Bournemouth to meet his stepfather: ‘I’d always been put off him by my mother. When Annie met him for the first time, she said, “I think he’s lovely.” And for the first time in my life I realised he actually was a very nice person, but I’d always been talked out of it by my mother.’ It is understandable to imagine that any guilt or embarrassment Lily felt in the circumstances may have been channelled into brainwashing her children in this way. In her lifetime she married three times, but as Roger stresses, ‘Never for money! Never for money! Except the last one, who dropped down dead at her feet. He was a multi-millionaire. They were about to be married. There was going to be a fourth.’ One thing he will never take away from her is the intensity with which she threw herself into running the business: ‘She worked so bloody hard. Twenty-four hours a day.’ If she was not in the office, she was in the kitchen. Not that she was without back-up staff. Her youngest son recalls the Swiss chef who used to chase everyone around the kitchen with a knife when his anger was roused. Colin was by now managing the accounts, when, that is, he was not indulging his passion for tap-dancing. When questioned about the social contradiction in how a relatively modest family could afford to process three offspring through private education, Roger can only point to her industry: ‘I wish I had known my mother better. She was so supportive. She paid all the school fees. But children don’t think of that at the time. It wasn’t as if they were well off. She grafted so hard.’

Tony Hancock remained at Durlston Court School in Swanage until the summer of 1938. When he joined, there were around sixty-five boys on the register. Converted in 1903 from a large mid-Victorian private house, it occupied a commanding position overlooking the bay and the resort’s monumental Great Globe, 40 ornamental tons of the Portland limestone that characterised the area. Between 1928 and 1965 it could boast the redoubtable Pat Cox as headmaster, immortalised later by another Durlstonian, the scriptwriter and producer David Croft, as the part-inspiration for Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army. ‘It’s not that he was a pompous man,’ David recalls, ‘more that he represented all the best characteristics of being British, loyalty, and the old school.’ Cox had been a junior officer in the Durham Light Infantry during the Great War at the age of seventeen. ‘It’s not if we win the war, it’s when we win the war,’ he would pontificate during the later conflict. Croft arrived just after Hancock left. He recalls that the mistress in charge of the junior school had with some foresight told Hancock that if he didn’t sit up straight and hold his head erect he would grow into a round-shouldered old man. Sadly he did not need to reach old age to fulfil the prophecy. According to Roger, himself an old boy, the school’s motto, engraved on its crest beneath the imperial Roman eagle, was ‘Erectus Non Elatus’. This quickly translated into ‘Upright, not boastful’. Hancock might have preferred the line from the old George Formby song: ‘I’m not stuck up or proud – I’m just one of the crowd – a good turn I’ll do when I can!’

It was inevitable that he would apply himself to the drama life of the school. He made his first public appearance cast as the ‘celebrated, underrated nobleman, the Duke of Plaza-Toro’ in an end-of-term production of The Gondoliers. This required him to lead a train of noblemen on stage and announce with great dignity, ‘My Lords … the Duke!’ On opening night, the nobility was assembled, the audience was expectant, and his moment came. Hancock raised his hand in an impressive gesture, his lips parted, but the only sound that emerged was a strangled gargle. The voice of a master from the prompt side urged him to go off and come on again. The crocodile traipsed back into the wings. At the second attempt things were even worse. Tony recalled, ‘My jaws worked hard – like a gramophone without a record on it. Not one other sound could I raise but for a mouse-like squeak. “All right, Hancock,” said the teacher, “you’ve had your moment of clowning.”’ The school magazine reported, ‘The part of the Duke had to be played silently in mime!’ He progressed sufficiently to be offered a part in the next production, The Pirates of Penzance. Tragically, between auditions and casting his voice broke, ‘which was just as well considering what little I had done with it in its intact state,’ wrote Hancock. ‘I sounded like a cross between Lily Pons and Paul Robeson.’ The master, knowing full well that parents were paying large sums for small boys to flaunt their exhibitionist tendencies in this manner, clutched at a particular straw: ‘What I really want is a good stage manager.’ But Hancock’s determination knew no bounds. By making a nuisance of himself he was allowed to join the chorus on strict instructions: ‘Remember, Hancock, you can whack your thigh. But you must not sing.’ Eventually he was reduced to demanding roles like falling out of cupboards and wardrobes: ‘I can claim to have died the death in more ways than one at Durlston Court. The odd thing was that the more I failed as a child actor the more I determined to succeed as an adult … setbacks and adversity in general have always stiffened my resolution and it was so maddening to lie there on the stage being stepped over and prodded for heart beats when I felt I had it in me to make people laugh.’ There was little doubt about that. Many years later his mother told an Australian newspaper that he had been a ‘funny little lad’ since the age of three: ‘He used to do such funny little things that had everyone laughing and always had a funny saying at the tip of his tongue.’

