TONY HANCOCK

The Definitive Biography

John Fisher

For Sue,

with love,

for always being there

FOREWORD

Sid James used to claim that he learned his lines during the television commercials. That was always a sore point with me, a plodder who takes about three hours to learn one page. All the time I sweated over my own script, going through what I call my hair shirt routine, I imagined Sid looking up from a cornflakes advertisement and saying, ‘Hmm … yes, I’ve got that,’ and I could have killed him.

I shall always remember the day I went to Pinewood to watch him playing a part in Chaplin’s picture A King in New York. He had a foolscap page and a half of dialogue to learn. He handed it to me and said, ‘Give us a run through, will you?’ I rehearsed it with him a couple of times and by then he was word perfect.

I was lucky to get on the set at all. Chaplin liked to work on his film behind locked doors and it was a long time before his production assistant would admit me into the fortress. All I wanted to do was to watch a genius at work, and seeing A King in New York come to life under that man’s magic touch was an unforgettable experience. His vitality was astounding. He seemed to be everywhere at once, directing a scene here, playing in one there, and never sitting down for a moment.

Now there is a man who knew all along exactly where he wanted to go and got there. Without aspiring to be another Chaplin, I hope I shall be able to look back on my career and say the same.

Tony Hancock, 1962

Preface

‘REMEMBERED LAUGHTER’

‘For a comedian to leave behind that kind of echo of remembered laughter – it is hard to think of his life as a complete tragedy.’ Denis Norden

He would have relished the fact that by Coronation Year his name had been immortalised in a dirty joke. As a performer he renounced smut at an early age, but years later my school playground rallied to the cheeky charade of which his idol, Max Miller, would have been proud. Four deft pats on their respective body parts posed the question – ‘Who’s this?’ – and said it all. ‘Toe – knee – han’ – cock!’ The playground, then as now, knew no taboos. We all performed it out of bravado. And it is reassuring to learn that while he never allowed his professional funny side to stray into the double entendre terrain of seaside comic postcards colonised by the great Maxie himself, nevertheless from an early age ‘the lad himself’ would have been at the harmless vanguard of such fun.

I had the edge over the other members of my peer group in that I had seen our eponymous hero with my own two eyes. Hancock first became crystallised in the national consciousness by the radio comedy series, Educating Archie, starring ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy Archie Andrews. No sooner had the programme taken wing than Brough was touring the variety theatres with a stage show capitalising on its success. In November 1951 the pair arrived to spend a week at my local theatre, the Gaumont in Southampton. To a small child fast approaching seven years of age Archie was a real live boy, as genuine as any who would share that playground joke a year or so later. I prevailed upon my parents to take me to see my idol in the ‘flesh’. The parade of acts that preceded Brough’s ventriloquial turn stays etched in my memory to this day: Ossie Noble, a clown of antic finesse, able to fling an unruly deckchair across the stage in such a way that it stopped just short of the wings in perfect sitting position; Edward Victor, a hand shadow artist who secured the biggest applause of the evening with his pièce de résistance, a silhouette of Winston Churchill puffing at his cigar; Ronald Chesney, a virtuoso harmonica player with the uncanny knack of making his instrument talk; and a young girl singer hitting the high notes with, I now realise, a vocal control unusual for her years, Julie Andrews. The last two were regular members of the radio cast, as was the comedian on the bill, Tony Hancock.

It seems appropriate now that, on the show that introduced me to the delights and serendipity of variety, he should be there. Outside of the pantomime, he was the first comedian I saw perform on a theatre stage, and he set the standard thereafter. To those whose memory of Hancock is geared to his later Hancock’s Half Hour success, this performance would have been a total surprise, a triumph of visual athleticism as he threw himself into a series of impersonations of the sportsmen who featured in the opening titles of the Gaumont British Newsreel, preceded by a display of miming skill as he jerked and contorted his hands and arms and legs into an impression of an increasingly rampant robot to illustrate the song he was singing. When a few years later the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan outlined his concept of high-definition performance, he might have had Hancock in mind, although at the time all I cared about as he created physical patterns that seemed to linger in the air was the pain of laughter in my side.

