Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing: The Definitive Biography of a Comedy Legend

In an interview with Ken Dodd, the psychiatrist Anthony Clare professed: ‘There is about a lot of comedy a regression. It is a negative word, a return to childhood. In fact it’s the endorsement of childhood values, of fun, of anarchy, of colour in a grey and dull world.’ The comment pinpoints the spirit of play that characterizes Dodd’s humour; it applies equally to Cooper. The world he came to create on stage can be seen as a metaphor for what his childhood became with its desperate frustration to get his magic right, and when he could not engage an audience by baffling them, at least to leave them laughing. Roy Storer’s adopted sister, Joan, recalls how the kids would gather in a circle around Tommy in the school playground to witness an impromptu magic show. As his confidence increased he staged more formal displays for a halfpenny admission in the shed in the garden of ‘Devonia’. Even then, according to Joan, he took the practice of his magic seriously. He certainly had picked up on his mother’s philosophy that a service, a commodity became more important if you had to pay for it. More importantly he discovered that magic provided his ticket to a form of social acceptance: he admitted in later life that it was only when he started to do conjuring tricks that he found the other kids took any notice of him.

The days when parcels arrived from Holborn were red letter ones, although Peter North recalls, ‘he’d always rush to perform the tricks before he had mastered them, like the one with the egg cup with a lid and the ball inside. People would laugh at him then. But he never seemed to mind. He just laughed it off.’ Peter intimates that the teenage Tommy might not have been bright enough to appreciate what was really happening here. Like the scarecrow on the road to Oz, he was a nonstarter academically: ‘He used to sit next to me in class and copy my answers in maths. I had no idea he was looking over my shoulder. But in addition to the answers you had to show the stages that brought you to your conclusion. Tommy always had the bottom line correct, but merely inked in the intermediate figures at random. He just gave himself away! And, of course, whenever I was wrong, Tommy was wrong. The teacher only had to see the exercise books side by side.’ The same teacher used to give his hair a disciplinary tweak a hundred times more than anybody else. Maybe unwittingly she set the style for the protruding tufts that later on added definition to the fez.

By way of compensation for his intellectual shortcomings he went out of his way to promote himself as the high panjandrum of practical jokes, all the while endorsing the old Will Rogers adage, ‘Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.’ Some were jokes you could order through the mail, like the giant spring snakes that jumped out of jam jars (a mainstay of his act for years to come); the noisy metal plates that sounded like a window shattering whenever they were dropped (Tommy was never without these in his back trousers pocket); the sneezing powder that made everyone in the class sneeze but you (if you blew it in the right direction); and the mysterious imitation ink blot left on desk or windowsill for someone to report to teacher (‘Who’s upset the inkwell? It must be Cooper!’). Other gags needed more careful stage-managing. He would prevail upon Mrs Knight, the owner of the local sweetshop to give him any spare imitation chocolate bars used for window display purposes. To one of these he would attach a long length of invisible thread – magician’s parlance for a fine, black filament scarcely visible to the naked eye – and place it in a prominent position in the school playground. Keeping hold of the other end he would hide behind the toilet building and patiently wait for the first person to discover the chocolate, at which point he would jerk the thread away to leave his school colleague as perplexed as Tantalus. By now Tommy would be running away, laughing his head off, just as the other kids would guffaw at him whenever he set off down the road on his bicycle, his big pelican feet spread out like flippers. He could never ride in a straight line, since his knees were constantly clashing against the handlebars.

His surreal sense of humour extended out of the school arena into the surrounding environs. Roy Storer can clearly recall Tommy riding his bike down nearby Hampton Lane holding a newspaper in both hands and appearing to read it at the same time. This appeared to be quite a feat given the rough surface of the road and the fact that not surprisingly the saddle was adjusted to its highest point. Roy recalls his disappointment when he learned that he managed the feat by virtue of two holes cut in the newspaper to give him an approximate view of where he was travelling. Roy’s mother kept the grocery shop in the Lane, half a mile from where Tommy lived. She has known him to enter with a huge suitcase wearing a turban and long silk dressing gown, blacked up like a renegade from a minstrel show: ‘He kept repeating “Veree cheep, veree cheep” until my mother had to insist, “I don’t want anything today Tommy,” and he would go on his way.’

So much of it came down to his size. When Spike Milligan made the comment that when God made Cooper he got it wrong, he was not far from the truth. Size and shape have long been accepted as key components in a comedian’s armoury and Tommy was no exception, his individual body parts contributing to the living cartoon his outward appearance presented from an early age. In later life he would joke that he could palm an ostrich. The outsize hands made his misplaced dexterity all the funnier, the feet his walking – not to mention his cycling – all the more peculiar. He once admitted to his daughter, Vicky, an amazingly easy tendency to blush when he was a boy, recalling how when still at school his mother would take him into a shoe shop and ask for a size thirteen. All the shop girls would snigger at the thought of someone so young endowed with feet so enormous. That he was still in short trousers at the time didn’t help matters. In later life he could still feel the heat suffusing his cheeks. When Vicky asked how he dealt with the situation, he replied that he developed a tendency to turn away from it either facially or, if possible, with his whole body, a form of psychological ducking and diving. To this day Vicky wonders whether this motor response survived in some degree in her father’s constant motion on stage, first this way, then that, as he went from table to table surveying which prop to display next in his comedy of indecision.

