Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography

Pulled the hair off his chest for encore.

But the Sheriff at last found his false teeth

And shoved them in reverse in his head,

So that when he attempted to talk to Hortense,

He chewed lumps off his back stud instead.

Then up rode Hortense’s fiancé,

It was all he could do to keep standing.

He was so thin his landlady had to take care,

Lest the cat got him out on the landing.

The gorgeous beast jumped from his mustang,

And said to the Sheriff, ‘Desist!

‘Unhand this poor innocent maiden,

‘Or I’ll come and slap you on the wrist.’

The Sheriff just drove him so deep in the ground,

His face turned quite yellow with terror.

He went so deep that coalminers lunching below

Chewed the soles of his gumboots in error.

’Twas a shame for Hortense’s fiancé,

He was only just out of his teens.

He was too full of holes to be buried,

So they used him to strain out the greens.

The first reality to confront him upon leaving Bradfield was far removed from the 1930s’ variety stage, although it had everything to do with the comedy he would make his own in later years. He soon became involved in life at the hotel and brought all his powers of observation to bear upon a different world: ‘It was the kind of place which attracted little old ladies. They used to set out for the dining room at 11.30 and get there just in time for the gong at one.’ The intake seemed to be dominated by ‘several dowagers who used to sweep in like galleons under full sail, with their frigates of female companions, bouncing along nervously in their wake. What those companions put up with for the sake of a winter at Bournemouth!’ Christmas provided an exceptional opportunity to observe the idiosyncrasies of the British at play. Lily poured her heart into making sure all had a good time, but not all went to plan. As her son remembered, they had to drop a game dubbed ‘Woolworth’s Tea’: ‘The idea was that everybody came to tea wearing something they had got from Woolworth’s which, in those days, meant it had cost not more than sixpence. Then your partner had to find out what it was. Fine, until somebody nominated a lady’s priceless family heirloom. End of Woolworth’s teas!’ The Christmas fancy head-dress party proved more popular: ‘There was the man who came as a Christmas pudding … he wore the plate round his neck and on his shoulders like a ruff and encased his head in a papier-mâché pudding complete with sprigs of holly on the top. And he refused to take it off. He sat throughout dinner feeding himself through a visorish trap door in the front. We tapped on the side between courses to make sure he was all right. It must have been very hot in there … pity, because he didn’t even win a prize.’ One of his jobs was to write out the daily menus: ‘The soup was the same every day – it sort of accumulated over the years. We used to do it geographically. I used to call it Potage Strasbourg, Potage Cherbourg. Then we got into the West Country and called it Potage Budleigh Salterton and Potage Shepton Mallet. It all tasted exactly the same and was repulsive.’

The hotel business gave him the opportunity of learning all he needed to know about petit-bourgeois gentility: how fierce, precarious and destructive it could be, while always open to comic interpretation. Nothing escaped Hancock as he turned over in his mind the potential for characterisation in comedy. He even observed that the old ladies marked the levels of their marmalade jars. Lily was well aware of her son’s comic perspective: ‘It wasn’t the way he told jokes. It was the way Tony saw the world. The way he never forgot anything.’

He was now fifteen, his only distraction from such matters provided by his decision to enrol for a commercial skills course in shorthand and touch-typing at the Bournemouth Municipal College. Records state that he signed up for the course the day after war was declared at the beginning of September, so he did not waste time. It was while, in his own words, he was ‘fondly beating out the old a-s-d-f-y-;-l-k-j-h to music’ that he decided to announce to the world what he had known for a long time, that he wanted to spend his lifetime making people laugh. This in spite of the fact that he soon acquired speeds of 120 wpm for shorthand and 140 wpm for typing!

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

‘REMEMBER GIBRALTAR?’ (#uf3f81074-2b6e-5857-afb1-fffe41bac34d)

‘It took me ten years to go on a stage without a hat on! It was some sort of protection. Like a clown’s mask.’