Personal experience tells me that our favourite funny men inspire a loyalty that other entertainers seldom achieve. As Hancock’s career gathered momentum and prestige, he came to define the era of his greatest success – my childhood and teen years – with almost Proustian exactness, while his comparative fall from critical grace during the 1960s seemed to make its own comment upon a harsher and more cynical world. Only something transcending mere nostalgia can account for the emotional tug of war that his staunchest fans experienced as we observed the highs and lows of his career. When the slide set in, comedy – however brilliant Howerd and Steptoe and Pete & Dud proved to be – never seemed the same again. One was always waiting for Hancock to dazzle in a way that would cap the achievements of his rivals, but it never truly came. When I heard the news of his death in the summer of 1968, the hollowness of the moment seemed to say that we, his public, had failed him, that he had never been repaid for the great years. This book is an attempt to redress that debt.

Of the volumes produced on the life and work of Tony Hancock in the years following his demise, none has possibly made the impact of the first, a memoir by his second wife, Freddie Ross Hancock, written in association with that astute journalist David Nathan and published a stark year after his death. Temporarily the book, a frank and honest account of the troubles that beset the comedian down the years as well as a wider biographical treatment, turned its subject into basest clay. Emerging from a sheltered childhood protected by the enduring love of my parents’ marriage, I experienced the chill of disappointment to discover that the man I revered had been possessed by unconsidered demons. His apparent inconsiderateness and cruelty, awash in the dregs of an alcoholic despair, were nothing if not distressing to me at so impressionable an age. The book had been a gift from my parents and I recall wanting to keep it from them, so sensitive was I to the alienating aspects of its subject as he was depicted therein.

Maturity teaches that there exist the two clichéd sides to any story. In time I discovered that all star performers are marionettes whose strings are drawn upwards by the public’s expectation of them, whether on stage or off. We tend to place a burden on the object of our admiration that at times places honesty off limits. But the candour of Nathan’s text may have been self-defeating. In subsequent years the Hancock biographical record has not been helped by much that has been speculative and sensation-seeking. The doom and gloom of the final act of the story has always suggested a tragedy with few, if any, mitigating features, while in the years since his suicide in Australia in 1968 the myths have cohered and clung like barnacles to the hull of his reputation. It has therefore been rewarding to discover for much of the time a lighter, happier, even ordinary Hancock as the veils of my research have lifted; also a performer who managed to succeed for so long despite his innate insecurity, rather than someone who failed because of it. The alcoholic excess and its attendant troubles clouded only the last few years of a spectacular career, while, as Roger Wilmut, zealous chronicler of the Hancock career in all media, has pointed out, he was capable of giving fine stage performances far away in Melbourne as late as 1967. Forty years on he continues to stand tall as arguably the greatest British comedian of my lifetime. Certainly in terms of the broadcast media it is impossible to think of anyone who has subsequently surpassed his achievement. There was little that was funny about his insatiable desire for perfection and the self-doubt that came in its wake, but the sorrow at the end has to be balanced by the utter delight of a nation in his comic skills. As Denis Norden, the doyen of British comedy scriptwriters, has said, ‘For a comedian to leave behind that kind of echo of remembered laughter – it is hard to think of his life as a complete tragedy.’

Few comedians have affected the lives of their public in the way Hancock did. Even today it is impossible for a member of his audience to realise they have forgotten to cancel the newspapers while on holiday, to endure the agonies of the common cold, to be bored senseless on a Sunday afternoon, to get stuck in a lift, to donate blood, without enjoying again the bonus of the laughter he created when he found himself in those circumstances. In these contexts Norden’s phrase ‘echo of remembered laughter’ becomes especially relevant. Moreover even today the thought of what Hancock would have said or done in a particular situation provides a constant pick-me-up at moments of mounting frustration as bureaucracy and technology take more and more of a stranglehold on our lives. In this way he exercised – and continues to exercise – a strong emotional pull over his audience. It is the great paradox of his story that one to whom life became unbearable in its last few years should forty years after his death continue to make life bearable for others.

Chapter One

THE IMAGE OF HANCOCK

‘I was always trying to make life a little less deadly than it really is.’

Seldom has a comic persona played a more tantalising tug-of-war with the character of the individual behind the mask than in the case of Hancock. It was Denis Norden again who voiced the opinion that rather than write a succession of scripts for Hancock, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson found themselves writing a novel, so fully rounded was the character they refined and defined while writing in excess of 160 radio and television Half Hours over a period of seven momentous years. Even had they set out to think this way – which they didn’t – they could have had no idea they were inadvertently compiling a virtual biography of their colleague at the same time. Irrespective of the extent to which the world view, mind-set, spoken idiom of the Hancock character belonged to the performer in real life, it is remarkable to discover that so many of the pivotal aspects of the Hancock saga and mythology are foreshadowed in their words. While they obviously did not create the man with all his problems and complexities, many of which still had to reveal themselves after they parted company professionally, there was, as we shall discover, scarcely a twist or turn in Tony’s corkscrew of a career that wasn’t pre-empted with spectacular – albeit involuntary – prescience by Alan and Ray, and sometimes poignantly so.

