Titter Ye Not!

The sprawling tentacles of suburbia were reaching out from London, slowly but remorselessly grasping the precious green acres of fields and hedgerows and slipping them into its hungry concrete jaws. Ironically, given the economic climate, this was the year of the first housing estates, with building hitting a record for the century and new houses going up at the rate of a thousand a day, selling for £350 each, with a down payment of just £5 to clinch the deal.

All Francis saw of the emergence of a brave new world was the tearful face of his beloved mum when his brother Sidney and sister Betty had to be taken away from school at the age of fourteen. His parents could no longer afford their education. The youngsters were shunted out into the big wide world – Sidney joined the Post Office as a clerk, while Betty found a job as an office junior. Francis, resting on the laurels of his scholarship, stayed at school. ‘Quite honestly,’ he admitted later, ‘I never had any idea of the sacrifices my parents made to keep me.’

A year later it would just be his mum. After his father died in 1934 it was she who refused to give in. Instead she worked herself to the bone to keep the family intact. It would be a mixture of guilt and affection that kept Frankie close to her for the whole of her life. When fame and fortune came, he never forgot the early days and what she did for him.

But right now his mind was on rather more than academia. The London County Council, or LCC, ran evening classes for aspiring actors, and that included all aspects of theatrical work. Frankie enrolled, and after a few months with the LCC Dramatic Society was told of a chance to be promoted to the acting heights – to RADA, otherwise known as the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Or, if you prefer, mecca to every young hopeful in the land. The Academy was floating its own scholarship around like a tempting carrot.

Frankie’s teacher at that time was an actress named Mary Hope, who would seem to have had more faith in her pupil than he did in himself, and put him to work in prolonged coaching sessions. The examination required the embryonic thespians to spout an extract from a contemporary play, followed by two Shakespearian soliloquies. Frankie stifled his nerves, and agreed to take the plunge.

On a dismal grey day he set off from home in his best suit, clutching a packet of cheese sandwiches his mum had made him for lunch. Frankie got off the train at Holborn, and walked the half-mile to No. 62, Gower Street, where the imposing RADA building is located. He had been jittery to start with, the butterflies in his stomach fluttering with growing urgency as he got nearer to his goal. Walking through the doors, he would say, turned him into a ‘near wreck’.

He records what happened next in graphic detail.

‘I shuffled into a vast room where the other candidates were waiting, and was summoned in for the audition, absently clutching my sandwiches. That’s when my nerve went. My left leg started to shake – the original knee-trembler! Then I started the speech.

‘“To be … um … er … to be or … um … n-n-not to b-b-be … Th-th-that is … is … is … um … er … the quest-quest-question …”

‘That’s when my bag of sandwiches burst, showering crumbs and cheese all over the floor …’

Poor demoralized Frankie squeaked his way through the audition, knowing from the expressions of the three judges that he was on a hiding to nothing. He stumbled out of the audition room, shouldered through the crowd waiting their turn, and fled into the cold grey afternoon.

Well aware of the sacrifices his mother had made, Frankie felt he had failed her. ‘I had let everybody down. My mother, the school headmaster, my mates, my tutor, everyone. And myself. On the train home I just stared blankly out of the window. But when I got to Eltham I couldn’t bear to face her.’ He found himself in a field at the back of the house – ‘where I sat in the long grass, sobbing my heart out.’

The tears dried. Frankie Howerd sat there for two long hours. And slowly his mind cleared.

‘I had a strange premonition,’ he would describe it later. ‘Call it a flash of intuition – call it anything. But I sat bolt upright in the grass, and said aloud: “You’re stupid! What are you? Plain stupid! God gave you a talent, and if it’s not to be an actor – what then?’

‘And the answer came: a comedian!

‘Why not? I didn’t have anything to lose, except my pride – and that was wounded enough already after such a traumatic day.’

Frankie crawled home at sunset to face his mother, and break the bad news to her. When she heard about the RADA débâcle she smiled sympathetically, patted his shoulder, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. When she heard about his new ambition to be a funnyman, there was the briefest of pauses before she nodded and said: ‘If it makes you happy. As long as you’re kind and decent, I don’t care what you do.’ What more could a devoted son ask of a devoted mother?