The kaleidoscopic skill with which Galton and Simpson rang the changes on the life and times of their radio and television creation was reflected in the diversity of occupations the real-life Hancock held down – sometimes it seems for little longer than a broadcasting half hour – once he decided against continuing his academic career. Any hopes that he might have sauntered straight onto one of Bournemouth’s several stages had been felled in the summer of 1939 when he petitioned the local impresario and entertainer Willie Cave. Cave was not only responsible for the concert party that strutted its stuff on the Bournemouth sands. He had also been one of his father’s closest friends and, at Jack’s suggestion, had given their mutual pal George Fairweather his big break, when they managed to persuade him that he’d be better off on £4 a week than on the 37s. 6d. he was earning as a postman who had to be up by four in the morning to sort his mail. Throughout his childhood Tony had been captivated by the makeshift auditorium on the sands that precariously housed ‘Willie Cave’s Revels’. With a stage constructed from canvas and girders, it could seat a deck-chaired audience of 500: when a strong wind blew, the cast would brave the possibility of collapse and turn their skills from song and dance to tent maintenance. Cave, not prepared to be won over by the sentiment of past friendships, was straightforward with the eager teenager, telling him he was far too young and inexperienced to be treading his boards.

His formal education over, Tony ventured into his first job as a tailor’s apprentice at the local branch of Hector Powe. Visions of upholding the sartorial elegance of the local gentry were soon dispelled. When he held out his hand for a tape measure, he found a kettle in its place. He lasted four hours: ‘The first chore they gave me when I arrived at nine was to sweep out the cupboards. At ten they set me brushing down the stairs. At ten thirty I had to brew the tea. And at eleven I handed in my notice.’ After a short while he progressed to the equally unlikely post of Temporary (Unestablished) Assistant Clerk, Grade 3, for the Board of Trade. Having purchased an umbrella to look the part, he found himself stamping clothes rationing forms in the incongruous setting of the newly requisitioned but still elegant Carlton Hotel. The work lasted two weeks, but only because he had to give two weeks’ notice. He may have said this jokingly, since at other times he seems to suggest the work continued into 1941. ‘Nothing worse outside a Siberian salt mine,’ was Hancock’s final judgement on this period of his life. But the experience did pay dividends of a kind. Before undertaking the role he had asked of its prospects, only to receive the reply: ‘Surely, Mr Hancock, it is not necessary for me to outline the prospects. This is the Civil Service.’ As he later admitted, anyone who caught his programmes would know that that voice haunted him for years to come. The whole experience left an indelible mark on his psyche, informing his portrayal of bureaucracy’s underdog with depth and precision. One can imagine John Le Mesurier as the resigned administrative officer: ‘Very well. I think you’ll fit our requirements. We can arrange for you to start in about a week.’ One can equally imagine Hancock’s measured pause before responding, ‘I won’t decide right at this moment, if you don’t mind … there are several other irons in the fire … I’ll drop you a line in a day or so.’ As Tony said, ‘Nothing like this had happened to the Civil Service since tea went on the ration.’