All great comedians from Chaplin and Keaton to Cooper and Tati have understood the idea of personal branding. With Hancock the process evolved more gradually through his collaboration with two scriptwriters of brilliance, until the outer trappings of the character they created together proved too constricting to bear and he attempted to change direction, ultimately parting from them, having already revised his wardrobe and locale. Nevertheless their shared creation is how he is most fondly remembered, and his portrayal of it remains his greatest achievement. This is the Hancock of his BBC years, from the start of the classic series on radio in 1954 until the last modified episode on television in 1961. There was much else on the credit side, a dazzling amount, including his earlier radio work, two feature films, more television of variable but not entirely negative quality, and a stage repertoire upon the extent of which many a lesser talent has fashioned an entire career. But the BBC was where most would say he belonged. It has even been said that the institution has ended up more like him than its former self. ‘The BBC is the corporate equivalent of Tony Hancock,’ observed Jeff Randall, the financial journalist, in the Daily Telegraph recently. ‘Full of talent but riddled with self-doubt.’ In Hancock’s day Auntie certainly seemed more assured of her identity, in spite of – even because of – the burgeoning competition from the commercial television sector. There was then a creative climate in which all associated with Hancock drew strength.

Half a century after his heyday there can be no disputing the earlier dominance of the individual whose dodgy initial aspirate could be seen as the template for the television aerial fast becoming attached to every rooftop in the nation, the technological icon of a new age. Comparisons with his contemporaries in the broadcast media are as irrelevant as applying the process to Chaplin’s place in the history of the cinema. Hancock’s Half Hour remains both pioneer and benchmark when the British situation comedy is discussed. Hancock represents the archetypal British telly comedy character, his single surname carrying the totemic resonance of that show-business elite that includes not only the little tramp, but Garbo and Bogart and Sinatra too. To my knowledge no other performer has been featured as often as seven times on the front cover of the flagship listings magazine, the Radio Times, six times during his short career and once posthumously. A correspondent to the New Statesman a short while after his death said it all. Having mislaid his passport on his return from Geneva, the writer became ensnared in a dialogue with a testy immigration officer at Heathrow. ‘Where do you live, sir?’ asked the official. ‘Cheam.’ ‘And what does the name Hancock mean to you?’ ‘But that’s East Cheam,’ countered the traveller. ‘You can go through,’ came the response. ‘No one who knows that could be anything but British.’ All was right with the world again.

It is sometimes difficult to accept that the character moulded by Galton and Simpson for Hancock had its origins in radio. It seems to have been tucked away in the visual folk memory of the nation, sharing space with intrinsically British icons like Mr Pickwick and John Bull, for far longer. And yet only in 1956, by which time as a radio show Hancock’s Half Hour had been triumphant for three series, did it transfer to the television screen and the combined instinct of writers, producer, wardrobe mistress and star conjure up the grandiose Homburg hat and oppressive black coat with its astrakhan fur collar that defined the pretensions and pomposity of his character as securely as the frock coat, cigar and painted moustache had summed up Groucho’s aspirations to upward mobility for another era. Already Hancock the man and Hancock the entertainer shared the physique that epitomised the sagging melancholy that contributed to his comic tour de force. ‘I look like a bloody St Bernard up the mountain without a barrel’ was a line that would creep into his act. The hunched shoulders, crumpled clothes, deflated stance – like a punctured Michelin Man recast as a sorry failure for a scarecrow – all made their morose contribution to one of the symbolic figures of the twentieth century. Within a short while the image had resonance for radio listeners as well. In an episode where Hancock is courted by Madame Tussaud’s, the waxwork technician played by Warren Mitchell knows exactly the look he is after. With all good reason he sees the model in astrakhan collar and Homburg, spats and patent-leather shoes. Hancock protests that this is merely his ‘walking out gear’. He envisages his look-alike in a more casual, homely pose: ‘silk dressing gown, cigarette holder, Abyssinian slippers, Cossack pyjamas and a fez’. Curiously our preconception of the first makes the second image funnier, since everything you need to know about the man, the catalyst for the laughter, is contained in the basic brand.

