Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography

It is no surprise that he did not remain in the job for long. It is surprising to find that he was still persisting with the ‘Confidential Comic’ approach, although Fairweather’s absence may explain this. At one camp by default he did secure a bona fide belly laugh. As he crouched forward over the edge of the temporary stage with all the complicity of Max Miller at his intimate best, he trod on a loose plank and fell over the footlights into the lap of the Commanding Officer seated in the front row. He later explained, ‘This piece of unrehearsed knockabout, followed by my struggle to clamber back on stage over the feet of the top brass sitting in the front row, bang up against the rails, proved more hilarious than any of my carefully rehearsed gags.’ Once when he was acting as compère for the ‘Black Dominoes’ at the Boscombe Hippodrome, his entrance was greeted with zero applause and his nerve failed him so completely that he retreated to the wings and continued to announce all the acts from an off-stage microphone. In 1967 Hancock attempted to summarise the experience of his early comedy apprenticeship for David Frost: ‘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. You know, when you’ve got the mask on, then you can have the funnel down the trousers and the water poured down, and it’s not you. While I had this hat on, it wasn’t really me doing it. Then gradually as you go along, you shed these things until you are confident enough to be yourself.’

In handing over the reins to his friend, George deputed more to the young Hancock than responsibility. Perhaps not realising that a duodenal ulcer would be responsible for invaliding him out of the army in a very short while, he also around this time entrusted to him much comic business from his own repertoire, items that had already reduced Tony himself to fits of laughter. One routine focused on a comic with catarrh and a predilection for taking snuff. It is almost impossible to transcribe as George described it, but for the record went something like this, with the sniffing and snuffling best left to the imagination: ‘This fellow was walking along the street the other day and – sneeze – excuse me – and a fellow came up to him and said, “Do you know where so and so’s place is?” – sneeze – “No, it’s just across the road, I think” – sneeze – “Ask the taxi driver.” “Yes, I will” – sneeze – …’ The sequence builds in crescendo fashion until the inconsequential finish of the biggest sneeze you could ever expect. To understand how funny this would have been as performed by Hancock, one has only to recall the television episode where he suffers a cold and his stoic attempts to hold back a sneeze in the face of Sid brandishing an aerosol germ spray – ‘that crop sprayer’, as Hancock dismisses it – give way to the final explosion. The ticklish anticipation of the moment takes full possession of his face and provided television with some of its funniest close-ups.

More enduring, not least because it planted the seed of a comic attitude that would stay with Hancock for life, was the ‘Pick a card’ routine. George would play the magician to Tony’s hapless stooge coaxed out of the audience to participate, his gormlessness accentuated by flat cap, inseparable carrier bag and shabby umbrella. A catalogue of misunderstanding and ineptitude as the stooge fails to keep pace with the conjuror’s instructions, the skit culminated in the total disgruntlement of the put-upon prestidigitator, his self-esteem in shreds: ‘If you don’t look at it, how are you going to know what the card is? There’s not much point in me being here is there? … Five hundred people in the audience and I’ve got to pick you. Listen, mush. Take a card, for God’s sake … Isn’t it marvellous!’ Years later when asked by a guest in a Southampton dressing room where his character came from, Hancock had only to point to the man at his side: ‘Go on, George; tell them about the card trick sketch.’ Fairweather’s natural courtesy always conceded a modest ‘I can’t see it myself,’ but he knew perfectly well the part he had played in influencing the Hancock persona and in sharpening his friend’s understanding of comic timing.

In time Fairweather, with an eye on Hancock’s aspiration to become involved in services entertainment when he entered the forces, gave him carte blanche to access his regular act. His forte was impressions. In the days before tape recorders George used to spend every available moment in the cinema listening to the voices, watching the mannerisms of the stars of the moment. His repertoire included Maurice Chevalier, Jimmy Durante, the radio comedian Robb Wilton, Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh of the Bounty, the flat-profiled George Arliss as Disraeli. Tony had started to develop his own flair for impressions at Bradfield College. His friend Michael Turner recalled, ‘He was a great admirer of W.C. Fields and James Cagney and could give a very fair impersonation of both. He was also fascinated by Damon Runyon and the New York Brooklyn accent, remarking after one divinity class taken by the headmaster, “I like dis guy Whitworth wit da neon dome.”’ So far this enthusiasm had yet to find a place in Tony’s act. Whereas Fairweather was a straight impressionist, his advice to Hancock was to approach things from an original angle: ‘You have a flair for burlesque – do my act as an amateur would do it and burlesque it.’ Hancock must have thought this a good idea. He continued to do so in his stage act until the end of his life. Laughton’s Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame was always a tour de force: ‘You’re so beautiful and I’m so ugly. I’m deaf, you know. It’s the bells. It’s the bells. Sanctuary! Sanctuary!’ Then suddenly, dropping the histrionics, he would announce ‘Sanctuary much!’ and lurch off stage. The last bit was Hancock’s, the rest Fairweather’s, in spite of claims Tony made later in life that the impression had been inspired by Peter Sellers’s spine-tingling version of Jekyll and Hyde, with which he would terrify impressionable young WAAFs when they were in charge of the RAF Light Entertainment wardrobe department together at the end of the war. Most probably Sellers’s influence enhanced the grotesquery.