In January 1935 Tommy moved from Fawley Junior to the new Hardley Secondary School two miles away. He completed his education only a couple of months later, leaving school at fourteen to take up an apprenticeship at the British Power Boat Company in nearby Hythe, the principal employer in the area, where for a short while his father undertook menial work in the saw mill. According to Peter North, who was close behind in entering the company, Tommy was among the ten per cent of the new intake whose parents subsidized the arrangement by paying a premium for their son to be taken on, a practice common among moneyed families who wanted their boys to have a trade: ‘An awful lot of premium apprentices had double-barrelled names.’ Presumably his mother’s financial acumen and family resources secured for him the privilege. His mum and dad would certainly have perceived it as the best they could do for Tommy amid the limited work opportunities in the area. Not that the small town was anything but prosperous. In 1936, of the approximate working population of 1,800 in Hythe and Fawley combined, only sixty-four were unemployed. When compared with the average northern industrial town that had up to seventy per cent of its workforce idle at this time, the figure was impressive.

The agreement would have been for seven years and according to Derek Humby, who joined as an apprentice at the same time as Tommy, the starting pay was a staggering two and a half pence an hour in old money, or ten shillings for a forty-eight hour week, rising by two shillings per week for the term of the apprenticeship. Fully qualified men were earning half-a-crown or two shillings and sixpence as the hourly rate. The firm specialized in producing torpedo boats and similar vessels and its motto – ‘Tradition, Enterprise, Craftsmanship’ – was known for miles around. At about the time Tommy joined, a new scheme was brought in based on the so-called ‘Three Principles’ of good time-keeping, good discipline, and progress in craftsmanship. According to Bill ‘Hoppy’ Wilson, who set up the scheme, apprentices were awarded ten points on attaining each principle: ‘For ten points they were given a voucher to purchase a tool for their trade free of charge. Higher points were given a voucher of greater value. These were granted every three months and by the end of the apprenticeship they had a complete tool box.’ Initially three months at a time were spent in each department, the chromium plating division, the carpentry shed, the coppersmith’s shop, the electrics area, and so on. There is no record that Tommy acquired even a single screwdriver!

Tommy and Derek saved up their pennies to enable them to take the ferry into Southampton every Saturday. They would invariably target Canal Walk – notoriously known as ‘The Ditches’ – in the rough part of the old town where ‘Tommy White’s’ served the best faggots and peas around. They then made their way to Chiari’s café and ice-cream parlour across the street. In addition Chiari was a landscape painter who incorporated a gallery into his establishment, as well as an amateur magician. He fascinated Tommy with the tricks he knew and taught him several, including the one where you wrap a marked matchstick inside a handkerchief, ask someone to break it through the cloth, and then produce it whole again. When they couldn’t afford the price of a cup of tea, Tommy would be allowed to perform for the patrons in lieu of payment. On one occasion Chiari promised Cooper he would teach him the secret of the Indian Rope Trick. The tuition never materialized, but its promise ensured Tommy’s constant return. On those Saturdays when Derek was unable to accompany him, he would head straight for Chiari’s. The following Monday he would always confront his friend with a cheery, ‘I’ve got a good one to show you today.’

On the work front Tommy’s concentration did not hold up for long. Every new trick in his pocket was an excuse to disrupt work in the boatyard as his mates gathered around to be amused and amazed. The constant downing of tools intimated that he must even then have had a quality that held the attention of observers, even if his bosses were less than tolerant. Humby recalls the occasion he caused an official stoppage of work. He and Tommy were officially designated tea boys with responsibility for readying the tea for the workmen during their dinner breaks, a task for which they received an additional three old pence a week. One day the formidable canteen lady, Mrs Youren, was pouring the tea for them when Tommy took three of her cups and proceeded to show Derek his version of the centuries-old trick with the cups and the balls. She was not amused and threatened to stop pouring if he didn’t stop messing around. It all sounds like a storm in one of her teacups, but Tommy persisted, the men veered from cheering to jeering, and it was hard to know who was on whose side. In the end the foreman had to be called to reprimand him before the normal day’s work could proceed.

It was in that very canteen – little more than a wooden shack – where one of the most widely reported incidents of his career took place, marking as it did a shift of allegiance from performing serious magic to burlesque conjuring. It was Christmas and the management had insisted Cooper should rise to the occasion by performing in a more organized way. Tommy described the occurrence many times over the years. Stage fright had turned his body to jelly, his throat to sandpaper. His props and his table went flying in all directions. The egg that should have disappeared was left dangling on elastic from his sleeve. The big trick where the milk was supposed to stay suspended in its upturned bottle failed to work. As he remembered it, ‘The stage was swimming with milk. I dropped my wand. I did everything wrong. But the audience loved it. The more I panicked and made a mess of everything, the more they laughed. I came off and cried, but five minutes later I could still hear the sound of the laughter in my ears and was thinking maybe there’s a living to be made here. When I joined the forces I began to do some shows in the NAAFI and started to do tricks that all went wrong.’

Tommy never lost his passion for straight magic and once established as a star relished those moments when he could turn the tables on his audience by sneaking in an example of genuine skill and, to his apparent surprise, a miracle would result. We can never be sure how black and white things appeared to him that day back in the British Power Boat canteen, but the escapade can certainly be pinpointed as the occasion when he first entertained the idea of an act based on incompetence, even if at that stage he could have had little inkling of where he would get to perform it. From that point on his ineptitude was deliberate. His friend and fellow magician, Val Andrews, has commented, ‘From the very start of his performing career Tommy worked extremely hard to ensure that everything he touched would break, fall over, refuse to work, or by arranged accident reveal its secret. Years of hard work and experience went into honing the perfect comic article.’ At other times, as the mood of the interview took him, Tommy would shift the scene of the Hythe catastrophe to a service concert in Egypt or a postwar audition in a London nightclub. However, there can be little doubt that his comic agenda was set that Christmas lunchtime. Derek Humby had been there to witness the fiasco. Nor was he the first comedian to be switched on to his trade in this way. As Eric Sykes has observed: ‘What people fail to realize is that you don’t decide to be a comic; the audience decides that you are a comic.’ Juggler W. C. Fields, fiddler Jack Benny, aspirant thespian Frankie Howerd, frustrated pianist Les Dawson all accidentally discovered a talent for laughter when their original talents failed to make the grade.