If any physical aspect defined the man it was his feet. He had the exact measure of them. ‘My feet don’t seem to be with me,’ Tony muttered to one interviewer. ‘They’re living a separate existence. They’ve been put on all wrong. They don’t join the ankle properly. Sometimes they feel as if they’re flapping like penguin flippers.’ Poise was never on the agenda at the comic academy, but it irked him just the same. ‘Let’s face it,’ he admitted to his friend Philip Oakes, ‘I look odd.’ When Oakes’s basset hound produced puppies he refused the offer of one as a pet. Someone had pointed out the similarity between his own feet stuck at their quarter-to-three position and the splayed paws of the animal. ‘Can you just see us trotting along together?’ he queried. ‘They’d be entering me for Cruft’s next.’ If his feet were something of an obsession with Hancock, Galton and Simpson were only too happy to latch on to the characteristic. In one episode, having failed the driving test for the seventy-third time, Hancock protests, ‘Me feet are too big – that’s the trouble. They overlap. I put me foot on the brake, half of it goes on the accelerator as well and we’re off again!’ On another occasion Sid James surprises Tony with his nickname from the time he supposedly served in the Third East Cheam Light Horse, ‘Kippers Hancock’. He is nonplussed that Sid could have known this, but as James explains, ‘With your feet what else could they call you?’ They were, in fact, a normal size 8½ and the man, not his writers, should be given the final word on the subject: ‘I feel as though I’ve got the left one attached to my right leg and the right one attached to the left leg. Quite horrible. If you examined my feet closely, you would see they were only good for picking up nuts.’

Jacques Tati claimed that comedy begins with the feet up, and if so Hancock might appear to have had it made from day one. The fact remains, however, that his greatest physical asset was his face. What his body lacked in definition was compensated for by the quicksilver precision of his features, capable of conveying every single nuance of the human condition with ease. Boredom, frustration, worry, exasperation, misery, insomnia, complacency all became funny when Hancock registered them, not least because of the skill with which he could appear so effortlessly to pick them out of the ether. At odds with the sagging jowls and the baggy eyes, he could transmit the subtlest thought with a simple twirl of a lip, the merest quiver of a cheek. On occasions the eyes defied you to tell him what he was thinking. You knew and laughed and he didn’t even have to speak. In many ways he was sited on a line equidistant between Chaplin and Buster Keaton, combining the chameleon flexibility of one and the abstract quality of the other. The unfortunately named ‘stone face’ of Keaton, upon which cinemagoers were able somehow miraculously to project their feelings, may have something to do with it. However, the comic effect he could achieve with the laugh that simmers, the frown that explodes, the word unspoken that came to the tip of his tongue to be swallowed almost instantly were totally Hancock’s and Hancock’s alone.

His facial prowess made him absolutely right for the emerging medium of television, but that fact only serves to underline that Hancock’s initial claim to attention was as a radio presence. At all stages of his career it helped that he had a voice that sounded as he looked. As we shall discover, the Hancock of Educating Archie sounded totally different from that of the performer remembered today. His microphone voice became modified considerably over the years, but once it found its natural level, consistent with the naturalism he and his writers were anxious to cultivate in comedy, it was hard to imagine him speaking in any other way. Plump, rounded and listless, given to sudden explosions of protest or triumph, it conveyed everything about the look and the attitude of his complex character. The emphatic caution with which he pronounced the aspirates of the title of his show – ‘H-H-H-H-Hancock’s Half Hour’ – dated from the very beginning of the radio show in 1954 and the device became a vocal calling card that firmly set the mood for each episode.

It is a paradox of the Hancock phenomenon that while he remained indisputably recognisable, understandably inimitable, he nevertheless proved well-nigh impossible to impersonate. The irony of the last radio script that Galton and Simpson wrote for him is that it revolved around the premise of someone who could do so successfully and in so doing take from the character profitable work in a television commercial that the lad deemed beneath his dignity. In this episode, the variety impressionist Peter Goodwright made a fair stab at the task and succeeded to a degree, but something was missing, even in sound alone. In later years Mike Yarwood would don the Homburg and astrakhan collar, but the impression always seemed stillborn, lacking the freedom and joie de vivre that he and others achieved with the likes of Cooper, Dodd, Morecambe, Howerd and all the other comic icons from and around the same period. The answer may reside partly in public perception. In Cooper and company we – and that means Yarwood on our behalf – saw uninhibited Masters of the Revels to whom in a Saturnalian moment we all wished to aspire: who hasn’t waved an imaginary tickling stick, or donned a makeshift fez and, arms outstretched, fumbled his way through a cursory attempt at ‘jus’ like that’? On the other hand, in Hancock we saw our basic selves and perhaps thought best to leave well alone. The subtler, lower register of the Hancock voice did not help either, nor did the depth of the character as portrayed by the writers who shifted the personality of the man they knew up a gear or two to bring about their marvellous shared creation. It is ironic that one of the weaknesses of that character should be an irresistible urge to drop into impersonation at the drop of a hat, in his case the Chevaliers, Laughtons and Newtons of a bygone Hollywood age.