Whatever the vicissitudes that beset Tony’s early working life, he had so far enjoyed a not uncomfortable war. Although the lights had gone out over Bournemouth and the tourist industry was in recession, his mother and stepfather persisted with Durlston Court Hotel, ensuring their son a strong, albeit erratic, domestic base, until it was requisitioned and they set out on a round of pub and hotel management that took them, according to Roger Hancock, all over the country to no fewer than thirty-two different establishments during the hostilities. Both the industry and the illusory calm of their various lives were shattered at the beginning of September 1942 when the news came through that Colin William Hancock, Pilot Officer 132998, 269 Squadron, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, was ‘missing presumed dead’. Married in November 1939, he had joined the service on 22 April 1940; the following day he was recommended for training as ‘Wireless Operator/Air Gunner’. He was eventually stationed at the RAF airbase at Kaldadarnes, thirty miles south east of Reykjavik in Iceland. He went missing on 1 September 1942 somewhere over the North Atlantic. The squadron annals record the incident as follows: ‘Hudson of No. 269 Squadron sighted U-boat. Attacked when submerged. Some oil seen. At 18.53 hours strike aircraft Hudson M despatched (Pilot Officer Prescott, Sergeants Smith, Hancock and Harris) but failed to return.’ The following day three further Hudson aircraft searched for the missing plane. Again one of the three failed to return. On board was Eric Ravilious, the Official War Artist, today regarded as an artist and illustrator of considerable standing, who had arrived at the airfield only the day before. Today Colin’s name, one of over 20,000 Allied airmen with no known grave who were lost in the conflict during operations from bases in Britain and Europe, is commemorated on Panel 69 of the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede in Surrey. Records reveal that he had been awarded his commission as Pilot Officer as recently as 4 August 1942, information that does not appear to have been known within No. 269 Squadron at the time he went missing and which became known to his family only after his death.

In recent years Colin’s business skills in helping to run Durlston Court had reassured his parents that the venture would continue to succeed for another generation in his hands. According to Roger, that is why his mother refused to return at the war’s end, ‘selling the property for a terribly low price in the region of £26,000, when two years later she could well have achieved close to £100,000 for it’. The family was looking after the hostel in Staffordshire the day the news arrived. Even today Roger, disoriented by the thirteen-year gap between his elder brother and himself, wrestles with the poignancy of the moment and the absence of any great surge of personal grief: ‘I remember being in that corridor and she came down and told me. It didn’t mean anything to me. That was the terrible thing. It was somebody removed. But the awful thing is I didn’t even think for her. I remember saying, “You know there’s a letter in from him this morning.” I mean, how long had that taken to come? It was later that I realised what she’d gone through. She was absolutely torn apart, and that turned her into a spiritualist. And she got a lot of comfort from it, she really did. But unfortunately she started to believe it all too much, over-compensating. But you can totally understand why.’

In the years to come on tour Hancock would sit up into the early hours with his agent Stanley Dale, affectionately known as ‘Scruffy’, and beg him to recount his own wartime experiences as a navigator in bombing raids on Germany. Dale recalled, ‘He would get out my flying log and go through it with a fine-tooth comb, making me give all the gory details – how my companions were killed, how I got shot up, how I won the DFC. He worshipped that log book. One of his favourite subjects was war and how futile it was.’ It is impossible not to suppose that he was somehow projecting his brother’s memory onto Dale’s achievements. That memory worked in other ways too. In the late 1950s Cyril Fletcher approached Hancock with the request that he appear in one of the fund-raising concerts he and his wife, Betty Astell, organised for the ‘Guinea Pig’ Club formed by patients of Sir Archibald McIndoe, the pioneering plastic surgeon, who during and since the war had worked for the Royal Air Force on the treatment and rehabilitation of badly burned air crews. Jimmy Edwards, shot down at Arnhem, was arguably their most famous member. While major stars dropped everything to support the cause, Hancock could not be persuaded. Fletcher never forgave the younger comedian for his refusal, but maybe Hancock had personal reasons for not wishing to meet and perform before the badly scarred and disfigured victims in McIndoe’s care. Fletcher certainly had no idea of how close Hancock had come to the brutal reality of war. Even today some of Tony’s closest friends like Graham Stark, Damaris Hayman, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson react with surprise at the news of Colin’s very existence. However, at the end of his life in Australia Hancock did share his deep affection for his brother with Eddie Joffe, the producer of his last uncompleted television series. To Eddie he came over as ‘a tall, slim, charming and charismatic young man … Tony claimed that Colin’s spectre regularly appeared to him in dreams, swathed in seaweed.’ Our most painful memories are those compounded by our worst imaginings. There is no way Hancock could have said ‘Yes’ to Fletcher without seeing in the faces, the eyes and the minds of those damaged heroes the elemental horror his brother had failed to survive.

That last letter Colin addressed to his mother was dated 26 April 1942. It had taken four months to arrive. In it he expressed genuine concern for Tony’s immediate future and what his impending enlistment might entail:

Please tell him he is to do nothing until I come home. I’ll brain him if he does!! Because I know just what will happen. He will join some branch or other and then be sorry he did. Naturally I can help him no end and can advise what to try for. As for a full time job on the entertaining side, this is of course out of the question. I have not received his letter yet, so expect he will mention it. Anyhow please tell him not to do anything until I have seen him. I can’t write about it very well. I shall never finish.