The variety theatres of Southampton provided Tommy with his first appreciation of magic as performed before a proper audience on a large stage. The great illusionists of the day passed through the stage doors of the Hippodrome, the Palace, and the Grand. Horace Goldin, Chris Charlton, The Great Carmo, and Murray the Escapologist were all major names who in the late Thirties visited the town that proudly billed itself as ‘The Gateway to the Empire’. One particular performer attracted Tommy’s attention, as he later confided to ‘Wizard’ Edward Beal, a kindly small-time local entertainer who found time to run a bookshop next door to the business Tommy’s family ran in Southampton in the late Forties. In his book Particular Pleasures, which contains an appreciation of Cooper, J. B. Priestley queried, ‘I wonder if he is old enough to have seen, even as a young boy, the wildly original act of the American, Frank Van Hoven.’ Van Hoven, billed as ‘The American Dippy Mad Magician’ and one of the first of the true burlesque conjuring acts, died in 1929. While Tommy did not see the original, he did see the man who copied his act, namely Artemus. The week of 20 March 1939 saw the Southampton Palace Theatre featuring a bill headed by ‘Artemus and his Gang – Juggling with Water, Eggs, and Ice.’

Van Hoven’s other billing had been ‘The Man Who Made Ice Famous’, placing due emphasis on his main prop, namely a huge block of ice, the slippery peregrinations of which kept audiences in uproar as it slithered across the boards, causing freezing havoc among the three stooges enlisted to hold it and to keep it in a state of perpetual motion with the table and the goldfish bowl slopping full of water that they were supposed to hang on to at the same time. A borrowed handkerchief also came into it somewhere: only when the block of ice was in fragments, the bowl emptied of its contents, the table smashed to smithereens and the audience reduced to hysteria did Van Hoven get a chance to explain that he had been trying to pass it into the ice. Those who saw both considered Artemus mediocre in comparison with the original, but those who came to him fresh would rave enthusiastically. He did vary the routine, substituting the production of real eggs from a hat in lieu of the handkerchief business. The accidental omelette that materialized as eggs smashed on the wet and icy stage made the surface even more hilariously hazardous. In later years, as we shall discover, Tommy made great play of a burlesque magician sketch in which someone else played the wizard and he played a stooge from the audience. Eggs were the operative prop on this occasion. Tommy was too practical to have to bother about ice and goldfish bowls. But, as he reminisced to Ted Beal about the act, there was no doubt that Artemus had impressed him. Assuming he saw him in March 1939 and not before, the experience postdates the Hythe canteen episode, but must have further heightened his perception of the burlesque conjuror in entertainment terms. Ted also confided in Tommy his special philosophy: ‘The trouble with so many magicians is that they are purveyors of puzzles without the humour’; but by the late Forties, Tommy had already come to that conclusion for himself.

Meanwhile he was getting nowhere fast at the Power Boat Company. He was totally unsuitable for the task – ‘I can’t even knock a nail in straight!’ – but they couldn’t give him the sack because the premium had been paid: ‘The course I was on was one you had to pay for, so I got off with a warning and being sent home.’ Afraid to tell his parents, he spent his time cycling to nearby towns and villages looking for odd jobs. It is hard to think that the situation could have continued for seven years, but world events intervened. As war clouds darkened and Chamberlain’s umbrella looked insufficient protection against the storm, a combination of patriotism and self-esteem found Cooper volunteering for the services. There is no way the Company could stand in his way and besides his height made him a natural for the Guards. His mother had the shock of her life when one day he arrived on the doorstep of ‘Devonia’ in uniform. That the Company could in fact tolerate his antics no longer was bypassed in the elation of the moment. And as Peter North says, ‘He wouldn’t have lasted there during the war. You had to tow the line. The work was classified as a restricted occupation and there was no mucking about then.’ In the circumstances, it is amazing that he did manage to accept the discipline of the army as he did.

When war was declared, Southampton became one of the major targets of the Blitz. His parents made frequent visits back to Devon and Caerphilly to stay out of harm’s way with family and friends. When peace arrived they appear to have lost their appetite for the semi-rural community. They moved from ‘Devonia’ around the beginning of 1948, ploughing all their resources into a shop at 124 Shirley Road, a major thoroughfare out of the centre of Southampton to the North West in the Romsey direction. Today the premises accommodate ‘Johnny’s Fish and Chips’ emporium. The nearby Rotrax café and cycle store are no more, while the tattoo parlour a few doors down has survived all trends. It has been said that Tommy set his parents up in the shop, but this is not the case, since they were up and running with at first a fresh fish business long before he achieved lasting success. The fish business did not prosper. Zena Cooper recalls how on a Saturday her father-in-law would sell the fish left over at the end of the week for next to nothing. In the end the neighbourhood got wise and bought nothing earlier in the week. Gertrude had to put her foot down and any fish not sold at full price by the end of Saturday she buried in their little postage stamp of a garden. Obviously a lady of amazing industry, she once again kept the family buoyant financially by harking back to her dressmaking skills. Within a short time she converted the shop into a haberdashery to act as a front for them, with alterations and repairs a profitable sideline.