For all Hancock would cling to exhibitionist tendencies fashioned in another era, no comedy show caught more astutely the social history and culture of its own day, as its hero came to terms with the new prosperity to emerge from the post-war gloom, the new consumerism, the new media consciousness. Its only contender to any sort of crown in this regard was radio’s The Goon Show, the anarchic comic explosion that sounded like a verbal hybrid of freak show and firework display played out in celebration of our accumulated imperial past. But for all its energy, invention and a three and a half year start, it was less accessible than Hancock’s Half Hour and, in spite of varying attempts, had the disadvantage of being impossible to translate to television. It needed to be heard. Its four original chief protagonists – Michael Bentine, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers – had recently, like Hancock, been catapulted out of the armed forces into performing careers that would have seemed impossible when hostilities began. All knew each other socially. If one concedes to Milligan the creative advantage, it is feasible that had the comedy pack been shuffled in a different way Hancock could have ended up in the first show in lieu of one of the other three performers. Both programmes shared the same producer, the wiry and dynamic Dennis Main Wilson, and Milligan’s co-writer in the early days, Larry Stephens, was an even closer friend of Tony and the author of the bulk of Hancock’s stage material. Moreover, Hancock had still properly to formulate his views on naturalism in comedy, a quality that amounted to anathema in the parallel universe of the Goons. Both shows in their contrasting ways drew regular comic inspiration from the folk memory of a conflict that now seems so distant and yet in those bleaker times loomed like an unwelcome ghost in people’s lives.

Hancock the man had served in the RAF. Hancock the character, being all things to all men, had, albeit in tall-story-dom, served on all fronts. In the episode where he gets stuck in a lift he describes himself as an old submarine man, to whom the confined space of the moment is a mere bagatelle. When the vicar, played by Noël Howlett, retorts that he thought he had just said he had been in the army, Hancock, resourceful as ever, claims that he was actually attached to a Commando unit being transported by submarines to blow up the heavy-water plants in Norway: ‘Very tricky stuff, heavy water, very tricky. Have you ever handled it?’ For another episode he had spent the hostilities punishing the Hun high in the clouds: ‘Did me victory roll over Hendon airport picking up packages off the tarmac with me wing tips. Nerves of steel – 144 missions and never turned a hair!’ Most memorably, when asked at the blood donor clinic whether he has given before, his imagination spiralled into new levels of derring-do: ‘Given, no. Spilt, yes. Yes, there’s a good few drops lying about on the battlefields of Europe. Are you familiar with the Ardennes? I well remember von Rundstedt’s last push. Tiger Harrison and myself, being in a forward position, were cut off behind the enemy line. “Captain Harrison,” I said. “Yes sir,” he said. “Jerry’s overlooked us,” I said. “Where shall we head for?” “Berlin,” he said. “Right,” I said, “and the last one in the Reichstag’s a sissy!”’ However outrageous, such reminiscences not only provided the perfect platform for the overblown conceit of the character; they also resonated with an audience to whom much of his swagger touched upon reality.