There is no evidence that the brothers met again, nor any reason why no more letters appear to have come through after being sent at three-weekly intervals until then. Tony had to find his own way of dealing with the tragedy, and his immediate enlistment on 7 September 1942, within days of the announcement, provided bittersweet distraction. He also volunteered for air crew, but was failed on his eyesight. Tony liked to joke his way around the fact by claiming that his arms were too short to reach the controls. From the beginning he had a friend by his side, Slim Miller, another comedy hopeful who had been with him in Fairweather’s concert party. Their shared ambition eased the journey from Bournemouth Central Station. ‘By the time we reached Romsey, just beyond Southampton, we’d written half a show,’ Miller recalled later. For the moment, though, they ‘wanted to get a crack at the fun’. The earthbound reality proved otherwise. Initially they were posted to Locking, near Weston-super-Mare, for fourteen weeks’ basic training with the RAF Regiment, the body entrusted with the duty of defending air bases against ground attack. Hancock did not take kindly to the new disciplines. One night, as he burned the midnight oil writing letters home, he was disturbed by a caped figure that put its head round the door and bawled, ‘Put out those lights.’ ‘All right, cock – just a minute,’ replied Hancock engagingly, at which the NCO tore off his cape and angrily shoved three stripes under his nose. From that point on he saluted everybody. When the flight sergeant on parade told him to stick his chest out, he answered, ‘What chest?’ The officer, unaware of his earlier struggle with rickets, failed to appreciate the joke. When he was confronted with bayonet practice and the need to shout like a savage during the exercise, he protested, ‘I’m not doing this. It’s bloody barbaric.’ According to George Fairweather, he was put on a charge for that one.

Having persuaded the entertainments officer that he would be of greatest use to the unit by reprising his skills as an entertainer, he was let off the weekly route march to rehearse for the show that evening and given a signed chit to that effect. ‘By a happy coincidence,’ Tony recalled, ‘he forgot to date it, so while the others were struggling on their marches I would produce this thing and hop off to Bournemouth to collect props or make excuses about needing make-up.’ The marches were of an escalating nature, the ground covered being increased by a mile each week. By the time the regiment was up to fourteen miles Tony was told the shows had been cancelled: ‘So on went the kicking strap, the canister, the kitchen sink, the lot, and off I set … I really don’t remember the last few miles. It was agonising. My feet were practically aflame and I had to be helped in by a couple of mates.’ From that point Aircraftman Second Class (General Duty) Hancock was rumbled, marked down as an individualist and a rebel. One senses he revelled in the reputation.

Before long the RAF Regiment decided that both he and Miller were surplus to requirements and soon after Christmas reassigned them both to a Canadian unit that fortuitously happened to be stationed at Bournemouth, where their duties included guarding the offices and laboratories of a small photographic intelligence unit. He never forgot the first roll call:

‘Sikersky.’

‘Check, Lootenant.’

‘McLaren.’

‘Yeah, Red.’

‘Anderson.’

‘Here, Buster.’

‘Hancock.’

‘Present and correct, sir.’

‘So we’ve got a damn limey who’s trying to be funny, eh?’ spluttered the officer. It seems that only Hancock could get one step nearer to a court martial by calling an officer ‘sir’. ‘It was fatigues again,’ he admitted, although the opportunity the posting gave him to swan around his old haunts in uniform and to socialise with old buddies including Fairweather, now back in the resort and flourishing even more as an entertainer in professional shows at the Pavilion, was more than compensation. He and Miller were billeted at the swish Metropole Hotel. After less than two months they were redirected to a transit office in Blackpool, where they parted company. Hancock was given the opportunity to train as a wireless operator. He failed on four words a minute – ‘which takes some doing,’ he said – and was posted to Stranraer in Scotland. A week later a bomb fell on the Metropole.

At RAF Wig Bay, five miles north of Stranraer on the west shore of Loch Ryan, Hancock was assigned to the Marine Craft Section. His principal duties appear to have been the custody of a heap of coal and a boiler house. In a cunning echo of his earlier designation as a ‘domestic manager’ he made the decision to endow himself with the title of ‘fuel controller’ and hung a sign stencilled by himself to that effect on the door of his hut. He explained, ‘It gave my mother something to be proud of when I wrote home and told her my title. It also boosted my own morale and took some of the ache out of the job to read those words every time I trudged back to bed.’ In addition he was responsible for the lighting of fires in the Nissen huts, a process he soon had down to a fine, if dangerous, art. Not for Hancock the fuss and bother with wood and paper and getting the right draught. All he needed was a bit of rag, well soaked in paraffin. Having left the door of the hut well open behind him, he tossed this among the coal, followed quickly by a lighted match, and departed like lightning: ‘They used to go like a bomb. The only thing was the black stains on the ceilings. That seemed to bother them a bit.’ Throughout this time he must have looked like a refugee from a minstrel show, his face and hands begrimed with coal dust and soot. The image of Hancock slogging around with his wheelbarrow of coal is one of drudgery personified. In time he would stamp his own comic seal on such situations; for the moment one notes the gradual emergence of a sardonic sense of humour he would make his own.