In these final years of their lives the surviving memories of those who knew them give us further insight into the characters and eccentricities of his parents. Members of Gertrude’s family recall that to deter shoplifters she used to tie all the stock together with some of her son’s invisible thread, so that if someone sneaked something away when she wasn’t looking, all the rest would come with it. Mrs Spacagna, who had a hairdressing business in the vicinity, remembers her as a very private person, but a brisk business woman, always distinctive on her own shopping round from the long black cloak she wore. I have a memory too. As a child brought up in Southampton’s Shirley district in the Fifties, no sooner had I heard that the mother of my television hero had a shop less than a mile from where I lived than nothing could hold me back from making the pilgrimage to seek her out for myself. I could not summon the courage to enter, but remember peering through the window past the displays of knitting needles, zip fasteners, ribbon, braid, and buttons galore to spy sitting behind the counter what could have been a smaller version of Tommy Cooper in drag. It all looked dusty and higgledy-piggledy. I could have been peering into a pantomime set. I was later told she was only too happy for people to go in to talk to her about her son, of whom she was rightly proud. Photographs of his career festooned the walls, and albums would be brought from the back room at the merest beckoning. I regret missing the opportunity.

Michael Legg, who worked nearby, was called into the shop one day and told by Mrs Cooper that ‘Dad’ wanted to speak to him. He was shown into the living quarters at the back and Mr Cooper asked if he would call in each day on his lunch break to take a betting slip down to the betting shop in nearby Park Road: ‘I always remember he had wads of notes in his waistcoat, trousers and shirt, as he did not believe in banks.’ Their nephew, Bernard Diggins remembers a narrow passage shut off from the road running down the side of the shop: ‘He grew his own tobacco and had strung up a line on the wall on which he was hanging the large tobacco leaves to dry.’ Thomas died on 2 December 1963, his death certificate listing his occupation as ‘night watchman (retired)’. This reminded his daughter-in-law that he did spend a spell at the nearby Atherley cinema, and may even have been a projectionist there. It would help to explain the notes sprouting out of his pockets, while the tobacco leaves provided their own poignant footnote to his death, which, as we have seen, was due to bronchial troubles.

Tommy’s mother survived her husband by over twenty years. By the early Seventies the dressmaking had become too much for her and she shifted the emphasis of her stock to costume jewellery, although to anyone looking inside it was still the same ramshackle repository it had always been. According to neighbour Marian Rashleigh, necklaces and brooches were now hung in the windows ‘like net curtains, but I don’t remember them ever being cleaned or changed for more modern pieces. I can’t remember when the shop was vacated, but by then cobwebs adorned the necklaces.’ In fact it was vacated twice. When Gertrude became seriously ill in her mid-eighties Zena began to clear the stock. Both Tommy and David had offered their mother a home, but she valued her independence and they found themselves putting it all back to give her something to do! As her niece, Betty says, ‘She was still in the shop at 88 years. It was time she closed up. But she was an obstinate old woman.’ She died of a heart attack in the Royal South Hants Hospital on 13 February 1984 two weeks before reaching her ninety-first birthday and just two months before her elder son.

According to his daughter, Tommy’s relationship with his parents was fragile. His father complained that he never visited his Mum as much as he should, and when he did go there always seemed to be a blazing row because they’d argue about why he didn’t go more often. Their worlds had not unnaturally drifted apart. They had no proper grasp of the erratic working hours and travelling that show business entailed. However, while the Shirley haberdashery was an unlikely environment in which to picture Tommy, another local resident, Sonia Blandford has an affectionate memory of him there:

One day I was sent after school to collect a present that had been ordered as a gift for my Auntie. I was surprised to see

‘Closed’ on the door. I knew I was expected and found the nerve to bang on the door. It was opened by Tommy himself. You can imagine how overwhelmed I felt. While his mum found the item Tommy entertained me by producing lengths of material from my sleeve and eggs from my ear! Although he was a TV favourite of mine, I was terrified of him. He was a giant of a man and his overwhelming personality was too much for a small child such as myself to feel able to cope with comfortably. I think he sensed this and chatted to me about the animals I kept as pets and what I was doing at school until his mum rescued us both from the discomfort of the other. My memories of them both are very fond. He was very kind and although not comfortable with a small girl to entertain who was clearly scared of him found something to talk about that would reassure.

Tommy may well have been embarrassed himself, but whatever decisions he had made about his professional approach to magic in the works canteen, it is encouraging to know that twenty years later he could still empathize with the sense of wonder that magic pure and simple could arouse in a child. Indeed, throughout his life he stayed a kid at heart.

THREE (#uc4885778-0f4b-51d2-a7d1-827980508e0e)

‘Let Me See Your Dots’ (#uc4885778-0f4b-51d2-a7d1-827980508e0e)

The idea of Trooper Cooper resplendent in the plume and pomp of The Royal Horse Guards astride a charger with sword held to attention is a sublime comic image. But in later years he was always keen to downplay the impression: ‘I’ve done sentry duty in Whitehall many times. Khaki uniform though – nothing fancy.’ His basic training at Pirbright was interrupted by the outbreak of war and Tommy found himself learning to ride a horse sooner than he expected. Riding army fashion – that is riding one horse, while leading two others – in Rotten Row at 6.30 in the morning became another established part of his early routine. With his fast gained reputation as ‘The life and soul of the NAAFI’, it is hard not to imagine him trotting down the Mall, boots burnished and spurs glinting, without his mind wandering to the latest gags and gimmicks to be shopped from the magic supply depots, the practical joke with which he could bring uproar to the barracks that evening.