For the moment he was markedly more successful on the playing field. The school records reveal that as a victim of measles in his first term he got off to a slow start both academically – coming twelfth out of twelve in his class – and athletically. He rallied sufficiently to win the school’s welterweight boxing final ‘by a narrow margin – he is quick and hits very hard and showed that he can take as well as give punishment’. He went on that year to excel on the cricket field, taking thirty-five wickets with an average of 6.3 including seven for six against Old Malthouse School. At soccer he scored twenty-two goals in fourteen matches. The following year saw cricket figures of seventy wickets in thirteen games, including one return of eight for twelve. A member of the school shooting team, he was awarded his First Class marksmanship badge in his final year, and on sports day 1938 the Victor Ludorum Cup. His final cricket season revealed figures of fifty-seven wickets at an average of 4.3. The headmaster wrote, ‘In Hancock, A. J. we have one of the best bowlers Durlston has ever had.’ He had been more specific at an earlier date: ‘He always bowls a good length with plenty of nip off the pitch and swings in from the leg rather late.’ As for lessons, he managed to win the prizes for English and French in his final year and to achieve 76 per cent in the Common Entrance Algebra exam to secure his place at public school.

He moved on to the long-established Bradfield College, near Reading, in the autumn of 1938. It might appear he was set securely on the educational ladder to British middle-class success. He stuck it for little more than three terms. His housemaster, J.R.B. Moulsdale, confirmed his aptitude for sport, but as for academia: ‘he was not academically very bright – no qualifications at all – and it is rumoured that his housemaster once wrote a report that said, “this boy thinks that he can make a living by being funny”’. As if to substantiate the pupil’s opinion, Moulsdale added as an aside on another occasion, ‘He was much, much better at imitating his masters. His mother told Joan Le Mesurier of how one visiting day she had gone to the Dean’s office to discuss his academic progress. The news was not encouraging. As she left he told her that she would find her son leaving the hall with the rest of the school. She expressed her concern how she was going to pick him out of the crowd. “It’s simple,” replied the Dean with a twinkle. “He’ll be the only one with his mortarboard stuffed under his arm and his gown trailing on the ground.”’ The impression of a Just William caricature has been endorsed by Richard Emanuel, for whom Hancock acted as fag: ‘He was permanently untidy. His clothes never appeared to fit, his tie veered towards the back of his neck and his collar had a life of its own. He invariably had inky hands and not infrequently ink on his face. His hair was generally in keeping with his collar and tie.’ Whatever his natural propensity for untidiness, Hancock was registering a protest: he hated the place. Soon after the beginning of his fourth term he literally, in his brother’s words, ‘threw the mortarboard and gown away under a bush and jacked it in in disgust’. Fortunately his decision to quit the system, without any apparent opposition from his family, forestalled the prospect of being haunted by a public-school accent for the rest of his life. It is always feasible that family economics were the reason for his departure and that Hancock was at last putting on a good acting performance. The prospect of war could not have had a settling influence either. According to Ronald Elgood, when in the early 1950s Tony found himself playing the Palace Theatre, Reading, ten miles away, Moulsdale invited him back to the alma mater for old times’ sake. He refused point blank, saying how much he loathed Bradfield. Moulsdale appeared somewhat surprised, as though he had not realised his old pupil had this particular chip on his shoulder.