He was characteristically disparaging about life on the desolate edge of the west Scottish coast. He dubbed Stranraer ‘the Paris of the North – you can’t see a sign of life after five o’clock in the afternoon’ and would joke of a typical Scottish evening out: ‘Chuck a caber about, have a quick dance over the swords, cut your feet to rhythms, and away you go.’ When he felt so disposed he would make amusement for himself by sending up his Commanding Officer without mercy. On one occasion he was attempting to resurface a path when the officer approached: ‘No, no, no. That’s not the way to do it at all.’ As Hancock tugged away at his cap in apology, he continued, ‘No. Look. This is how it should be done.’ Hancock explained that without so much as a by-your-leave he then took his shovel and started throwing stones and pebbles around like a man who had lived in a glass house all his life. When the officer triumphantly asked, ‘Now do you see what I mean, Hancock?’ the latter seized his opportunity: ‘Well I think so, sir, but I wonder whether you would mind just showing me that bit where you flick your wrist again.’ This was the cue for the jacket to come off, the tie to be loosened. The gravel flew like fury, but Hancock continued to act dumb: ‘I still don’t quite see it, sir. Sorry if I seem a bit dim.’ Inspired by those last few words the officer became even more possessed, but as Hancock later said, ‘I must say that to this day I have not seen a path better resurfaced than by that CO.’

Al Tunis, a Canadian radar technician based at RAF North Cairn, the nearby radar station, retained a vivid memory from those times. Shaving one morning in the washroom, he heard splashing and shuffling followed by the gush of a flushing toilet: ‘Through the mirror I could see the figure of an airman emerge, carrying a bucket, only to disappear into the next stall. He was clad in fatigues with a wedge cap on his head at a careless angle. When he came into view again I inspected a thin, stoop-shouldered figure, topped off by a sallow, sad face with heavy-lidded eyes. He grunted a greeting and carried on with his work.’ In time a friendship developed and out of a mutual enthusiasm for all things theatrical the idea of a concert party servicing the local camps emerged. In the weeks leading up to the performance Hancock kept himself largely to himself. Tunis was puzzled that he did not appear to rehearse: ‘I had visions of him going through his paces down at the shore, against the backdrop of the beehive-shaped Ailsa Craig looming to the north, shouting his lines over the turbulent waves.’ He need not have worried. For all his nerves during the day, come the night all went well: ‘The spotlight was clearly intended for a slight, stooped young man with sad eyes who stepped on stage to assume the identity and the manner of the born comedian … he delivered a performance with the deadpan expression of a Keaton.’ The era of ‘The Confidential Comic’ was over. Encouraged by his reception, by the end of 1943 he had applied and been accepted for an ENSA audition. When he stepped onto the stage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, he could have been back at school playing the leading nobleman in The Gondoliers. His whole body quivering with nerves, he could barely utter ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ before the words froze in his mouth. Angry and depressed, he made the long train journey back to Scotland. There was little consolation to receive from ENSA a few days later a formal card that read: ‘Dear Sir/Madam, we have much pleasure in informing you that we liked your act at audition, and will let you know in due course if we require your services …’ So much, Hancock must have thought, for the personal touch.

While cross with himself on the one hand, he also knew that show business could provide the only escape from the icy hell of RAF Wig Bay in wintertime, where it was so cold the men literally slept in their uniforms. ‘Everyone shaved fully dressed,’ he remembered. ‘You stood in the ablutions at seven thirty in the morning singing “The Whiffenpoof Song” in the boots you had been wearing in bed.’ By January he was attending a second ENSA audition, having this time applied under the name of Fred Brown, ‘just so the officials wouldn’t be prejudiced’. He recalled, ‘When they saw me on the stage they said, “Haven’t we seen you somewhere before?” but I pretended not to hear and just went on with the audition. At least I tried to, but the same thing happened as before. A complete dry-up!’ However, the big break was not far away. Ralph Reader, who had successfully translated his pre-war Gang Show success with the Boy Scout Movement into entertainment for the RAF – initially as a ploy to cover his work as an intelligence officer – did show an interest, after Tony had won an amateur talent competition in Dundee. Later Reader reminisced, ‘I asked him if he had any comedy material and he rolled off about a dozen jokes. Apart from one, I hadn’t heard any of them before. They were not real jokes but mostly service situations. This was fine because we wanted people who could play in sketches.’ He was speedily assigned to the No. 9 Gang Show unit posted at Abingdon and in the summer of 1944 discovered himself aboard the Edinburgh Castle, a troopship converted from a Royal Mail steamer, bound for Algiers at the start of a twelve-month tour of duty that would travel throughout North Africa, Italy, Yugoslavia, Sicily, Malta, Crete, Greece, Gibraltar and the Azores.

His fellow Gang Show trouper John Beaver has shared his memories of being on tour with Tony at that time: ‘He was completely unable to look after himself. He had tropical shorts – known later as Bermuda shorts – and his came down to the ankle. We were in Athens on VE Day and I remember him going out that night and coming back with an “Out of Bounds” sign.’ One token concession to comfort for each Gang Show member was the regulation issue of a collapsible bed. Hancock never forgot his: ‘We used to call it the pterodactyl. The thing was it had got bent and lying on it was rather like being stretched out on a rack … your feet and head were on one level and the middle of you was about a foot higher, which can be very painful.’ Beaver remembered the time they spent on an empty rail cattle truck somewhere in central Italy. By now the ‘pterodactyl’ was in an even greater state of disrepair: ‘The back part supporting his head was tied together with a piece of string. As we trundled through the countryside the string broke, but I was next to him and he slept all through the night. All the time his head was going bump, bump, bump, but he didn’t wake up at all, except with a thick head in the morning!’ Years later Galton and Simpson portrayed a restless Hancock attempting to get some sleep on a train journey. He nods off with his head against the window, but the jolting of the train causes him to keep banging against it. Eventually he rubs his head and gives up the effort. Perhaps he recalled the earlier journey.