Tommy’s height made him a natural for the Blues. He joined as a private and took seven years to achieve the rank of sergeant, by which time the fighting was over. He always said that what he liked best about the early years was the boxing. There were 100 guards in his unit and he stood out among them. He claimed never to have won any championship, contrary to reports that he did win a heavyweight title, sufficient to be offered a contract to turn professional at a later date. However, the sport did teach him how to look after himself, giving the lie to his later claim that he spent so much time on canvas that he was going to change his name to Rembrandt. His nose was broken, but not in the ring, rather when he slipped alongside an army swimming pool. In later years his son, Thomas, reminisced about his dad’s prowess in this area: ‘Everyone thought of him as a big softie who would not hurt a fly. In fact he was capable of laying you out with one punch and would not hesitate to do so if he thought someone had asked for it. He hated trouble, but I remember one time in a pub in Golders Green when three yobbos were giving the landlord a bad time. One broke a bottle over the counter and went to stick it in the landlord’s face. And dad, who had been standing at the bar minding his own business, just turned round and flattened the yobbo with a right-hander on the chin. The other two looked on in amazement and scarpered.’

A less valuable legacy in civilian life was his proficiency on horseback, although he always retained a love for horses. Zena Cooper recalls that when Tommy returned from the war he would go riding with his brother, David, in the New Forest and show off by emulating feats better associated with the Cossack riders, passing under the belly of the mount and up again the other side while at a gallop, even riding backwards. Not that he would have won any regimental trophies in this area. He made a veritable party piece out of the detail of one catastrophe: ‘I remember one Christmas, at a full-dress ceremonial parade, there were one hundred of us neatly lined up by the sides of our horses. Now, as a recruit I didn’t know this, but when you get on a horse, when you put the girth around the horse, the horse blows himself out because he doesn’t want to be tight. So you’ve got to wait. Well, I didn’t know this, and he looks at you. He’s a little bit suspicious, you know what I mean? Then all of a sudden you have to go quick and he goes “Ooh!” But I didn’t know this, so as a recruit I just went like that with the girth and he went out with his stomach and I thought I was tight. So the order came, “Prepare to mount” and I put my foot in the stirrup and they said “Mount” and the saddle went underneath. Ninety-nine of us rose as one man and I’m in a heap on the ground.’ The look of dismay on his big, baffled face as he gathered himself up from the floor would have been worth the price of admission.

His regimental misadventures could fill a book or certainly an episode of one of those forces comedies that, in the Fifties, Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko brought to a comic zenith worthy of Cooper himself. In the British theatre of service comedy it is easy to picture William Hartnell as the sadistic sergeant going the rounds to prod Cooper and his cohorts out of their slumbers for roll-call at four o’clock in the morning. As Tommy remembered it, “‘Good morning.” “Good morning.” “Good morning.” And he had a bayonet in his hand!’ Outside it was pitch black and the corporal used to emerge with a huge hurricane lamp. ‘Good morning, men,’ he’d shout. ‘Good morning, lamp,’ Cooper would answer back. It was a fair response. They were too blinded by it to see him. Michael Medwin or Harry Fowler would have been spot-on casting for the barrack room lawyer who led the protest when the sergeant insisted on a rifle inspection no less than ten minutes after they had come back from a route march and flopped exhausted onto their beds. His departure was the cue for said barrack room lawyer to lay down their rights: ‘I’m not going to clean mine at all. The King’s rules and regulations say we’re entitled to half an hour’s rest. It says so – under section twenty-nine, subsection six.’ ‘I listened to him, I did,’ said Tommy, ‘I believed him. Then the sergeant came in. He said, “Right, get your rifles ready.”’ Cooper stepped forward and stood up to him through clenched teeth, ‘We’re not cleaning them.’ The sergeant was taken aback. ‘We’re not cleaning them, are we fellows? Are we fellows?’ As his voice became more questioning, the realization dawned that the rest of the troop behind him were working away like the clappers. It is unlikely that any member of the British comedy acting establishment could have done justice to the crestfallen vulnerability of our hero at a moment like this.

One incident in Cooper’s military career has practically assumed the status of an urban myth, although on separate occasions Tommy assured both Barry Cryer and myself that it did take place and that it happened to him. He was lucky not to be court-martialled. One morning in the early hours he was on sentry duty and dozed off standing up by the side of the sentry box. Within seconds the sergeant came round the corner with the orderly officer: ‘And all of a sudden I open my eyes just a little bit and I can see them standing there. So I’ve got to think of something now or otherwise I’m going to end up inside. So I wait for a second and I’m standing there and I open my eyes fully and I say, “Amen!”’ Assuming they noticed at all, it did the trick and nothing was said. Many years later the episode became the basis of a regular routine in his stage act, Tommy playing his dozy self and the fierce sergeant major in mimed counterpoint amid a flurry of ‘not like that’s’ and ‘like that’s’. But there was no denying the potential seriousness of the situation: ‘I fell asleep. I did. That’s a crime, isn’t it? You could go to the Tower for that.’