Elgood was a contemporary of Hancock at both Durlston Court and Bradfield. His abiding memory, aside from the fact that there was nothing lugubrious about him – ‘that came later’ – is of a sense of mischief: ‘He was fairly streetwise. I don’t know if he came from a state school. I well recall a game of football with Tony at centre forward. We were naïve little gents and he tapped the ball with his hand when the referee wasn’t looking. We were amazed.’ His tone suggests that they also secretly admired his cheek. He is certainly remembered ‘as a good-natured boy, a nice guy’. To Pat Cox’s wife he was ‘just an ordinary likeable schoolboy’. To Peter Wilson at Bradfield he was ‘a cheerful soul – full of jokes and the joys of spring’. There is no evidence to suggest that he suffered adversely from the notion that it helps to build the character of children by the enforced separation from their loved ones in a repressive, potentially alienating environment, although his brother does point out that he was a shy child. Another Bradfield contemporary, Nigel Knight, observed a ‘complete and utter silence, uncommunicativeness (markedly towards groups)’. Tony admitted to John Freeman being an extrovert till the age of about fourteen, ‘and then it sort of packed up’. He had no idea why. Roger puts it down to public school: ‘You were kept away from the punters. Later I cracked it. I went to a party, at the House of Commons of all places, and I thought nobody knows anybody at this party. I’m no worse off than anybody else. So I started going up to people. But Tony was not particularly gregarious. He was shy. If he did crack it later, it was with the drink, but not without. But it was a wonderful education, particularly in the business my parents were in when you really had no home life. So you were going back to school and seeing your friends, which is really the reverse of what you would expect.’

Preparatory and public school, albeit minor, provided an unlikely background for a professional comedian who would go on to achieve mass appeal. On radio and television the Hancock character often goes to great pains to recover his imaginary past – scholastic, military, ancestral, professional – by asserting a status he apparently never had. Had his true educational history been common knowledge, the radio episode The Old School Reunion, in which Tony regales Sid, Bill and Hattie with his boyhood triumphs at ‘Greystones’ – ‘seven of the happiest years of my life: started off as a fag and worked my way up to head cigar’ – might not have been as funny, even if the dénouement does insist that he turned out to be the worst school porter they ever had. Galton and Simpson also indulged his passion for sport in many an episode. It is comforting that their grandiose Roy of the Rovers soliloquising on his behalf was rooted in a certain schoolboy truth: ‘Picture the scene – Wembley Stadium 1939 … the ball was cleared high in the air – I caught it on my forehead – balanced it there – tilted my head back and with my nose holding it in position I was off. Past one man, past two men, forty-five yards, the ball never left my head. I was holding the lace in my mouth …’ But his soccer skills were nothing to his cricketing ability. He claims he is known in cricketing circles as ‘Googly Hancock’, and not as Bill Kerr suggests because of the way he walks: ‘Perishing Australians! What do they know about cricket, anyway?’ snorts Hancock with disgust.

Cricket became something of an obsession, a passion that lingered until the end of his life. He developed into a fine medium-pace seam bowler, and one of his proudest moments came at a charity match in 1958 when with little dispute he bowled out Ian Craig, the Australian captain, lbw with only his second ball; unfortunately the umpire, acknowledging the crowd had come to see the touring side, gave ‘not out’. His mother recalled that as a boy, ‘He used to go round the hotel swinging his arms. He was always bowling at something.’ It also provided the defining bond between the two brothers, in spite of the age gap between them. ‘I suppose,’ says Roger, ‘that between seven and ten I got to know him better because we played a lot of cricket in the yard at the back of the hotel.’ His real-life athletic prowess would have especially pleased his father, who had engrained the love of sport in his son. Among his other accomplishments Jack had been an extremely good billiards player, a superb golfer and a boxing expert. He had coached boxing on an ad hoc basis at Durlston Court School and boasted a certain notoriety as a licensed boxing referee officiating at tournaments at the Winter Gardens, the Stokewood Road Baths, and elsewhere locally. His youngest son claims that he was ‘the most unpopular referee in Hampshire – as soon as he was announced, he was booed’. Tony had his own memories: ‘Regularly we trotted along to his fights, sat ourselves down in free ring-side seats and promptly stood up and booed every decision he gave. Very popular we were, I don’t mind telling you.’

