Titter Ye Not!

In the crowded, smoky haze with the troops crammed at tables over their beer, Frankie hit the right nerve – and touched funny-bones. The other secret of his act was that everything he did tilted at Authority – with a capital A.

Later he would christen all bosses, be they managing directors, chief producers, entrepreneurs or impresarios (take a bow, Bernard Delfont!) with the sobriquet of ‘Thing’. For now his barbs were directed at ‘Them’, the faceless Top Brass who were never named but shown up as causing Gunner Howard F.A. maximum discomfort while sheltering behind their pips and their stripes. He would end his act for the troops by leading them into one of the wartime songs that brought a catch to the throat and a tear to the eye: ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ or the rousing ‘Bless ’Em All’.

Frankie’s face was rapidly becoming his fortune in terms of the laughter it provoked. So was a voice which had the first hint of what later persuaded Harry Secombe to suggest he wore ‘the tenor’s friend – a truss with a spike in it.’ It could be likened, as one critic suggested, to ‘A corncrake suffering from an overdose of gravel’.

In fact Frankie had been working assiduously on his voice while on lonely patrol in the country lanes of Essex. He told his friend Lew Lane, the producer of numerous events for the Water Rats charity, how he expanded his vocal cords. ‘I sing the alphabet,’ he revealed. ‘It’s really very simple.’ And in front of Lew one night in his dressing-room at the Prince of Wales Theatre he sang it from A to Z, up and down the scale.

‘They say some actors can read a telephone book and make you laugh,’ Lew said later. ‘Hearing Frankie sing the alphabet sent shivers down my spine. All the letters had a resonance of their own … it was weird.’

Weird or not, it worked. Frankie grew in confidence. And his voice grew fuller by the day, its range reaching out to the corners of the low-ceilinged Mess at Shoeburyness Barracks.

He totally flouted the advice once given to budding comics by the legendary Lupino Lane: ‘Any inclination to fidget and lack stage repose should be immediately controlled. This can often cause great annoyance to the audience and result in a point being missed. Bad, too, is the continual use of phrases such as “You see? … You know! … Of course …”’

But on an unashamed wave of ‘You sees’ and ‘You knows’ emanating from the makeshift stage by the bar, no one could possibly miss the rumpled khaki-clad figure fidgeting and pulling faces up there through the cigarette smoke.

‘Listen … Lis-sen!’ it exhorted. The voice was demanding, petulant, and in the end it got its way. ‘Pull yourselves together! You’ll make me a laughing stock, you know. Now, who can manage a little titter? It isn’t always easy to get your titters out on a wet Sunday …’

They listened. They got their titters out. And they laughed.

Full of new-found zest, buoyed by the applause of his weekly ventures on to the public stage, Frankie grew bolder. His sister Betty helped out on some occasions, forging the close-knit bond that would stay with them for life. Sometimes he persuaded her to take to the stage as his stooge, even sing a song or two. At other times she would take the train out from Fenchurch Street on a cheap-day return to lend him moral support.

Frankie’s downfall came one November day in 1941, and it was spectacular.

Autumnal mists were swirling around the barracks, lending a chill to the air from the North Sea. To cheer up the battalion, Frankie persuaded his Entertainments Officer to put on a lunchtime show in the Mess.

Only this time he was in drag.

‘I was dressed as an old ATS scrubber, with huge balloons pushed under my jacket, a straw wig, a white powder face and a great half-moon blob of lipstick over my mouth,’ Frankie would say, regaling friends with the story after much persuasion. ‘I got up on a table and sang a comic song – but in the middle of it, the air-raid siren suddenly started up.

‘Everyone stampeded for the exit to get out on the parade ground and take up their posts. I managed to get backstage and do a quick change into my own uniform, got the wig off – but I forgot about the make-up!

‘You’ve guessed it. I scrambled out with my rifle and pack and lined up with the others. I was in the back row and standing smartly to attention when this young officer marched briskly along the ranks to make sure we were good and ready for whatever Jerry might throw at us.

‘He stopped abruptly opposite me, looked me up and down, but said nothing. Then he just stared into my chalk-white face, and I remembered the mascara and lipstick. Cor – strewth! I felt some explanation might be in order.

‘“Er – concert party, sir … The alert went …”

‘He just looked at me. “Um,” he said. “So it did.” And he moved off, only more slowly. At the end of the row he turned and peered at me, shaking his head slowly.

‘The rest of the lads never let me live that one down.’

Frankie had what is known as a ‘quiet war’. Instead of posting him to the front line, the Army had the sense to see that the talents of their ham-fisted but willing recruit were more suited to a microphone than to a bayonet. Gunner Howard F.A. stayed on at Shoeburyness and was transferred to the Quartermaster’s Office where he virtually took over the garrison’s ‘fun factory’. He ousted the Entertainments Officer, and flung himself wholeheartedly into getting together the weekly acts that, for a couple of hours at least, would take the minds of the troops off what was happening across the Channel.