The other irons were, of course, non-existent. For a while he expressed a flurry of interest in journalism, something that in subsequent years reared its head in many interviews, not least to win him the allegiance of yet another painstaking provincial reporter. Heartened by his proficiency in touch-typing and shorthand, he returned to the city of his birth to explore the possibility of a job on the Birmingham Evening Despatch. ‘I had two ambitions,’ explained Hancock. ‘One was to be a newspaperman. The other was to go on the stage. I saw myself first as the Despatch’s chief reporter and then, a fortnight later, as one of the leading lights of Fleet Street.’ The editor could not subscribe to this agenda, and Tony was politely asked to leave. The only other work to come his way not directly connected with show business was through the kindness of his father’s friend Peter Read, now running the Pembroke Bar and Silver Grill in Poole Hill, Bournemouth. He remembered Tony as ‘a quiet boy, but very observant … he always knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to be a comedian, and not only that, he wanted to be a star comedian.’ When Read explained to Lily that he could offer her son the post of potman, she sensed the title might not flatter his more elevated ideas for himself. Read was resourceful. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘we’ll call him something else.’ And so the new dogsbody was installed as the hotel’s ‘domestic manager’. In nostalgic interviews later in life Hancock would cling possessively to the title. Read’s recall of his new employee was vivid: ‘One day I remember giving him a job in the store room, putting empty port bottles back in their crates. I completely forgot about him until, about half an hour later, I heard some weird noise … eventually I found him hidden behind the crates and bottles reciting Shakespeare and completely overcome by the fumes … port can do that to you.’ Hancock claimed he was rehearsing, imagining the rows of crates and barrels to be ‘a wildly applauding audience’. It sounds like a scene from a Sydney Howard movie. On another occasion he was discovered insensible from using primitive siphoning methods to decant the port. He swallowed so much of the stuff he had to be poured helpless into a taxi, never to return. But he did survive for around six weeks and could later admit that for much of that time ‘at least I was happy’. The only other employment he undertook outside of show business came when his mother and stepfather were temporary wardens of a girl’s hostel at Swynnerton, near Stone in Staffordshire, later in the war. For about a month he was employed in an armaments factory as an ‘electrician’s improver’, a title Hancock looked back upon with disbelief: ‘It was great … they said, “Put on your spurs and get up the telegraph pole.” What? Not me, mate!’ ‘Electrician’s mate’ would have been a more apt designation for the task in hand.

Throughout these diversions Hancock’s show-business ambitions did not lie dormant. One summer afternoon in 1940 in the restaurant at Beales, one of Bournemouth’s fashionable department stores, George Fairweather had just finished his regular teatime stint as a vocalist with the resident Blue Orpheans band, when he was approached by Tony’s mother. He had not seen her since the year of her first husband’s death, the resentment at her remarriage so soon after the demise placing a barrier between her and Jack’s innermost circle of friends. He never forgot her exact words: ‘I don’t want to hold a pistol to your head, but Jack, my husband, was very good to you when you first started, wasn’t he?’ George nodded and Lily continued, ‘I wonder if you would return the compliment, because young Tony’s got his father’s talents and is dying to get started, and since you’re running troop shows, could you do anything for him?’ George committed himself to his protégé’s future progress at that moment. He was by then in charge of the Bournemouth War Services Organisation, which put on two shows a week for the forces at the local Theatre Royal and toured the nearby army camps and ack-ack sites under the sobriquet of the ‘Black Dominoes’ concert party: ‘There was no money in it and everybody worked for nothing, so that is how he got his first break.’ George had last seen Tony when he was a boy, first at his father’s hotel and then hanging around the ‘Revels’: ‘He used to stand at the back with all the kids watching the show for nothing. And he was always very intrigued because in those days there weren’t the coloured lights there are now. We used dead white light and when you were on stage you had to have a full make-up, which in the daylight was hideous. It was a brown-red make-up with blue eyelids, lovely maroon lips and mascara on the eyes. But when you finished the show, so that you wouldn’t lose the audience who were watching for nothing, you had to dive down out in the open air and go through with the box, which they used to call “the bottle”. Tony used to kill himself laughing seeing me coming in this awful make-up with all the local yobbos going “bloody ’ell”.’