In his Face to Face interview Tony made it quite clear why he left Bradfield: ‘I wanted to get into the theatre … I felt I could do it somehow … I don’t know why really.’ He emphasised to John Freeman that he had wanted to be a comic for as long as he could remember. Ever disparaging of his appearance, he added, ‘perhaps looking like this it was perhaps the only thing I could do’. He would not be the first comedian to turn such a deficiency into a workable option. At another level, however, one needs to jump back to when he was around six or seven years old to discover the emotional heart of the matter. There would have been no single moment of annunciation. Whatever the schools he attended, the most engaging, most enduring part of his education occurred as he fell under the continual spell of the variety artists who clustered around his father in the hotel bar in the early 1930s. In later life he revealed that he had the measure of them exactly: ‘They fascinated me. Those old pros were so much more extrovert than people in the business today. It seemed as if they would go into an act at the drop of a hat. They were different from any other kind of people I had ever met in my life. They seemed to get so much more out of life simply by being alive.’ In later years he would parody the world of ‘no business like show business’, but he never lost his respect for the professionalism of the variety trade that catered for a million eventualities in the tireless round from one venue to another.

It was a significant time in the development of British entertainment. A new breed of performer was breaking through in variety, a more sophisticated type whose talent, often nurtured in concert parties, had been lifted to success in the radio studios of the day. In comedy a more sophisticated approach underpinned humour that still somehow managed to remain accessible to a wider audience, as the Oxbridge satirical movement would thirty years later. How could a boy of impressionable years not be impressed by both Pavilion favourites and Hancock hotel patrons like Norman Long, billed as ‘A Song, a Smile and a Piano’, the Western Brothers, listed as ‘The Singing Songwriters’ with their admonition, ‘Play the game, you cads,’ and Gillie Potter, ‘The Squire of Hogsnorton’, with his erudite ramblings about his mythical but oh-so-real village? Their billing matter beckoned as Tony gravitated towards his destiny. The week commencing 3 October 1933 was a red-letter one. Placarded on the posters around town as ‘England’s Premier Radio Stars in Person’ were the ‘In a Spot of Bother’ double act Clapham and Dwyer, Tommy Handley of later ‘ITMA’ renown, and Elsie and Doris Waters all wrapped up in one bumper fun parcel. The last two were especially significant with their portrayal of ‘Gert and Daisy, the Radio Flappers’, comedy where the accent was less on jokes, more on characterisation as the public seemingly eavesdropped on a conversation driven by the minutiae of existence, the tedium of bus queues, shop queues, cinema queues, in short the sluggish inertia of suburbia writ large. No comedian would come to embrace those aspects more effectively than the adult Hancock.

Looking back from the vantage point of his own success Hancock would single out the occasional act. The select members of his extended dream family included ‘Stainless’ Stephen, billed proudly as ‘The British Broadcasting Comedian’, a Sheffield-based performer who knew Jack Hancock extremely well. His speciality was a form of ‘punctuated patter’, articulating the symbols that add meaning to the words in a way that predated Victor Borge’s splendid verbal games for a later generation: ‘Somebody once said inverted commas comedians are born comma not made. Well … slight pause to heighten egotistical effect comma … let me tell my dense public (innuendo) that I was born of honest but disappointed parents in anno Domini eighteen ninety something … end of first paragraph and a fresh line.’ A sometime schoolmaster whose real name was Arthur Clifford Baines, he heightened the effect on stage by wearing a costume that embraced a stainless-steel waistcoat and a bowler hat with steel rim to match. Hancock later acknowledged that by listening to Clifford he first learned the importance of timing in lifting a relatively trite script to a more exalted level. Moreover, according to Tony, it was ‘Stainless’ Stephen who ‘gave me my first whiff of greasepaint by taking me behind the scenes at the Bournemouth Pavilion Theatre. That was a magic night for me and thereafter I made a beeline backstage at every opportunity.’ Recently completed in 1929, the Pavilion Theatre on Bournemouth’s Westover Road rose majestically in its commanding position like a red-brick Taj Mahal. His school uniform soon became as familiar a sight in the wings as the stage manager’s pullover. One incident there loomed large in the notes he made in 1962:

One night the Houston Sisters were on, Renée and Billie. Renée looked so sweet and attractive that I stood there entranced. Then she came off and said a few sharp things to the man who was handling the lights. She really gave him the works and I was twenty-five before I knew what all the words meant. It was a shock for a lad of eight wearing his school cap, imagining he was in some wonderful fairyland until – whoosh! That lovely creature came bursting into the wings and shattered all his illusions. Renée was right, though. That man was making a pretty fair hash of the lighting.

Few performers made a greater impression on him than the traditional double act Clapham and Dwyer, who claimed a complete paragraph in his jottings:

It may sound strange now when my own line of comedy is so remote from anything they ever did, but nevertheless that pair taught me the rudiments of the job. Charlie Clapham – in topper and monocle, again – was the funny one, a spry, scatterbrained whippet and quite a dog in every way. Billy Dwyer was the mastiff of the act, but in his solid fashion he was great fun. In fact, he bore out what I have always felt about these comedy partnerships; that the straight man is invariably much funnier than he is credited with being. In a way the Clapham and Dwyer relationship reminded me of Laurel and Hardy’s. I have always thought that Hardy was as funny as Laurel and Billy Dwyer used to amuse me enormously. I followed their act all over the place and often stayed with the Dwyer family. They may not always have wanted me but they got me just the same. Bill had an odd quirk of humour. When I arrived at his home he would say, ‘Goodbye!’ and tell me, ‘There’s a good train back at 6.30 tonight.’ Sometime I wonder whether he actually meant it, but I prefer to think it was one of his little jokes.

And then there was Sydney Howard, who was a movie star as well. If back then a cross between a soothsayer and a casting agent had been looking to replicate the Hancock of the future, they need have searched no further. His rotund build, his equally rotund speech, his ‘googly’ gait, his sense of comic mournfulness were all spot on. He too epitomised pomposity in the context of a frayed, shabby gentility. To watch him today in one of his most successful low-budget comedies, Fame, is a revelation. He plays the floorwalker in a department store. When a boy insults him, he goes to swipe him with his hand before thinking better of it and quickly converts the movement into an insincere pat on the head: one can almost hear a muted ‘Flippin’ kids!’ – the catchphrase that defined Hancock’s early radio success. At another point he asks a customer what kind of jumper she requires. Her answer is enough to send Howard off into the patriotic travesty of a bargain-basement Richard II: ‘A Fair Isle – this fair isle – this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this Eden, demi-paradise, this fortress built by nature for herself against infection and the hand of war, this happy breed of men, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea …’ and so on until the drapery department curtains come crashing around his head. Later Hancock would make his own comic capital out of the speech. There is no evidence that he saw the film, although it is exceedingly unlikely that he did not. But, crucially, any similarity is in the attitude.

On one of Howard’s visits to his parents’ hotel, Tony plucked up the courage to tell the great star he was keen to go on the stage: ‘He told me I would be crazy if I did. “Keep away from it, lad,” he said. “I wouldn’t let a dog of mine go into show business!” Then a pause, and Sydney said in his wonderful Yorkshire way, “But if you do get into it, let me tell you one or two things.” And he took me into a corner and showed me all sorts of tricks of timing and hand movements.’ It may have been the most important ‘lesson’ of his life. They met on at least one other occasion. When Tony was about ten years old the Hancocks and the Howards found themselves holidaying by chance at the same hotel in the South of France. The comedian and his wife made a fuss of the young Hancock, incongruously cocooned in his prep-school uniform as the Riviera sun streamed down. One day Sydney spotted a loose thread on the Eton jacket. He went to remove the offending strand. As he pulled it away, it just kept coming. The other end, far away, was on a spool secretly threaded through from Tony’s pocket. Hancock may well have picked up the gag from Chaplin’s City Lights, a film that had a life-long impact upon him, although its origins are probably enshrined in the annals of the practical joke. ‘You’ll go far, my son,’ said the astonished comedian with a gleam of surprise in his eye.