Ralph Reader was a slick and appealing performer of rise-and-shine ebullience with a background in musical theatre both on Broadway – where he had worked with Al Jolson – and in the West End. A prolific producer and choreographer, he continued to be active at all levels of the entertainment business long after scouting took his career in an additional direction. Thanks to George Fairweather, Hancock was already familiar with the standards he set. Although the shows played exclusively to service personnel, dubious material was verboten and woe betide anyone who caused the pace and spirit of the show to flag. As Graham Stark remembered, no one was ever allowed to take a bow: ‘You finished and got off – the standard of entertainment in the services was pretty low and we were dynamite.’ Every single performance on every single battle front opened and closed with the song of Reader’s own composition that remains his abiding trademark, ‘Riding Along on the Crest of a Wave’, the accompanying hand movements to which were as obligatory as the words. Hancock could not possibly have relished the waving-pointing-wriggling-clapping ritual, but Reader only remembered the obliging professional. ‘In those days he didn’t worry. He was a joy to be with and was one of the favourites of the unit. He used to take everything in his stride … sometimes when we called very early rehearsals [and] had to work three shows a day and probably travel forty miles afterwards in an open lorry, he was one of the gay sparks of the crowd … I was very fond of Tony and I watched his career. When one gets successful obviously one is going to be crowded and I don’t think Tony ever liked crowds. What he did like was friends.’

When he began to compile notes for a possible autobiography, Hancock was anxious to pay his tribute to Reader and those days. His words reveal that they somehow understood each other:

We were an extraordinarily mixed bunch – an impossible assortment, you would have thought, of professionals and ‘boy scouts’. Yet somehow Reader’s organising flair managed to weld us together into a smooth running team. He used to infuriate me by telling me what to do when I didn’t want to be told, but I had to admire his gift for controlling crowds. I have seen him walk in that breezy, boyish way of his into a draughty great hangar, take command of about seven hundred bored, belligerent fellows and in no time have them working like one man. I often thought then and still think now what a wonderful film director he would make, if he would only apply to directing individuals his skill for directing masses. Brilliantly though he did it, I always felt that he underestimated his ability and had no idea of his own talent for close individual direction.

Throughout his lifetime few friends were closer to Hancock than Graham Stark. When No. 9 unit was amalgamated with No. 4, Stark’s old outfit, in July 1945 Graham was despatched to Abingdon to supervise. Hancock immediately impressed him: ‘this strange little shuffling airman with extraordinary feet and bizarre sort of hair stuck apparently at random on the top of his head – a bit portly – but Christ, he was funny!’ Graham recalls that when it was time for him to allocate the sketches, Robert Moreton, ‘a very nice man, but a bit waspish,’ looked at him in a sort of twisted way and asked, ‘Have you two met before?’ ‘I’ve never set eyes on him,’ said Stark. ‘Then why is he getting all the material?’ Even today Graham takes great delight in reliving the moment: ‘I always remember I leaned forward quite calmly and simply said, “Because he’s funny.” Tony always reminded me of that down the years.’ There was another moment that ricocheted back from the past when they were high-flying on radio together in the early 1950s. As the Garrick Theatre resounded with laughter during a recording of Star Bill, all Tony had to whisper to his friend was, ‘Remember Gibraltar?’

The highlight of the European tour for the new amalgamated unit under Stark’s control was the performance presented in a 2,000-seat theatre converted from a cave in the colony. All the services were represented in the audience as Hancock and Stark performed a sketch in which they played two old officers looking back over their lives, with so many medals between them they trailed all the way down their backs. The routine must have been reminiscent of the act Morris and Cowley did as two Chelsea Pensioners on the music halls for many years. On the night in question the laughter was such as they had never heard before. ‘This wall of noise came and was so phenomenal,’ says Stark, ‘we got the scent of victory half way through that sketch and we looked at each other and said that this is the night we shall always remember.’ And they always did, always grateful for the justification why they were prepared to commit themselves so fully to an occupation so scarifying, so precarious and so unsocial. Brian Glanville, in his evocative novel The Comic, inspired by aspects of the Hancock story, summed up the elation: ‘Each fresh laugh was like a charge, giving you power, making you want to go on and on, surpass yourself, excel yourself, till they were laughing so hard that they were right out of control, and you couldn’t hope to make yourself heard.’

Vic Weldon, another Gang Show veteran, has recalled Hancock’s extremely idiosyncratic approach as a solo comic. In one of his ‘gags’ he would point to the front row and, thinking of the proverbial lilies in the field, remark, ‘Look at this lot in their finery. All that gold braid. It makes you go religious and think of the text, “They reap not, nor do they sow, yet Solomon in all his glory could not outshine one of these.”’ In one sketch entitled ‘Rumours’ Tony found himself in a skirt alongside John Beaver and Fred Stone, the leader of that unit, as three charladies caught up in an air-raid, coping with life to their hearts’ content (or discontent) until the arrival of a Duchess played by Robert Moreton. Another sketch featured Tony Melody and ‘Hank’ Hancock in ‘Candle to You’: the presence of two Tonies in the unit necessitated the adjustment in Hancock’s billing, something that would linger into early civilian life. Presumably one of them was in drag. Melody would sing adoringly to Hancock, ‘No one can hold a candle to you,’ in distant anticipation of Morrissey’s success with a similar title, but different song, many years later. One of the lines sung by the pop star may have had relevance: ‘Or am I Frankenstein?’ In his comprehensive survey of forces entertainment, Fighting for a Laugh, Richard Fawkes mentions that Hancock also specialised in one act as a green-faced ghoul.