The comic capital he made out of the incident perhaps compensated for the downside of a life spent constantly standing to attention and stamping on parade. He put many of his later health problems – varicose veins, phlebitis, thrombosis in the leg, ulcers too – down to his guardsman’s duties. In fact, he could have had treatment for the veins while he was in the services. He told his friend, Bobby Bernard of the occasion he went into the surgery to see the medical officer about the problem. Another soldier was standing there in his shorts. He turned to Tommy and said, ‘Look at mine. They’re getting better.’ According to Tommy, ‘His veins were worse than mine.’ ‘If that’s better, I’m going,’ shouted the cowardly conjuror.

In an article in the Lancashire EveningPost in May 1974, his fellow trooper Ben Fisher provided a vivid recollection of Cooper the serviceman. No sooner had Ben joined the Blues in 1943 than he found himself sharing a tent with Tommy. Come morning, it quickly became apparent that his colleague enjoyed special privileges: ‘While all around echoed to the whacking of the duty Corporal of Horse’s cane on tent walls, we were left in peace, for this, as I was soon to learn, was “Cooper’s Tent” and as such apparently beyond the pale of military discipline.’ As their friendship grew, Fisher discovered that Tommy had developed a disarming flair for avoiding the more onerous military duties. Indeed, he can never actually recall Tommy being ‘on duty’, but there was no question that the most familiar name in the camp was ‘Cooper’: ‘It was usually shouted at the top of his voice by our Corporal Major. On hearing the call Tommy would emerge from some nook or cranny with the air of a man interrupted during some urgent assignment, and wanting nothing more than to get back to it.’ Fisher stressed that he never emerged empty-handed. There was always a bucket, a brush or some utensil or other dangling from his hand as proof of his unstinted industry.

In off-duty hours he would give impromptu concerts in front of the tent, not only performing his crazy conjuring, but also comedy sketches: ‘Our favourites were “The Death of Robin Hood” and one about the Home Guard.’ In the latter, with possible echoes of his Uncle Jimmy, he improvised a one-man Dad’s Army. Arifle and tin hat with the lining removed so that it fell around his ears were the only props he required to pantomime his way through a series of disastrous drill movements. For the Robin Hood scene he would make a dramatic entrance from the woods around the camp, pretending to be mortally wounded with an arrow clutched to his chest. Staggering to the front of his tent, he would summon Little John to help him find a suitable burial place. Tommy would then switch to the other character. It is hard now to imagine him playing Little John as camp as he then did, a prissy individual, ‘fussy about keeping the camp tidy, making all sorts of excuses about why this or that spot wouldn’tdo’. After much pleading from the folk hero, the routine ended with Robin stumbling back to the trees in disgust, shouting the payoff line, ‘All right … all right … but it’s the last time I’ll ask you to do anything for me!’

Within a short time Tommy was sent overseas and the war became a reality. His section of the Blues was deployed to the western desert to a camp near Suez as a reconnaissance unit working with armoured cars and small tanks: ‘We used to go out first, see the enemy and then come back – cos we were cowards!’ He did not take kindly to having to sleep in a hammock – back home the army beds had been adjustable – but did develop a passion for hot climates that would inform his holiday habits for the rest of his life. He eventually received a gunshot wound in his right arm and ended up in Army Welfare. Tommy lost his A-1 rating, but his talents as an entertainer had not escaped the authorities. He was given the opportunity of auditioning – successfully – in Cairo for a travelling army concert party. In spite of the painful hard slog of his guardsman’s routine and a minor injury into the bargain, it is tempting to suggest that only now did his service career become serious. He had at last found a proper, albeit frequently makeshift stage for his talents. He was not the only member of his generation of funny men to develop his skills entertaining his comrades in this manner. The system also provided greater scope for individuals who would not otherwise have visited a theatre to see an act like his, although with the variety theatres in decline it was too much to be hoped that they would cultivate the habit on a regular basis once Civvy Street reclaimed them.

Tommy was now in his element, although there were those in this newly acquired audience who might have had second thoughts. In his exhaustive study of service entertainment, Fighting for a Laugh, Richard Fawkes reported the recollections of the actor John Arnatt, under whose jurisdiction Cooper the trouper at one point found himself in Cairo: ‘In one of John’s shows was an unknown conjuror making a virtue of the fact that his tricks didn’t always work … he had not done anything before … certainly not as a professional.’ According to Arnatt, ‘He was a bastard to be with as an officer because he delighted in getting you up on the stage to help him out and then he would take the mickey out of you something terrible. He had the entire audience on his side and if you weren’t careful you came out of it looking none too dignified.’ Interestingly in later years Tommy almost entirely dispensed with audience participation on stage and left the mickey taking – always a dubious form of pastime when members of the public are involved – to others. For the time being the rough and ready forces environment was the perfect setting for such spectator sport.

He had the intuitive sense to deliver what the troops required, making great play of the trick in which some of the cards in the packet held by the officer on one side of the stage magically found their way into the packet held by the officer on the other, becoming distracted along the way as he kept breathing on their pips and shining them all the while. The crowd roared. In later years he never lost his disrespect for military authority. The magician and writer, Val Andrews recalls seeing him lose his temper with people who insisted on using their service rank outside the military environment: ‘Colonel this! Major that! Tell everyone you’ve just met Sergeant Cooper!’ Back at base, echoing his childhood, he remained paradoxically a man isolated in his own world, immune to the popularity his extrovert performing talent should have won him with the rank and file. His colleague, Jack Chambers is on record that Cooper remained a man it was hard to get to know: ‘We’d be sitting together after the show – drinking cups of tea out of sawn down beer bottles – and he didn’t join in. He never had a mate or anything like that.’ All his personality was now diverted into his act. Had there been other magicians in the unit, I am sure he would have found a bosom pal for life.

