Titter Ye Not!

The Boxing Night panto became a treasured annual date in the Howard diary. At home, Edith Howard encouraged her young son to create his own tiny wonderland in the front room: a tea tray for a stage, rags on sticks as makeshift curtains, actors cut out from cartoon drawings and pasted on cardboard so that they could stand up. Then Frankie would invent his own stories, shifting them around the stage as he talked his way through their adventures for hours on end.

He never tired of it, and at weekends after Sunday lunch he would put on special performances for his mother, brother and small sister.

Now Frankie’s mother was forced to go out and do charring for wealthy families on the ‘other’ side of town to make up the money to support her own family. She scrubbed floors, washed dishes, cleaned rooms for a few precious pounds. But the kids never went hungry or found themselves without clean clothes. The pride of a working-class mum saw to that.

By coincidence, it was at this time that the eager-beaver young Francis decided to embark on his first commercial venture to make himself a spot of pocket money. He persuaded the little girl next door, a winsome moppet named Ivy Smith, to help him mount a concert party – and charge admission.

Their stage was the end of the garden, with the fence as backcloth. The time was Saturday afternoon. The audience – asked to fork out a farthing for the privilege – were the local neighbourhood kids. And the wardrobe belonged to Frankie’s mother and Ivy’s parents, who knew nothing about it. Draped in clothes several sizes too big, the pair paraded around giving full rein to the imagination of their youthful entrepreneur-producer.

Until Mum finally appeared on the scene, took one look at her clothes being dragged across the grass, and demanded: ‘What’s going on here?’

Frankie proudly informed her that he was giving a concert – and, what’s more, making money out of it. The reply was a sound cuff around his head, and a stern lecture from his mother along the lines of daylight robbery, ending with the order: ‘Give it all back – now!’

A chastened Francis surrendered his profits and, rubbing his head, reflected that show business had its pitfalls after all.

Scholastically, Frankie Howard was nobody’s fool. At the age of eleven he sat for the entrance examination to Woolwich County School for Boys, later to become Shooters Hill Grammar School – and won a scholarship there. He was awarded one of only two London County Council Scholarships that were on offer.

On 1 May 1928 he duly donned a smart uniform of blue blazer, grey trousers and black tie with gold stripes, and set off across the fields for the daily 45-minute slog to a brand new school. Young Francis Howard walked into the new building in Red Lion Lane with four hundred other children of varying ages and abilities, sharing the tummy-butterflies and usual mixture of anticipation and trepidation on the first day of any term. Frankie, trudging along the footpaths that morning, was in a blue funk at the prospect of being in an alien class – socially as well as academically.

Shooters Hill Grammar was a mixed fee-paying school that drew its pupils from a wide circle of well-to-do middle-class families embracing Greenwich, Blackheath and south as far as Bromley. Today it has changed its name to Eaglesfield, and with 1,500 pupils is the largest secondary modern boys’ school in southern England. But in those days, as a scholarship boy Francis stood out in a smaller crowd, or felt he did, and the knowledge did nothing to help his innate shyness and over-sensitivity.

But he was tall for his age, though thin as a rake, athletic, and proved good at sport. In a school where cold baths and cricket counted for everything, sporting prowess was the green light to popularity, and soon he was accepted by the others and indeed became a leader on the field of human conflict where willow meets leather.

Even at that age, he had a long reach and large hands, and became a demon bowler for his team.

A slight hiccup came in his first summer term when he was smitten with a young girl in his class, and made the mistake of writing her a love letter, which he tentatively passed to her under the desk. ‘Her name was Sheila, and I had a huge crush on her.’ Such is calf love – but some cad got hold of the precious missive, and next day it appeared pinned up on the school notice board for all the world to see. ‘Oh, the shame of it!’ Frankie would wail later, still squirming at the memory of the hoots of derision before he elbowed his way through the crowd and tore it down. But he got his own back the following Saturday by taking six wickets in six balls, and was hoisted shoulder high by his team-mates to be carried off the field in triumph.

Working hard and playing hard, Frankie’s schooldays were days he could look back on with pleasure and not a little nostalgia. He joined the school dramatic society, and immediately made his mark as a leading light on the boards. He even turned his hand to writing short plays, and submitted Lord Halliday’s Birthday Party for a school concert. But the headmaster, Mr Rupert Affleck MA, studied the hour-long script and found that his tastes and those of his thespian pupil didn’t quite tally.

He banned it.

Undeterred, Frankie was in every show that came along, eventually earning himself the nickname ‘The Actor’, a flag he waved with enormous pride. If those childish plays improvised at the bottom of his garden were the seeds of what lay ahead, the school concerts were the first flowerings which suggested that perhaps his destiny lay in the theatre after all. Instinctively he felt drawn to things artistic.

He also contributed to the school’s annual magazine. The Ship was an impressive piece of work, a bound volume of more than one hundred pages detailing the exploits of the boys and girls – and, most important, of their prowess on the sporting field of battle. Reports of house matches between Brodie, Briggs, Leather, Clark and Platt – named after the housemasters who ran them – took up many pages.

But so did the pupils’ own efforts, and no second guess needed for who set out a page of jokes under the headline Howlers in the 1932 issue … They were typical schoolboy humour, as bad as any you will find in any school magazine anywhere – but in Frankie’s case, an early taste of things to come.

Sample: Ali Baba means being somewhere else when the crime was committed. (Think about it.)

Poll tax is a tax on parrots.

People go around Venice in gorgonzolas.

A senator is half-man and half-horse.

They don’t write scripts like that now – or maybe they do.