Frankie left school. He had no great diplomas to his name when he shook hands with the headmaster and turned his back on the gates of Shooters Hill Grammar for the last time. Just a GCE (the General Certificate of Education). His name is listed under the farewell Valete in the 1935 school magazine.

But he had some good memories to take away with him – and he’d managed to filch the cricket ball with which he took the six-out-of-six to become a hero for a day.

Now it was time to get a job, and help with the family finances. In those hard times it was anything but easy, but after prodigious scouting of the area Frankie landed a job as a filing clerk with the firm of Henry A. Lane, Provisions and Produce, at No. 37–45, Tooley Street in the East End – at the princely wage of £1 per week. The job was dreary and dead-end, the only relief being after work when Francis found solace in Southwark Cathedral, where he would sit alone in a pew for hours listening to organ music or concerts – and on one unforgettable occasion the St Matthew Passion which seemed to scorch its way into his very soul.

His religious zeal burned as vividly as ever, coupled with a growing appreciation of music. ‘I know nothing about classical music,’ he confessed once. ‘But it all adds up, doesn’t it?’

As he shifted restlessly at his desk overlooking the docks, Frankie’s pen toyed with shipping orders and invoices while his mind was elsewhere – in the realm of the theatre, and the local concert parties around Shooters Hill where once more he was a leading light. His boss didn’t help. According to Frankie, the manager – one Henry Lane himself – had a limp, a black patch over one eye, and a malevolent gleam in the other, a legacy from the Great War. Mr Lane vented his spleen daily on the hapless youth in his charge – and Frankie, being Frankie, was panicked into making ludicrous mistakes like spilling tea in the boss’s lap or ink over the desk.

In the ten weeks he worked there, Frankie also came out in an unsightly rash of boils, caused by a mixture of stress and being run down. They were the first of innumerable ailments which would dog his footsteps over the ensuing years, earning him his unfortunate reputation for hypochondria, much of it well-founded. But to start with it was just boils.

The final straw in Frankie’s unhappy association with the company came when a bundle of documents he dispatched to Vladivostock was opened and revealed to be a programme for a revue he had just put on called Frank Howard’s Gertchers Concert Party. It was a case of ‘Kindly leave the office’ – and Frankie, at nineteen, found himself enduring the humiliation of the dole queue for the first time in his young life.

His mother helped find him his next job. The head of the household where Edith Howard did her daily cleaning chores ran an insurance company, heard about her son’s sorry tale, and gave him a post as a clerk in the firm’s Southwark office at thirty shillings a week.

But by now all Frankie’s creative juices were flowing into his amateur dramatics, with concert parties taking up most of his energy. That meant comedy – and he worked day and night to think up sketches and routines he could perform in the local church hall, old folks’ homes and even for the Shooters Hill Dramatic Society he had joined. He formed ‘Frank Howard’s Knockouts’, insisting once again that his name was in the title – the first significant traces of a performer’s ego becoming apparent?

Travelling to concert dates could prove a problem, but Frankie was nothing if not an opportunist, and thumbed a lift with anyone who would take him. Once he found himself on the back of a motor bike en route home after the annual Herne Bay Sunday School outing. It poured with rain. The upshot: to boils, add pneumonia.

Frankie expanded his concerts to other boroughs, and was soon performing in church halls throughout South London – and all for free. He even changed his name to Ronnie Ordex for a time, decided he didn’t like it, and changed it back again. Finally he felt it was time his efforts yielded a material dividend.

He started looking around for a suitable place to air his talent – for money. His first tentative attempts to turn professional resulted in dismal failure. But the boy tried, how he tried! Now twenty-one, he wrote himself a comic monologue, and rehearsed it until he was word perfect with scarcely a hint of a stutter. Then he thumbed through the entertainment columns to find the nearest music hall that was featuring what he was looking for. Talent Night!

In the thirties most of the country’s music halls put on a ‘Friday Night is Talent Night’ spot in their bill at one time or another. All Frankie had to do was pick the theatre, make his way there, and join the queue to put his name down on the list. He made sure he came on early so that he didn’t have to wait around too long kicking his heels and trying to control his nerves. That first monologue failed to get the laughs, so Frankie ditched it. The following week he put on schoolboy shorts and tried out a comic song. Again, a smattering of applause that sounded suspiciously like sympathy. Next, he switched to impressions. James Cagney, Charles Laughton, Noel Coward, they all came in for their share of mimicry. The trouble was that they all sounded the same. Frankie wrote that off to experience, and went back to playing safe – telling jokes.