The Hancock character has been rightly described as 1950s man, a Charlie Chaplin for the Welfare State. For all he might rattle on about his vainglorious past, the present provided the real challenge. Long before the character reached television, the public could visualise perfectly the world he inhabited. Rationing may at long last have been heading for the ‘exit’, but we should not be deluded by nostalgia. Britain was still a pretty grim place, and his writers’ evocation of Hancock’s home base, the seedy side of sprawling suburbia epitomised by East Cheam, only served to make it even grimmer. Not for nothing did the philosopher Henri Bergson chide that to understand laughter we must put it back into its natural environment, ‘which is society’. Hancock’s specific address at 23, Railway Cuttings signified grime and austerity. One could never quite imagine the sun shining through the soot that persisted in the damp, dank air; never envisage the streets entirely free of potholes and puddles. Hancock’s disaffection was perfectly captured in the depiction of a National Health Service that for all its promise was rapidly becoming over-stretched: when he goes to the doctor to cure his cold, only to find the medic can’t even help his own, he pontificates, ‘I don’t pay ten and threepence a week to cure you!’ Not that he was without a chippy optimism, born of the patriotism that was his life’s blood. Even Hancock expected things to get better, that he would arrive, in the words of one fan, the film director Stephen Frears, at a sunlit upland where he would be treated with the right degree of respect and have a comfortable life. He certainly knew his priorities, ever ready with a Churchillian swagger ‘to strike a blow for the country that gave us our birthright, our freedom, our parliamentary democracy and our two channelled television set’.

Hancock had the full measure of the new ITV – ‘Just like the BBC, but with advertisements instead of breakdowns!’ – just as Galton and Simpson had their grip on the consumer revolution that would provide the rose-tinted panacea for the times. The recognition sparked and enlivened the comedy. Their scripts soon became a repository of marketing lore for subsequent generations. Hancock proved a sucker for the ‘individual fruit flan’, ‘the drink on a stick’, ‘the flavour of the month’. Only hours before his shows members of the audience would have been purchasing such commodities, the thought of laughter far from their minds. But on the next trip to the supermarket, the next treat at the cinema, the product would register and produce a second laughter response, ‘remembered laughter’ on a shorter time scale. When he goes to the movies himself, the lad is more anxious to see the advert where the toffees wrap themselves up and jump into their cardboard box than the main feature. At times his aspirations seem defined by the process. When his character shows ambitions to be a chef, it is to enable him to have his picture on the buses holding up a packet of salt; when leading man parts fail to come his way, he remains hopeful that the actor playing the old retainer who holds the barley water can’t last forever; his cricketing dream has less to do with playing for England than taking Denis Compton’s place on the hair cream ads. One of the most brilliant sequences ever enacted by Hancock was the running commentary on London at night as he sits side by side with Sid on a bus ride to the big city. The posters, the shops, the neon signs come to life as he peers through the window provided by the television screen and explodes with enthusiasm at the two scruffy kids sniffing gravy, the sea lion pinching the zookeeper’s Guinness and the animation provided by a myriad of light bulbs that announces the arrival of Piccadilly Circus. This has long had him puzzled: ‘I always thought there was a little bloke behind with a big bag of shillings belting up and down working a load of switches!’

In his engrossing survey of such matters, Queuing for Beginners, social historian Joe Moran has shown how the cheap free gift in the cereal packet became the symbol of the tacky promises of consumerism. An episode where Hancock fights a by-election as a Liberal candidate is made doubly funny by a subplot featuring his obsession with finding the elusive trumpet player to complement a full band of plastic guardsmen given away with cornflakes. Another ruse entailed sending in a requisite number of packet-tops for a supposedly free gift. In a parallel scenario– well before ‘salvage’ was made fashionable in the green interest as ‘recycling’ – Hancock bemoans his absence once again from the New Year’s Honours List and resolves that never again will he put his country first by sacrificing his cereal packets to the paper cause: ‘Never again! They can whistle for their salvage in future. I’m gonna stock myself up with Davy Crockett hats and bus conductor sets and assorted scenes from Noddy in Toyland. We’ll see who’s the loser in the long run.’ But a social tide had turned and it was all about winning. The relatively cheap accessibility of foreign travel and entertainment, the easy automation of household tasks, the national obsession with football pools and newspaper competitions were all symbolic of a new acquisitiveness. Sometimes the character became confused along the way. Who can forget him in the launderette transfixed by the swirling display through the window of the washing machine and then sneaking a look over his neighbour’s shoulder: ‘I’m not interested in your washing – just thought you were getting a better picture on yours, that’s all.’ Nothing escaped the Hancock experience. Not for nothing was ‘you never had it so good’ – a phrase we shall come back to – described as the ‘token’ phrase of the new era.