Melody went on to achieve a solid career playing recurring policemen and as a comedy support in radio and television. Fred Stone’s most memorable moment came in the original London production of Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend. Hancock always held him in high regard: ‘He was a very strong personality who managed to keep eleven men who were living as closely as we were in reasonable shape. No matter what he felt personally about anything, it couldn’t interfere with a performance. I was only twenty or so at the time, but it was a great example to me.’ Tony attempted to cling to the philosophy to the end of his career and, for all the distractions and aggravations of his troubled times, for the greater part succeeded. Arthur Tolcher, the harmonica player who achieved notoriety on The Morecambe and Wise Show with his consistent failure to get a note in edgeways, was also around at times, as was the renowned circus clown Jacko Fossett, who must in later life have looked with sympathy upon the man who turned down the Beatles. When Tony asked Jack for advice, his reply was succinct: ‘Go home and work for your mother – you’ll be better off.’ Most notable for subsequent achievement was Rex Jameson, who as the ‘weak-willed and easily led’ Mrs Shufflewick provided the definitive portrayal of a gin-swilling gossip whom Hogarth knew only too well, as the authentic music hall spluttered its last gasp. Most poignantly, Robert Moreton, the bumbling comedian of later Bumper Fun Book fame, who would pave the way for Tony as the tutor on Educating Archie, took his own life when his career appeared to disintegrate in 1957.

Hancock came to see the time he spent under Reader’s influence as crucial to his development as a professional. In an episode of a radio series entitled The Laughtermakers in 1956, he admitted, ‘[So far] I hadn’t found any really satisfactory sort of approach, but those years gave me what I badly needed – confidence and experience. There just isn’t time to get nerves, or think deeply about art, when you’re doing shows in caves, in ships, from the backs of lorries in the desert.’ He could have added, on every single day, in conditions ranging from sub-zero temperatures to desert heat so intense that the sand and the flies competed to cause the greater discomfort, and with little regard for how near the front line they might have been, although in a moment of honesty he once declared that this was never nearer than three miles away. He expounded on the matter for John Freeman: ‘There were only eleven men in the company … you made about fourteen appearances in a show and although you did a lot of things that you weren’t really suited to do, it somehow opened us up a little more and you saw possibilities of expanding in a way that you hadn’t thought of before.’ He failed to add that the RAF stations were the saddest places to play. The comedy actor Kenneth Connor recalled for Fawkes that one end of the mess where the performers would be entertained before or after the show would always be banked high with wreaths and floral tributes for those who had gone missing in action. Throughout a performance it was customary to hear the Tannoy going, ‘Crash crew, stand by,’ while planes would come limping in from raids and those who were lucky enough to emerge from them would come hobbling in to see the end of the show. He doubtless dreamt of Colin on those nights.

But life was not without humour. Hancock loved to tell the tale of how as they unpacked three decks below water level on that first voyage to Algiers, Robert Moreton unwrapped a white dinner jacket from his kitbag, ‘in case there’s a dance on board’. Nor was he unprepared to tell a story against himself. Having decided to respect naval tradition by smoking a pipe for the first time in his life, with all ‘eyes on the distant horizon’ – to quote from the Gang Show anthem – Hancock leaned over the railing in best In Which We Serve fashion and took his first puff. The bowl fell off and plopped into the briny, and Hancock never smoked a pipe again. He shared with George Fairweather another incident, this time recalled from one of Ralph Reader’s auditions. His friend re-enacted it for me: ‘A broad Brummie got up on stage and Ralph said, “What do you do?” He said, “I jump.” He said, “No. What’s your act?’ He said, “That’s my act. I jump.” He said, “What do you mean, you jump?” He said, “Well, I jump and get higher and higher. That’s what I do.” He then stood to attention and he jumped and he jumped and he got so high. It became a standing joke between the two of us. If I phoned him and he asked, “Who’s that?” I would always say, “I jump.” He always knew who it was then, and we were away.’ The adenoidal naivety of the poor sauteur never failed to add to the merriment.

Reader was fond enough of Tony to write a song especially for him, although it is not clear whether this happened during the war or when a later expanded version of the Gang Show went on a conventional theatre tour after the hostilities. The number capitalised on his appearance as an ‘erk’, the service slang – for an aircraftman on the first tier of duty – that captured so brilliantly the forlorn, shambling demeanour of so many who were plunged indiscriminately into the conflict. Both Tunis and Stark had spotted his ability to project the type with comic effect from the stage. As Reader said, ‘I must admit it seemed to come terribly naturally to him.’ The song was called, ‘I’m a Hero to My Mum’, and he sang it straight as a ballad. It took him until 1 June 1946 – ‘a record that was beaten only once, I believe’ – to achieve promotion from Aircraftman Second Class to Acting Sergeant, by which time the war was over. ‘I doubt,’ recalled Hancock, ‘whether I would ever have risen to Acting Sergeant if they hadn’t been so short of NCOs by then and found there was nobody else to produce the Ralph Reader shows. We called them variety shows, but the first one I put on consisted of twelve singers and two comics. So much for variety!’ Hancock would not be demobbed until 7 November 1946. The challenge of turning himself into the star comedian of his dreams awaited him. A letter he wrote to his brother, Roger, from Italy in June 1945 is significant:

Spaghetti is eaten by everybody, though there are several different approaches to it. Some believe in getting one end into the mouth and giving a long hard suck until the spaghetti unravels and vanishes into your mouth with a ‘plop’, while others use the mid-air method which consists of lifting the spaghetti off the plate in a lump between a knife and fork and juggling with it, making frequent determined lunges at it with the teeth. But as it looks as if you’re knitting a balaclava helmet, this can be a bit embarrassing.

His gift for observational humour was already developing. The promise was there.

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

‘IT’S NOT EASY, IS IT?’ (#uf3f81074-2b6e-5857-afb1-fffe41bac34d)

‘I’m Anthony Hancock, comedian. I wonder if you’ve got anything.’

Hancock was catapulted out of the forces on 6 November 1946, although any immediate exhilaration must have drained away when the dreariness of the life ahead of him sank in. In retrospect the influx of new comedians onto the British show-business scene after the war appears like a tidal wave, but the process was far more gradual. At the beginning the whole glorious parade of them – Hancock, Howerd, Wisdom, Secombe, Sellers, Milligan, Bentine, Cooper and many more – had yet to be prised from an indiscriminate blur of desperate hopefuls, from which the fittest – or funniest – would survive in an eerie parallel to the struggle from which they had just emerged. Gang Show veterans like Hancock were also at a disadvantage; not released from the service until after more established ENSA members, they consequently found themselves in an already overcrowded market for entertainers.

Tony recalled that he flew through the demob centre at Wembley ‘like a typhoon’, making a grab for his £60 gratuity and the first clothes he could put his hands on whether they fitted or not. Hancock admitted, ‘I thought the battle was over when they sent me out into the world in one of those stiff, hairy suits and hard pale blue trilbies that no one would have dared to wear in public except for the sheer joy of getting out of uniform. But it had only just begun.’ For two weeks he installed himself in a room at the British Lion Club in Ebury Street, before moving to the Union Jack Club for veterans just across the way from Waterloo Station. His room resembled a cell, but provided a paradise: ‘It meant that for the first time for four years you didn’t have to be with other people if you didn’t want to. It was luxury unimagined.’ The downside was provided by the regular visits from the police, ‘who came from time to time to see if there were any deserters’. Like customs officers, they must have cast the shadow of ersatz guilt upon him. The threat of the redcaps became a recurring comic motif in the radio version of Hancock’s Half Hour almost ten years later, as Hancock the poseur made spectacular claims to a derring-do war career he never had.

At Ebury Street he was reunited with his old chum, Graham Stark. Graham recalls that they survived on a diet of coffee and doughnuts – Hancock used to joke that he ended up with a hole in his stomach – and spent much of their time together in the Nuffield Centre, the club for service personnel then situated in Coventry Street, where it embraced the restructured remains of the bombed-out Café de Paris next door. They spent their time wondering when someone was going to offer one of them a ‘walk-on’ part at the very least. Stark remembers, ‘It was almost a relief when the weekends came, the agents’ offices were closed, and nobody could give us the brush-off.’ They whiled away the time with the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle, turning the solving of it into an exhibitionist ritual designed to command attention. As Graham wielded the pencil, Tony would extemporise: ‘Oh, here’s one, right – let’s think now – C – blank – T – four-legged animal – feline – it’s not easy, is it?’ Sitting there in their demob suits, they received free coffee and sandwiches and nobody asked any questions. Crosswords never lost their allure for Hancock, and his fascination with words – the magic of holding them up to the light and teasing out their innermost meaning – was brilliantly caught by Galton and Simpson in the bedsitter episode, as he stared into the mirror and pondered his teeth: ‘I wonder which one’s the bicuspid. It’s a funny word that, isn’t it? Bicuspid. Bicuspid. Bicuspid … yes, that’s probably from the Latin. Bi meaning two, one on each side. Cus, cus meaning to swear. Pid meaning pid. Greek probably, pid. Yes, Greek for teeth. So bicuspid – two swearing teeth.’

When Stark was offered a spell in repertory in Kidderminster, Hancock took the first step in the direction of some form of self-sufficiency by moving into a one-room flat with two beds at the end of a bombed terrace at Edith Road, Barons Court, with another Gang Show pal, John Beaver. Here they shared a washbasin with no running water and a bucket underneath to catch the water when you pulled out the plug. Hancock was always forgetting to empty the water, and this played havoc with the landlady’s ceiling underneath. Here also Hancock endured the freezing winter of 1947, keeping warm by clinging to the bed covers – ‘I just gave up looking for work and took to my bed’ – and subsisting on a distinctive brand of sausage: ‘It tasted like hell, but you ate it and if you had a couple of glasses of water each day for about three days following, you felt full.’ Beaver recalled a slightly more varied menu: ‘Tony was afraid of getting scurvy and insisted on a diet of green stuffs.’ They used to go shopping for Brussels sprouts, potatoes and the infamous sausage, but because his pride did not allow him to be seen carrying a shopping bag, Hancock insisted on using an old cardboard attaché case. In those days, when it was not easy to come by new kitchen utensils, they were restricted to a single knife, fork and spoon each, a frying pan and a saucepan. Everything was cooked over a gas ring. The spirit that pervaded the ménage is shown by a mock-diploma that some friends, the actor David Lodge among them, presented to Beaver: ‘Know by all men by these presents [sic] that this Golden Spoon, to be known hereafter as the “Culinary Trophy” was presented to Johnathon Beaver, Esq., of the Beaver-Hancock household as a token of esteem and regard of the Gastronomical Triumphs over the Sausage.’ Beaver was keen to emphasise that it was all in good fun, describing his roommate as ‘somebody who was always in a good mood, in a good temper – you could always get on with him – no big-time attitude about him – he would always give and take’.