Now reacquainted, Fairweather remembered Hancock as ‘not gloomy in those days – bright as a button – terribly conceited – knew everything like we all did when we were young’. More importantly George discerned the awakening of a talent, even if he felt he was using it in the wrong way. By his own admission Hancock had already been accumulating material, much of which he was far too young to understand: ‘from stage acts, from jokes that other people got laughs with in pubs. All was grist to the mill. If it got a laugh, into the act it went.’ With a certain logic he clung most tenaciously to the gags that raised the biggest reaction, which were invariably the most risqué. Suddenly his shorthand skills were serving a use he may not have anticipated as his hand skedaddled across the page of his notebook to record the latest comic gem. In the spring of 1940 through friends of his father he was booked for a smoking concert at the Avon Road Labour Hall. For what was almost certainly his first professional engagement he was paid a fee of 10s. 6d. Precociously billed as ‘Anthony Hancock – the Man Who Put the Blue in Blue Pencil!’ he sashayed on stage like a juvenile Max Miller, the comic icon of the day, whose outrageous motley of technicolour patterned suit with plus fours, jaunty white trilby and corespondent shoes he attempted to replicate with a check jacket, top hat and a pair of the aforesaid two-tone shoes that cost him a complete week’s Civil Service salary of £2 10s. Hancock had not reckoned with the beer served throughout his act. The clinking of glasses and the rowdyism of the crowd made it difficult for him to be heard by the few who were prepared to listen.

In later years Miller and Hancock could be seen as cultural counterpoints: ‘The Cheeky Chappie’ who took the art of communication with a live audience to a zenith never repeated with greater panache and personal assurance, and ‘The Lad Himself’, pioneer and unsurpassed exponent of the more distant and paradoxically more intimate medium of television. Tony never lost his affection for the man John Osborne celebrated as ‘a saloon bar Priapus’. He was totally outrageous, but never really blue, at least in a mucky sense. If the colour applied at all, it was more in keeping with the defining sparkle of his laser-beam eyes. The pair have come to epitomise the cavalier and the roundhead of British comedy, and not just in a visual sense. The day would come soon when Hancock – by now styling himself ‘The Confidential Comic’ in outright homage to his idol – would renounce vulgarity, however honest, however clever, however exhilarating, for ever.

Fairweather agreed to give Tony a try-out in one of his shows at the Theatre Royal. It may be hard to imagine that you could play to army audiences of the day without being suggestive, but George was adamant this was not the style he required. ‘But the troops laughed,’ protested the younger man. ‘Of course they laughed,’ said his father’s friend. ‘Put four or five hundred soldiers in a hall and they’d laugh if you came on and said “arseholes”. But it’s not artistry.’ For all Fairweather’s advice, he had still to learn his major lesson. Fuelled by misguided zeal, he accepted an independent booking at the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Church Hall on Richmond Hill. Fairweather was incredulous when he was told. When he queried whether he intended to use his old material, Tony replied, ‘Why not? They’re troops.’ George explained there would also be Sunday school teachers and church officials serving the refreshments, but he had made up his mind. When the older man next saw him Tony was in tears, blubbering, ‘If only I’d listened to you.’ In time the detail came out. No sooner had he leaned across the footlights to tell the joke about the commercial traveller and the blonde than three old ladies got up to catch an early bus. When he gave them the one about the sergeant major and the ATS officer, silence hung in the air: even the troops were stunned into embarrassment. The one involving the land girl and the farm labourer might have worked had it been heard above the sound of the general exodus that was now taking place. Fairweather adjudged it the dirtiest act he had heard. The words of the priest as he reluctantly paid off the comedian remained with him forever, like the stain of some mortal sin: ‘Hancock, I know your parents well, and I’m sure if they had been here they would have been as disgusted as I am.’ As he dragged himself off the platform, the lady who had booked him told him not to return for his scheduled second spot, adding, ‘We want to fumigate the stage.’ He told Philip Oakes that he subsequently burned his script and in time disposed of the hat and the shoes. Although he was far from a puritan in his private life, in the years to come he would as a performer treat risqué humour with the obsessive contempt of someone with a compulsive cleanliness disorder. He even went as far as questioning a classic line in The Blood Donor. Alan Simpson explains: ‘It wasn’t his line. It was Patrick Cargill’s, when he says, “You won’t have an empty arm, or an empty anything!” “Do we need the ‘empty anything’?” queried Tony. Patrick said, “I like it.” Since it was his line, Tony let it stay.’