Coping with the new shallow affluence was only one aspect of people’s lives that attracted Galton and Simpson. There was little in keeping with the times that bypassed them, even if they claimed years later that they were too busy working to notice the parade as it passed by their office window. They could almost have had a hotline to Mass Observation, the organisation that during the middle years of the century set out to record everyday life in Britain through a formal programme of observation and research. The later television show set in the bedsitter in which Hancock tediously, from his point of view, edges himself through another humdrum day might pass as a parody of one of the movement’s completed questionnaires – or ‘day surveys’ as they were called – if it were not so true. Nothing was not noted down, however mundane it might seem. One can imagine Hancock’s log: lay down, smoked cigarette, tried to blow smoke rings, did exercises, burnt lip, looked for ointment, applied butter instead, did impersonation of Maurice Chevalier, and on and on. One atypically appreciative newspaper article described the process as ‘a searchlight on living’ and it was taken seriously in many quarters. In recent years the archive has illuminated the era, but one questions whether it has done so more effectively than the accumulated observation of two brilliant scriptwriters and their unparalleled interpreter.

The Belgian philosopher Raoul Vaneigem might have had the measure of the phenomenon when he commented, ‘There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man’s life than in all the philosophies.’ Hancock’s character would have devoured the remark. His eager quest for easy knowledge was a doff of the Homburg to the Reader’s Digest cum Teach Yourself culture of the day. This reached comic heights as he struggled between Bertrand Russell and the dictionary in that same bedsit episode, before concentration plummeted and he took refuge in a whodunnit, Lady, Don’t Fall Backwards. The lad’s conversation is peppered with tortured quotes and gaffes of schoolboy-howler horror. When John Le Mesurier’s plastic surgeon describes a potential model for Tony’s new nose as ‘aquiline’, Hancock’s response is, ‘That means you can use it under water, doesn’t it?’ But there is no consistency: ‘“This is a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done” – Rembrandt!’ is compounded at a later date by the double sting in the tail of ‘Did Rembrandt look like a musician? Of course she didn’t!’ Often the character displayed an ornate use of language totally out of sync with the times, but entirely in keeping with the holy grail of self-education. As he prepares to get ready for a night on the town, he declares, ‘Time the peacock showed his feathers, I fancy.’ But then in no time at all we are brought down to earth by the uncouth slang of ‘ratbag’, ‘bonkers’, ‘stone me!’ and ‘a punch up the bracket’.

The turgid posturing is not the stuff of youth culture, and it is so easy to forget how young they all were. When Hancock’s Half Hour first went on air, its star was only thirty – albeit it has been said he was born middle-aged – and its two writers a mere twenty-four. The point is that at certain levels the show tapped into the preoccupations of the young in an amazing way. Young people had at last discovered that they had the money that had always been denied them, to use now at the time of their greatest energy and vigour. In one early radio show Hancock found himself in a dance hall of the time, the sequence now as secure an evocation of its era as it is possible to imagine. Characteristically our hero is unimpressed. When Bill asks him what he thinks of the Palais, he replies he feels ‘like Marty standing here’, a reference to the eternal wallflower portrayed in Ernest Borgnine’s current film hit. It is never the intention that Hancock should fit in: ‘I’m fed up with this chewing gum – I nearly swallowed it three times – swinging this perishing key chain’s getting on me nerves.’ In an impressive cameo Bill Kerr later departs from his usual characterisation to play a convincing version of the Marlon Brando street-wise hoodlum who sends panic through the dance hall. ‘I’ve never seen a hokey cokey break up so quickly in me life,’ observes Tony. But at other times he was more than content to frequent the frothy coffee outlets, the protest marches, the beatnik milieu.

Many have commented that the decade of Hancock’s Half Hour was also that of Look Back in Anger, that Hancock corresponded to a comic version of Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, an angry – or at least frustrated – young man in a faux middle-aged shell. In one of the less typical radio episodes, The East Cheam Drama Festival, a third of the show is dedicated to a pastiche entitled Look Back in Hunger by John Eastbourne. As an exercise it is superficially funny, but in many ways redundant. Galton and Simpson through Hancock, their mouthpiece, were the comic complement to everything Osborne and his contemporaries represented. Porter was the first to rail at the excessive boredom of the British Sabbath – ‘God, how I hate Sundays! It’s always so depressing, always the same.’ Galton and Simpson took the disaffection and made it into arguably their most successful radio half hour. But there was never a sense that they were parodying the earlier work, nor were they consciously doing so. Even their most accomplished television script for the comedian, The Blood Donor, was pre-empted by Porter’s query, ‘Have you ever had a letter, and on it is franked, “Please Give Your Blood Generously”?’ When Porter, in an attempt to explain his supposed non-patriotism, declaims, ‘We get our cooking from Paris, our politics from Moscow and our morals from Port Said,’ we can almost hear the voice of Hancock and it becomes funny – or funnier – when we do. If one sets aside the emotional undertow of the play, there are passages – not least the more verbose monologues – that would become hilarious if Hancock were enacting them, in the same way that long swathes of Galton and Simpson dialogue would lose much comic lustre if performed by straight actors with no thought of comedy on their agenda. It is all in the perception.