When the fighting drew to a close he joined the Combined Services Entertainment Unit attached to the War Office giving shows for the troops left scattered throughout the Middle East. With a restless conscript army, morale boosting was as essential at a time of keeping the peace as it had ever been while the greater distraction of fighting was taking place. It was now that Tommy decided he wanted to dedicate his life to being an entertainer. It was also in Cairo that the performance took place that must come close to the one in the Hythe canteen for qualifying as the most defining of his career. As Jack Chambers has explained, it was a cardinal offence for a soldier to be improperly dressed, even down to not wearing your cap: ‘So if you can imagine one thousand troops sitting there and onto this stage comes a chap wearing very scruffy shorts and socks down to his boots – well, it was a masterly stroke and he just stood there with this gormless grin on his face and then he’d do the laugh.’ To add to the anarchy he wore a pith helmet, a cloak, and had the word ‘hair’ written across his chest. One night at the YMCA at RAF Heliopolis he forgot the pith helmet and at the expense of cliché the rest is history.

Tommy told the story a zillion times of how this night he mislaid the helmet and happened to pinch the fez from the head of a passing waiter. It is unlikely that the move was premeditated and it paid instant dividends, adding even further inches to his height. In the company of the Guards he would have become less self-conscious about his size anyhow. As he stood there, this gangling giant of good humour, he had no idea that before long his new headwear would, as a badge of recognition, rival the bowler and trilby to which comics as diverse as Chaplin, George Robey, Max Miller and Tommy Trinder held allegiance. In addition, Arthur Askey had his forage cap and Bud Flanagan his battered straw hat. Cooper would now forever be associated with the fez. The kind he wore was originally burgundy coloured and much taller. Some time around the Sixties Tommy came to favour a brighter, more compact version. In her years with Tommy, one of Mary Kay’s unofficial duties was to serve as Mistress of the Fez. In a letter to me she wrote: ‘The shorter ones were his favourites and the colour of the early ones was too dark. I must have made a dozen nice bright fezzes over the years, but they weren’t easy to make and if you notice some are taller on one side than the other! I always secured the tassel into the top of the fez so that it didn’t fling about when he bent down. Also the felt had to be a nice, pinky red.’

Different versions of how it all came about have been recorded. In some early interviews he let slip that he got the idea when he was in Port Said: ‘I bought one for ten piastres – about two bob then – and when I came home and needed a new one I had to pay thirty-five shillings.’ Down the years more than a few reminiscing servicemen have claimed that they gave him theirs. None of this is necessarily untrue. He would eventually have bought his own and acquired others, while Port Said may have been the scene of his decision to run with the idea as a permanent fixture. What surprises so many is that he was far from the first magician to wear one, a detail of which he would have been well aware.

A conversation on this very theme at The Magic Circle one evening resulted in an impromptu competition to see who could come up with the most names to have beaten Cooper to the fez. In fact there was a time when it became an unofficial part of the uniform for every other small time magician and children’s party entertainer. There were also more than a few acts with fezzes prominent on the variety circuits of the Thirties and Forties, although Tommy would not necessarily have known of them all. Among those who could have given his fez a run for its money from those early days was Eddie Songest – ‘With a Couple of Tricks and Colossal Nerve’– who used to boast that his was ‘a trophy won in a competition in which he consumed twenty-five boxes of Turkish delight in the world record time of thirty-seven and five eighths of a second’. Tommy would certainly have been familiar with Sirdani, with his ‘Don’t be fright!’ catchphrase and a stage identity that was a strange hybrid of Arab and Jewish. He made a name for himself on radio during the war explaining simple magic tricks and puzzles as a regular feature on the programme, Navy Mixture; every publicity photo I have seen of him reveals the squat purple flowerpot hat. Len Gazeka from the Midlands had an unusual gimmick to go with his fez. He would enter with his magic carpet under his arm, which he then proceeded to unroll on stage. Whenever he stood on the rug the tricks worked; whenever he failed to do so he found himself in Cooper territory. Possibly predating them all was Ben Said who had played at Maskelyne’s as a comedy magician in the early Twenties. He had known better days as an illusionist in the grand manner, under the name of Amasis. In the files of Tommy’s manager, Miff Ferrie was a poignant letter from Said from the Fifties with a brochure attached asking for work. ‘There is only one Funjuror’, the publicity proclaims. Miff must have noted the fez in the photograph. Ali (of Ali and Yolanda), Alex Bowsher, Johnny Geddes, Chris Van Bern, Percy Press; all have their place in the roll call of fez honour.

As British magical stalwart, Pat Page has explained, ‘Everyone had a fez.’ By coincidence, at about the same time as Tommy came home from the war in 1947, the magician Roy Baker was starting to market his original version of the egg and bag trick in which a fez was substituted for the bag. It was named ‘Abdul’s Fez’ and hundreds must have been sold over magic shop counters down the years, but there is no record of Tommy ever performing it or adapting his own fez for the clever variation of one of his favourite tricks, although in due course he did rise to the comic possibilities the hat offered him. There was the time he took it off and white chocolate drops cascaded over his shoulders: ‘I’ve got terrible dandruff’; the occasion at a Royal Performance when he came on with a weather vane attached: ‘I’ve been struck by lightning!’