The experience strengthened his respect for George Fairweather, who was thirteen years his senior. In return, the relative old stager, impressed by his promise never again to use smut on stage and seeing the conceit knocked out of him as a result of the church hall incident, became all the more inclined to help him, even if in the young Hancock he saw the total opposite of his father. Whereas Jack both on and off stage had represented the epitome of elegance, immaculate down to his fingernails – ‘the reason he used a cigarette holder was because he couldn’t stand nicotine on his fingers’ – Fairweather would refer to his son as ‘the unmade bed’: ‘He had no idea about clothes – just threw them on to keep him warm.’ Soon an emotional bond built up between the two. The younger man never stopped plying his mentor with questions about his father: ‘It was as if going over things again and again somehow brought Jack back to life. He never really got over his father’s death.’ Hancock began to adapt his act with George’s advice, instructing him to learn by watching others, without actually copying their material. Early inspiration was provided by the newly popular radio comedian Cyril Fletcher, whose plummy voice imported a comic solemnity to his famous ‘Odd Odes’, a phrase that entered the language. Hancock’s original instinct had been to spice them up for the troops; Fairweather made sure he removed anything that might be considered off-colour.

In time he broadened his writing efforts to embrace the surrealist travesty approach of the music-hall comedian Billy Bennett, whose billing ‘Almost a Gentleman’ summed up the social inadequacy he projected on stage in shrunken dress suit, curling dickey and chunky hobnailed army boots. The eulogy to the Sheriff of Toenail City dates from this period, together with rhymes like these, which he happily shared with his friend, the actor Jim Dale, in later years:

He came from the mud flats of Putney,

His tongue hanging out like a tie.

From the tip of his toes to the top of his head,

He must have been fourteen stone high.

That was just the first verse. There were twenty-five more, of which Dale also recalls:

The force of the bang was horrific,

Every man was blown out of his shoes,

And a block of tall flats by the side of the road

Caught the blast and was turned into mews.

The assumption is that he did write them himself. Without access to Bennett’s complete canon there is no way of checking, but neither is there any reason to suppose that his relish for sharing them with Dale was fed by anything other than nostalgic pride for the minor achievements of his youth.

Hancock also admired the style of the monologist Reggie Purdell, who became better known as the voice of the magician in the famous BBC children’s radio series Toytown. To the accompaniment of ‘descriptive’ piano music he recited short comic fables, one of which had something to do with a deer coming down to drink at a forest pool. When Purdell died in 1953, Hancock acquired all his material in manuscript form, but by the early 1950s, when his true style was fast emerging, it represented an anachronism. According to Philip Oakes, Tony also admitted to an early fascination with the comic alphabet that defines letters in an ersatz cockney accent. Probably first brought to wider recognition in the 1930s by Clapham and Dwyer, who dubbed it their ‘Surrealist Alphabet’, it also surfaced in the Purdell repertoire. Part of the fun was in the number of variations that could be rung on the basic theme: ‘A for ’orses, B for mutton, C for yourself, D for ’ential, E for Adam, F for vescence,’ all the way to a rousing finale of ‘X for breakfast, Y for God’s sake, and Z for breezes.’ It needs to be read aloud to make full sense.