Along with the job, he was promoted to Bombardier. Since the only bombarding Gunner Howard had ever done in his life was the verbal kind, delivered from a stage or maybe a table-top, Frankie was a- mazed to be singled out.

But his enthusiasm, coupled with his need for perfection even in those young, headstrong days, tended to get the better of him and outstrip diplomacy. It would happen again and again in later life, putting people’s backs up, getting himself a reputation as a niggler and worrier, both of which were fully justified. Or as a troublemaker, which wasn’t.

But who could tell a general that, when a two-page memorandum landed on the top-brass desk from a stripling in the lowest ranks telling him what was wrong with the Army?

‘I knew I shouldn’t have done it,’ Frankie would accept later. ‘But as far as I was concerned too many of the officers were putting their noses in where they didn’t belong. I was in charge of the shows, and there they were telling me what to do! Most of them didn’t know their funny-bone from their elbow, if you get my meaning.’

So he sat down and shot off a broadside to the garrison Commander-in-Chief, outlining his grievances. Mainly it was about the blue-pencil censorship, scratching out too many of his best lines. But there was more. Frankie demanded this, he demanded that.

The apoplectic general, slamming the pages down on his blotter in disbelief, demanded his head.

The upshot: Bombardier Howard was put on a charge and thrown into the guardhouse. It ready bleakly: gross insubordination.

Frankie wriggled out of that one, but it was a close call. The C-in-C relented after apologies and a long explanation was read out to him, plus an invitation to see the next show for himself. Frankie even won recognition for an Entertainments Committee from all ranks to oversee the acts.

It was now that Frankie started to embroider his delivery with the mannerisms that would make it unique in years to come. The stumbling hesitations became more pronounced. Innocent words sprouted horns of wickedness. His leer took on new dimensions of suggestiveness.

And the boys and girls in khaki loved it.

As his confidence grew, Frankie joined a local concert party in nearby Westcliff. On his way to rehearse, he spotted a poster. Talent Night in Town! Frankie altered course, made his way to the Empire Theatre, and was first in the queue. There were no lights outside because of blackout regulations. Most of the audience were elderly. The atmosphere was curiously sombre. Frankie thought he would liven it up.

He bounced out on stage, brimful of pep. ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen —’ Not gentle-men, not yet. ‘I am now going to sing a little song entitled “She Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas”!’ There was a stunned silence. From the wings Frankie heard an enraged hiss. The manager.

‘Gerroff! Now —!’

Frankie, flummoxed, looked at the drapes and his voice rose in an indignant squeak. ‘Eh? What –?’

A ripple of laughter ran through the audience, but the manager would not be thwarted. ‘I’m not having dirty jokes like that in my theatre!’ he fumed. ‘Out you go!’ And behaving like ‘Disgusted of Westcliff’, he ordered the bewildered comic out of his theatre.

Much later Frankie would remember that night and work it into his act, talking to an invisible presence in the wings.

It was with the concert party, playing to local institutes in church halls, that Frankie met Mrs Vera Roper, a vivacious housewife who was a dab hand at the piano. She would accompany him when he burst into song. But one night Frankie started off … to silence. He stopped short, glared at her, and said: ‘Are you ready?’ No reply.

‘That’s all I need,’ Frankie growled. ‘A deaf accompanist!’

And that was how ‘Don’t mock the afflicted’ came into being.

Mrs Vera Roper had, in fact, been mulling over her ration book which lay on top of the piano, counting the number of meat coupons that were left in it. She was far too preoccupied to take in Frankie’s sarcasm.

He looked at her again, then at the audience. ‘Poor dear,’ he said scathingly. ‘She’s past it!’

The laughter that rose from the chairs in the hall gave him pause to think. The song got going finally, with Mrs Roper’s ration book tucked safely back in her handbag. But Frankie was unusually silent in the van ride home to base.

For the next week he was engrossed in a weird and wonderful idea. On the surface it sounded too silly to work: a singer accompanied by a totally deaf pianist – how on earth could it be feasible? But slowly it took shape, and the preliminary sketch became a running gag that was probably the most famous in Frankie Howerd’s entire repertoire.

During the next fifty years, Frankie would have no fewer than eight ‘deaf’ lady pianists tinkling the ivories. Each one benign and bewitching in her own way, each a stoic pin-cushion for her master’s cruel barbs. ‘No, don’t laugh … poor soul, it might be one of your own–’ The long-suffering Vera became ‘Madame Vere-Roper, known to me as Ada’. Why was it so funny? It was the way he told it, of course.

Next in line for musical immortality was Blanche Moore – ‘Madame Blanchie Moore’ – a large, motherly woman who stuck valiantly by him in theatres, concert halls and clubs up and down the country. She hailed from that same concert party, though at that time she only played for her two daughters while they performed a lively dance routine.

She, too, was a housewife, happy to be called on by Frankie for various dates, with the understanding that the family came first. If she was free, with no domestic commitments, she would be on the next train to whichever venue awaited her talents. If not, no problem. Frankie had other ladies-in-waiting.

Until four years later – when Sunny Rogers, the whip-cracking, rope-twirling Gal from the Golden West, rode into town.

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