It was at the Lewisham Hippodrome that he decided to try the one about Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins …

Long John is standing by the rail staring out to sea when Jim tentatively approaches him and plucks at his sleeve. ‘Yes, lad,’ growls the old sea dog. ‘What be ye wantin’?’

‘I was wonderin’, Long John,’ ventures young Jim, ‘how you come to lose your leg?’

‘Aaargh, that come from a cannon fired from a Spanish ship. I’m walkin’ the deck when — whoosh! This cannon ball takes me leg clean off. But quick as a flash me mates find a piece o’ wood and screw it in – and I’m as good as new.’

‘And … how come you got a steel hook for a hand?’ queries young Jim.

‘That, lad, be when I’m fightin’ Bluebeard the Pirate. He gets in a lucky swipe with his cutlass – and me hand drops overboard into the sea. Quick as a flash me mates grab a steel hook from the deck and screw it in – and there it is! Good as new.’

‘Finally,’ pursues the lad, ‘that eye patch. How come you’re blind in one eye?’

‘Ah that! That’s seagull droppin’s!’

‘But seagull droppin’s don’t make you blind –’

‘It do’, says Long John [and here Frankie would crook one finger at his eye] ‘if you’ve got a hook for a hand …’

He should have stayed in bed that day. On the bill were comedians Jimmy James and Derek Roy, both of whom had their own highly individual line in comedy patter, so the audacious tenderfoot found himself in tough company, while Jack Payne and his Band kept the music swinging. Jimmy – real name James Casey – was perfecting the drunk act that would be hailed as the best of its kind in comic history. As he staggered on in top hat and tails, trying to reach the cigarette in his mouth with two wavering fingers, you could almost see the stage tilting beneath him as he attempted to stay upright. He would become known as ‘the comedian’s comedian’, and Frankie, watching open-mouthed from the wings, could never have guessed that within twenty years he would be following his idol out on to the stage of the London Palladium in successive Royal Variety shows. Or that Jack Payne would one day become his agent.

‘Jimmy performed his drunk act like a rhythmic ballet. There was a kind of beauty about it,’ Frankie said, marvelling. ‘Humour is all about conflicting elements – and here was a drunk performing a ballet! There’s conflict for you.’

Derek Roy was making lesser waves, but would go on to become the resident comedian on the BBC’s Variety Bandbox, the most successful radio show of its kind, and Frankie would join him in presenting the show on alternate weeks. A-mazing – but that night in Lewisham his career could have been nipped in the bud for all time when he suffered the ultimate humiliation for any comic … being hooted off the stage.

New talent went on right after the interval. Jimmy James had closed the first half, and curiously enough excelled naturally in the style which Frankie would later adopt. He was a brilliant adlibber, and could milk laughs from the slightest chance remark. He was once asked by a BBC producer what he did on the stage, and replied: ‘I’m glad you brought that up. It’s been worrying me for years!’ While in a historic live radio show from the Garrick Theatre in the early fifties he mislaid his script and went through an entire nine-minute sketch with a bemused Tony Hancock as his feed, making it all up as he went along. And nine minutes can be a long time.

Curtain up. Frankie heard his name called. Taking his usual deep breath to stem his nerves he walked out with as much confidence as he could muster – and froze as a blinding spotlight pinned him to the stage like a fly in aspic. He gulped, tried to stammer out the start of the Long John Silver story. And dried.

Someone in the audience tittered.

Frankie tried again. After a few seconds his voice faded away into silence. The huge theatre was deathly quiet, suddenly hostile.

And poor, unfortunate Frankie just stood there, the shivering hub of his own personal nightmare.

‘I had never known anything like it – and yet it was what I’d wanted all my life,’ he said much later, appreciating the irony of that dreadful night. ‘I could only stand there like an idiot screwing up my eyes against the glare. I tried to get going on the joke, but it was so off-putting that my voice just tailed away and I dried up! I suppose I just wasn’t used to it.’

The audience started to laugh and heckle. Boos and cat-calls mingled with the jeers. From the pit the orchestra leader hissed, ‘Say something – or get off the stage!’