Conceivably it would be harder for a young performer to come out on stage wearing a fez now had Cooper and the others not done so. In our politically sensitive world, football fans travelling to Turkey in recent years have been asked to leave their Tommy Cooper impressions at home. Apparently Turks have regarded the fez as insulting since the wearing of such hats was banned by Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, in 1925. Bizarrely there was even one occasion in June 1967 when the organizer of a private function where Tommy was booked to appear requested that he leave his trademark headgear at home for fear of upsetting the largely Jewish clientele. Others have adopted a more practical attitude to it. Val Andrews told him early in his career that he should take the fez off at the end of his act: ‘People will think you’re bald and you have a great head of hair and this is an asset and when you reveal it, it’s a surprise.’ To Val’s delight, he always did.

The Middle East also provided a milestone in his personal life. It was there that he met Gwen. They first came together on a troopship travelling from Port Said to Alexandria, or maybe from Naples. Her accounts vary, but the romantic detail remained precise: ‘The very first time I saw him I didn’t speak to him. I had a shocking attack of flu and I was sitting in a deckchair all wrapped up in blankets and I saw this big man in battledress – he was a sergeant by now – standing against the ship’s rail with his back to the sea. The first thing I noticed was that the blue of the sea caught the blue of his eyes. He had the most magnificent physique I had ever seen. He was terrifically attractive in an ugly-attractive sort of way.’ When she asked someone who he was, she was told, ‘His name’s Tommy Cooper and he’s doing a show on board.’ Because of the flu, Gwen watched the performance from outside through a glass door. She couldn’t hear a word, but she saw enough to formulate an opinion: ‘I thought he was the funniest man I’d ever seen. This man’s got star talent, I told myself. One day he’ll be a big name.’ Upon arrival in Egypt Dove went her separate way to Cairo, not realizing that within days their paths would cross again. Gwen was a civilian entertainer attached to CSE and on Christmas Eve 1946 she found herself having to accompany Tommy on the piano at a concert in Alexandria: ‘I said to him, “Let me see your dots.” He didn’t know what I meant. I said “Your music.” He said, “Just play the first few bars of ‘The Sheik of Araby’.”’

On their way back in the army bus he sat next to her. ‘Can I put my head on your shoulder?’ he asked. ‘Certainly not,’ she declared. The relationship began at that point and two weeks later he proposed: ‘I don’t suppose you’d marry me, would you?’ ‘I suppose I will,’ was the response. There is no reason to suppose that Tommy had been party to such a deep attachment before, but the affair was not without its emotional complications. Gwen had recently been engaged to a pilot killed during the air raids on Cologne. When asked what she would have done had he survived, she replied, ‘I’d have broken off the engagement. I really fell for Tommy.’ They married in Nicosia, Cyprus on 24 February 1947. Tommy was so poor she had to buy her own wedding ring, although he made up for it later with a diamond eternity ring. Their honeymoon was a single night snatched at the Savoy Hotel, Famagusta. When they walked through the door the man at reception called out, ‘Ah, Brigadier Cooper!’ Their friends in the concert party had booked them in as Brigadier and Mrs Cooper as a joke. Without an inkling of embarrassment she would admit they had not slept together before that night, which with characteristic frankness she always described as ‘bloody wonderful’.

Throughout their life together he called her ‘Dove’. With her full-bodied figure she used to joke, ‘Anything less like a dove!’ Their daughter thinks the term of affection came about after a few drinks when ‘love’ turned to ‘dove’ and stuck. Maybe it came out of ‘lovey-dovey’. Whatever the derivation, there is unlikely to be any deep magical significance to the word, since Channing Pollock, the suave American deceptionist who popularized the manipulation of the birds in his brilliant stage act, did not arrive on the theatrical scene until the early Fifties.

Gwen was five months older than her husband. She had been born in Eastbourne on 14 October 1920, the daughter of Thomas William Henty, a blacksmith’s assistant. The gift of a piano from her parents at the age of eleven was the defining ‘box of tricks’ moment in her own life. All who came to know her would identify with the irrepressible joie-de-vivre and sense of purpose that could have led her to personal stardom in her own right – a performer in the Tessie O’Shea mould with piano in lieu of banjulele – had she chosen that path. On her travels in the Middle East she had fast been gaining a reputation as an entertainer. Ragged press cuttings pasted in her scrapbook before she met Tommy reveal that she had a far wider range of talents than her known skills as an accompanist would suggest. Working under the ENSA banner in the touring show, Sunrise in 1945, she is reported: ‘The girl of many faces is something of a phenomenon. As the moth-eaten old charlady, she rocks the audience with laughter. As herself a few minutes later, she provokes that peculiar whistle which troops reserve for what they usually describe as “a bit of all right”. She more or less runs riot through the show.’ Another review, from Beirut, tells us, ‘She gets right to the hearts of the audience. She has a Gracie Fields personality, her character sketches have 100 per cent entertainment value, and her vivacious singing at the piano of a charming satire entitled, “Men – men – men!” produced roars of laughter.’ In Baghdad she is described as putting over ‘her own sophisticated Mae West-ish solo act, but she isn’t afraid to discard the glamour and paint her nose red in real slapstick stuff.’

In the concert party she had been partnered in the ‘slapstick stuff’ by one Jimmy Murray, ‘an extremely good young comedian with a smooth and pleasant style.’ Upon marrying Tommy it was inevitable that they would contemplate a double act together. A large buff regulation notebook – emblazoned with a crown and ‘GR Supplied for the Public Service’– that Tommy kept up around this time provides some intriguing glimpses of their brief partnership on stage:

Tommy: Hello, darling. Is dinner ready?

Gwen: (Starts to cry)

Tommy: What’s the matter, my sweet?

Gwen: Y-you d-don’t l-love me any more.