As poverty competed with the rationing culture of the day, the exigencies of the kitchen were matched by those of the wardrobe. In addition to ‘the railings’, the name Hancock gave to his pinstripe grey demob suit, he admitted to two shirts and a change of underwear. Celluloid collars came in useful. Uncomfortable as hell, they could at least be washed clean under a running tap. The Fleet Street veteran Derek Jameson recalls meeting Tony by chance at the old Lyons Corner House in Leicester Square some time around this period. As the young journalist sat there with a cup of tea and his pile of newspapers, an easy target for anyone wanting a chat, he was approached by the aspirant young comedian: ‘He wanted a gander at my Daily Mirror. What he said made little impression on me at the time. What he wore stayed in my mind forever. It was his tie. A perfectly normal, rather dull neckpiece. Only he had no shirt under it. Just a crumpled sports jacket.’ The memory would have come as no surprise to Tony’s close friend, the comedian Dick Emery, who bumped into him in a similar state of half-dress in nearby Lisle Street soon after. Tony was carrying a parcel wrapped in newspaper. When Dick asked where he was going, he confessed that he was trying to find someone to lend him the money for his laundry, namely the shirt tied up with string under his arm!

When Beaver went into pantomime at the end of 1946, John Herod, another Gang Show chum who later became prominent in Australian show business as Johnny Ladd, moved in. Elsa Page was a mutual friend with an RAF background who remembers them as a typical ‘Odd Couple’: ‘They were not compatible as roommates. John was very precise with everything very clean, in its place, and well organised. Hank (as he was still affectionately known during these times) was untidy and left pans about, so John was cross and Hank would go home to Mum.’ Hancock could not have survived thus far without the support of his mother. When she came up to town, tea at the Regent Palace Hotel was de rigueur. Often Graham Stark saw her slide a ten bob note to her son under the table to save him the embarrassment of not being able to pay. The ritual was one that family friend Mary Hobley also observed. Tony always acknowledged the encouragement his mother gave at this time: ‘For years she had every right to tell me to turn it in, but she never did.’ In another interview he went further: ‘She thought that everything I did was great. It was only when I was settling down that she started to become critical. She was clearly very successful at hiding her doubts.’

According to Elsa, it was Herod who bullied Hancock into pursuing work. Each day he would take the tube from Barons Court to Charing Cross Road, where the variety agents had their offices en masse. Tony had a special mantra that helped him on his way. ‘You will call on every agent in London,’ he would recite to himself over and over as the train rattled on its way. When he emerged into the daylight his resolution disintegrated and, seduced by the smell of coffee beans roasting, he would allow himself to be drawn into the womb of the Express Dairy or a rival establishment for the newspapers, then lunch, followed by the decision-making process of what film to see that afternoon. One day hunger conquered fear and he forced himself up a dingy staircase into an agent’s office: ‘Heart thumping, eyes fixed and rather glazed, I burst in and announced, “I’m Anthony Hancock, comedian. I wonder if you’ve got anything.”’ As he extended his hand in greeting, he misplaced his foot and slipped on the rug. His feet went forward as he went backwards, half out of the door. The thunderstruck look on that agent’s face stayed with him forever. According to Beaver, Tony eventually went to great lengths to have an acetate recording made of his act to tout around the agents, but his lack of confidence in himself was not helped by his own assessment of his material. He sensed – perhaps correctly – that what had worked three miles from the front line was not what was required outside the theatre of war. The fear turned out to be academic. He had not been forgotten by Ralph Reader, who in the spring of 1947 offered him an audition for a very special new theatrical venture that would provide Tony Hancock with his first genuine professional engagement. Presented by Reader on behalf of the Air Council, the show attempted to tell the ‘epic story’ of the RAF in twenty-seven scenes of pageantry, comedy and song with a cast of around 300. The majority were still serving as airmen and women attached to the RAF Theatre Pageant Unit, who were supplemented by a small core of professionals, or ‘civvies’ – for civilians – as they became known. Hancock qualified as one of the latter.

His appearance in Wings provided Lily Hancock with her proudest moment from her son’s career. Without his knowledge she travelled to Blackpool in April 1947 for the opening at the Opera House, the largest theatre in the land. As she remembered things, she had reached the interval with no obvious sign of Tony in the first half of the show, when suddenly the curtain went up again. All her anxieties were dispelled as he sidled on in his definitive ‘erk’ characterisation and sang the sentimental appeal that Reader had written especially for him:

Intelligence is not the thing I’m famed for.