One mealtime during this holiday Tony was served a whole fish, complete from head to scaly tail. According to his mother he took one look at the lifeless eyes of the forlorn creature staring up from his plate and declared, ‘I’ll stick to good old bread and fromage, thank you.’ It is good to know that his father was able to witness his son’s slowly emerging comic style. To Tony, his father shared something of the vitality and example of his famous friends and provided that last zing of incentive for him to pursue his chosen path. Ultimately he needed no other justification. When he was nine, his dad pulled strings to secure him a film test, although nothing came of it. Years later in his dressing room at the Adelphi Theatre he read out the letter of invitation to appear in the 1952 Royal Variety Performance to their mutual friend, George Fairweather. He burst into tears as he explained, ‘If only Dad could have been here.’ ‘He will be,’ assured Fairweather. ‘I wish I could be as sure,’ added Tony, extracting a promise that George would attend the gala evening in his father’s place.

To her credit his mother ensured that after his father’s death laughter continued to ring though the rooms of the family apartment at Durlston Court Hotel. The extent of the family’s capacity for letting its hair down has been conveyed in her memoir by Joan Le Mesurier, with Lily at the forefront of the hilarity: ‘When the family was all together they were always laughing. His brother Roger would try to climb up the wall. Tony would roll on his back and wave his legs in the air, and Colin would kneel on all fours, banging his fists on the ground, all of them fighting for breath.’ Roger recalls the roles somewhat reversed: ‘Tony literally climbed up the wall if he was hysterical, and we were hysterical a lot of the time.’ It extended into young adulthood when the brothers would send their impromptu parody of the popular panel game Twenty Questions spiralling into Rabelaisian heights – or depths. ‘What is mineral with an animal connection?’ ‘Could it be the spade up the dromedary’s arse?’ responded Tony with Isobel Barnett primness. According to his brother, he would become literally helpless with laughter at such sessions. A photograph survives from an earlier time showing Tony in the company of his mother, stepfather and two brothers. He is mugging self-assuredly at the camera without a care in the world.

In time he came to translate his conventional boyhood fantasies into his first comic material. As a very young boy he nursed an ambition to become the Wyatt Earp of a make-believe town he referred to as Toenail City. The upper precincts of the Railway Hotel rattled to the ricochet of toy-town gunfire. One Christmas he received the gift of a sheriff’s outfit from his parents. Later he complained about the pains in his legs. His mother admitted that only then did they discover that he had strained the muscles from walking around all day bow-legged. Roger recalls that with time he gave the fantasy the comic treatment in an early recitation entitled ‘The Sheriff of Toenail City’.

I’ve come here to give you a story

Of the rip-roaring wild woolly west,

Where the Indians chew nails and drink liquor

While the men grow sweet peas on their chest.

In the township of Toenail City

Lived the Sheriff, a man of good class,

But he drank like a fish did the Sheriff,

Till his breath burned a hole through the glass.

But the pride of his life was his moustache –

It was famous as Niagara Falls

And his missus when washing on Fridays

Used the moustache to hang out the smalls.

His moustache was so long and whippy

People spoke of it under their breath

And the old-timers said that the Sheriff once sneezed

And it practically flogged him to death.

But whenever the Sheriff was shaving,

You could see him all covered in gore.

His whiskers just blunted the razor,

So he hammered them back in his jaw.

’Twas with Hortense, the bartender’s daughter

That he finally found his romance

Till one day she sat down beside him

She got one of his spurs in the pants.

She walloped him hard in the pants,

Her temper was starting to foment,

But the Sheriff’s false teeth just flew out with a pop

And bit her on the spur of the moment.

Then Hortense turned round on the Sheriff

And kicked him real hard on the jaw

And hearing the cowboys applauding