Shortly after this minor triumph, a school health check was less successful. On Frankie’s medical card of 25 October 1932 appeared two rather ominous words: ‘Back stoop.’ It was the first sign in his teens of a condition that would plague him on and off for the rest of his days.

Meantime, something else that would become a lifetime’s odyssey – and eventually a soul-searching dilemma – took over in a big way. Every night the young Francis faithfully went down on his knees by his bedside and said his prayers. He kept a Bible by his bedside, and read it last thing at night before switching the light out.

On Sunday he went to the church of St Barnabas on the corner. And at the age of thirteen he was deemed knowledgeable enough by the church elders and the Revd Jonathan Chisholm, vicar of St Barnabas, to be invited to become a Sunday School teacher. On Monday evenings he joined half a dozen other tutors from the diocese at the vicar’s home in Appleton Road for tea and cakes, and instruction for the following Sunday’s work.

Problem: Francis was not a good listener, and his attention was inclined to wander into the dream clouds as the vicar droned on. Result: when it came to the class on Sunday and he was facing a dozen eager young faces in his room off the church hall, he had no idea at all what he should be telling them.

But never one to be lost for words, Francis – he never quite made it to St Francis, though he admitted to it as a fleeting thought – launched into great yarns from his imagination featuring pirates, detectives and historical adventures.

In those days the face that would later launch a thousand quips – and virtually never veer from the script on TV, stage, screen or radio – proved a dab hand at off-the-cuff invention. Like the story-tellers of old, Frankie entranced his youthful audience – and the word spread. This was the room to be in. He received the plaudits from the Revd Chisholm with due humility, even if the Bible had taken a back pew that day. Luckily the vicar never sat in. He even encouraged his young protégé to join the Church Dramatic Society.

But now, at thirteen, a crisis loomed. The signs had probably been there, along with the growing pains of a shy introvert lad who longed to proclaim his talent to the outside world. Suddenly young Francis developed a stammer, a genuine speech impediment he put down to a mixture of wanting to please and over-eagerness to get the words out. ‘I was all stutter and gabble,’ is how he summed it up.

Also looming on the horizon was a church performance of Tilly of Bloomsbury, a vintage comedy by Ian Hay, and Francis practically went down on his knees to beg them to let him take part.

Enter Mrs Winifred Young – one of the several women who Frankie would later claim unequivocally to have had a major influence on his life, and the direction it took. Mrs Young was the producer, and she saw something in the shy, stumbling youth beyond a stutter and a capacity for walking into the scenery.

She found a role for him – Tilly’s father, aged all of sixty-five, complete with false beard, who would stalk around the stage declaring his faith in his daughter’s virtue through his whiskers. Mrs Young took the embryo actor under her wing, inviting him round to her house in Westmount Road on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and laboriously rehearsing him for two hours in the subtleties of enunciation and, above all, talking s-l-o-w-l-y.

And she won through. Slowly Francis relaxed, learned to enjoy his lines, forgot his nerves in the concentration on the part. ‘She was my Professor Higgins,’ he said. ‘I did exactly what she told me – and when it finally happened I was the hit of the night!’

He was, too. The unwieldy youth whose features were ill-disguised behind a long grey beard won the loudest applause. More important, he even won a few lines in the local paper’s review. The South London Press singled him out for praise, and Francis proudly cut out the six-inch critique and pasted it in a school exercise book.

‘It was my first Press cutting,’ he recalled. ‘But I had to wait a precious long time for the second!’

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Early Signs (#ulink_4f45e1da-4d19-580e-a811-06ee612ca85b)

Someone had said something to Frankie that took root inside his head and wouldn’t let go.

It happened as the curtain rang down in St Barnabas Church Hall on the last ripple of applause for Tilly, and a sweating potential star-is-born unclipped the spectacle frames that held his beard in place and breathed a deep sigh of relief.

‘You know,’ said the someone, ‘you should be an actor …’

Frankie never remembered who owned the voice. All he did know was that a gangling thirteen-year-old who had taken three curtain calls owed that someone a debt of gratitude. Because those lucky seven words welded a sudden determination inside him, turned the crossroads sign round from religion to acting – though some say pounding a pulpit isn’t that much different – and sent him on his way with a swing in his stride.

Suddenly Frankie Howerd knew, with incontrovertible certainty, where he was heading.

‘I could so easily have gone into the Church,’ he said. ‘I had religion instilled into me from the day I was born.’

His mother had been at the play. When he went home that night and told her of his Big Decision, Edith Howard, bless her, gave him a hug and said: ‘That sounds like a nice idea, Francis.’ It may have been the euphoria of the moment, or she may have been following a mother’s instinct of knowing when to agree with your offspring’s wildest dreams, but for Frankie it was the seal of approval he needed.

Frankie sensed her true feelings, but said nothing. ‘I think Mum was disappointed that I decided against entering the Church,’ he told friends later. ‘But thank God she supported me all the way. If she had come down heavily on me, I don’t know what I’d have done.’ Luckily, Mum was too sensible.

The next day Frankie enrolled for acting lessons.

His father was home, but doing very little to help. Finally invalided out of the Army, he took a local job as a clerk, but the pay was so poor that his wife still had to keep scrubbing the floors and polishing the furniture to make ends meet. In that year, 1933, the sixteen-year-old Frankie had little idea what was going on outside the unremarkable but comfortable confines of Eltham. The only clue was in the line of grey-faced men he would pass in the dole queue stretching round the block outside the local labour exchange.

The world was a bitter place, and that spring saw the height of the Great Depression with three million unemployed and the average manual wage standing at £2.10s. (£2.50) a week.