Hancock continued to ply the loop of small-time club bookings and trudge around the service camps gaining experience with Fairweather and his hard-working gang. In the spring of 1941 encouragement came when he attended an audition in the café of Bobby’s department store in Bournemouth for the BBC Bristol-based producer Leslie Bridgmont. Bridgmont would eventually become a stalwart of the medium with shows like Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh, Waterlogged Spa, Stand Easy and, for the aforementioned Cyril, Fletcher’s Fare, as well as playing a modest role in Hancock’s later career as a radio star. For the occasion Tony performed a monologue entitled ‘The Night the Opera Caught Fire’ and won a booking. Bridgmont never forgot him: ‘He was dressed in his best dark grey suit. My goodness, he was nervous – absolutely gibbering with fright. He had a script that he had written himself and it was absolutely terrible … still, I could see the boy had an individual style that was quite out of the ordinary, so I gave him a chance.’ His contract stipulated he submit his material in typescript. In the excitement Tony got carried away. He explained, ‘Being raw in the business, I took this to mean having this set up by a printer and so at great expense I arranged with a local firm to do it that way. They made a handsome job of it, but I have never been able to convince Leslie Bridgmont that it was not a gag.’ The producer never forgot his surprise upon receiving the copy of Hancock’s words laid out in heavy Gothic type elaborately bound in thick paper. Bridgmont later recalled not only his suspicion that this was an illuminated address that had been torn out of a book, but also his concern that had it not been original with Hancock it would be of no use for the show. When Tony met up with the producer, Leslie explained, ‘A typewritten copy would have done.’ One can picture Hancock’s expression. The job had cost him £3. He later joked, ‘It was cheap at the price: only ninety per cent of my fee.’ A month later at 11 a.m. on 6 June 1941, billed in the Radio Times as Tony J. Hancock, he made his first broadcast on a programme entitled A la Carte, described as ‘a mixed menu of light fare’. Transmitted from Bristol on the Forces station, the forerunner of the Light Programme, it was not an amateur talent show as has been surmised. The others appearing were all established broadcasters including Jack Watson, the comedian son of veteran Nosmo King as ‘Hubert’ and Al Durrant’s Swing Quintet.

Hancock may not have known at the time that the person he had most reason to thank for the broadcast was the actor and variety artist Jack Warner, later to become legendary as the evergreen copper ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ of television fame and in those early days of the war basking in the radio success of his show Garrison Theatre. Indeed the phrase ‘blue pencil!’ – as in ‘not blue pencil likely’ and adapted by Tony in his early billing matter – had, alongside ‘Mind my bike!’ and ‘Little gel’, been one of several catchphrases that Warner had used to boost morale in those times. In his autobiography, Jack of All Trades, Warner recounts the occasion his mother and his wife Mollie were staying at the Durlston Court Hotel when the proprietress confided she had a son who was desperate to enter show business and asked whether Jack might be able to help. This led to Warner watching a performance by the young Hancock, presumably when he was appearing at the Pavilion Theatre for the week of 14 April 1941 in the stage version of his Garrison Theatre hit. Making all the allowances in the world for his inexperience, Jack ‘knew at once that he had a great future before him. He was truly Chaplinesque in the way that he could make pathos and comedy come together.’ Warner arranged an introduction or two, as a result of which the invitation to audition for the producer transpired a month later. Bridgmont had given Jack one of his own big breaks in radio only a few years before. As Tony continued to struggle for recognition, he wrote to Mollie Warner, possibly out of gratitude, although it is not that aspect that impressed her husband when he recalled the letter: ‘It was almost entirely devoted to self-criticism, and written in a mood of desperate melancholia.’ When it was possible the star returned to see his act again and offered all the encouragement he could muster, but, mused the kind-hearted maestro in later life, ‘just how do you convince a very funny man that he is a great comic when he is convinced that he isn’t?’ The doubt, like the talent, was always there.

With one broadcast to his name there was no rush by the BBC to provide Hancock with a repeat booking, but his confidence received another lift that summer when George Fairweather at last invited him formally to join his ‘Black Dominoes’ concert party. The timing was propitious. In the autumn Fairweather would enter the army and it was convenient for George, as well as a natural progression for Tony, now a veteran of the Dorchester–Wareham–Blandford–Ringwood troop circuit for him to take over as head of the Bournemouth War Services Organisation. He was paid £2 a week for chartering buses and organising the tour rota in addition to his own activities as a performer. He once stood for over thirty minutes in driving rain at the head of a battalion of tired and patient entertainers waiting for the charabanc that would take them home from Dorchester, until it occurred that he had forgotten to book it. The experience would have resonated in his mind many years later in an exchange of radio dialogue when together with Sid James and Bill Kerr he finds himself soaked to the skin waiting for the last bus home. Bill notes that the rain has stopped, only to be corrected by Tony: ‘No it hasn’t. The wind’s blowing so hard it can’t land, that’s all.’