While Hancock may share Porter’s feisty indignation, for all his bluster he lacks his overriding self-confidence. Jimmy always knows he is right. Hancock is never too sure. He may rail at the petit-bourgeois whim for having plaster ducks on the wall, while knowing full well he has them on his own. As the television critic Peter Black pointed out, ‘A deeper aspect of this was that he perfectly well knew it: the best part of the Hancock creation was his stoical acceptance of himself. He knew in his heart he was doomed.’ We certainly never knew which way he would turn. Conned by the consumer giveaway culture in one episode, in the next he can be talking like an ombudsman: ‘Ten packets of that muck! Do less damage taking your shirts down to the river and bashing them with a lump of rock.’ He is punctilious as he sets out his stance to the vicar at the tea table: ‘I’m no snob. It’s just that I think that if people expect to sit down at high-class tables, they can at least take the trouble to learn how to conduct themselves in a proper and mannerly fashion.’ Then, after a pause, ‘If you’re not having any more tea, can I pour my grouts in your cup?’ One of nature’s committed aristocrats one moment – his rare blood group is enough to convince him of that – the shabby keeping up of appearances becomes his very life force the next. Forced by circumstances to a menu of bread and dripping for Sunday lunch, he hastens to draw the curtains lest the neighbours should see a man of his calibre (always with the stress on the middle syllable) reduced to such means. As a comic icon he was and remains classless, and not merely because he succeeded in cutting across all demographic barriers. If one could have cloned Hancock a couple of times, only his size would have held him back from enacting all three parts in that classic sketch that featured John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. The conceit, like the idea of living in a classless society, is, of course, an illusion, one Hancock and his writers understood only too well.

Once entrusted with their task by producer Dennis Main Wilson and script editor Gale Pedrick, Galton and Simpson proved themselves magicians of the deftest skill in the way in which week in, week out they rang the changes on the character and his circumstances. Sometimes he was affluent; sometimes he had only one shirt to his name. Sometimes he was a failed theatrical, sometimes the successful star of a radio or television comedy series. Sometimes he was a law-abiding member of the community, sometimes an army deserter who had lain low in a cave on the Yorkshire Moors for six years. Sometimes the continuity might appear suspect, but the almost dreamlike flexibility never stood in the way of the naturalism in comedy which all three set out to achieve at the start. As Alan Simpson has commented, ‘He was what we wanted him to be at any given time. That was the great freedom one had in those days. On one show we had him as a barrister. Nobody commented on the fact that you need seven years training, you need diplomas. Nobody cared.’ Anyone asked in an over-the-top television quiz to name a top racing driver who in his spare time was a purveyor of quack medicines, who had served in the Foreign Legion and whose grandfather had been a member of ‘The Three Tarzans’ music-hall act, could do worse than hazard a guess at the personage of Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, to give the character its full monicker. The question might as easily have been to nominate the derring-do test pilot who was stolen from his cradle by the gypsies, went on to inherit his great-uncle’s newspaper empire and ended up living as a hermit on Clapham Common. They both tick all the boxes. The Hancock invention was its own Pandora’s Box of possibilities.

Even later when he discarded the Homburg and fur collar the inner man somehow remained constant. Simpson uses the attitude to food and France to show how the character could paradoxically live within his own contradictions: ‘One week he would say, “I can’t stand that foreign muck. I want sausage, egg and chips.” And the next week he’d be haute cuisine: “I don’t eat that rubbish. Bring on the sea bass.” If he met an intellectual he might try to keep up with him or dismiss him with “what a load of old rubbish!” Never throw away a good joke – it all relies on what you think of.’ The approach gave them full rein to present Hancock as Everyman for the twentieth century. In time he was acclaimed ‘a massive caricature of mid-century man’. According to Philip Oakes, the comedian rather fancied the title. Every possible foible, every potential flaw was refracted though the persona. No comic has succeeded more admirably in making us laugh at our own fears, failures and insecurities. While Bob Hope majored on cowardice, Jack Benny on meanness and vanity, John Cleese on a manic paranoia, Tony Hancock was all our sins personified. Long ago Galton and Simpson described the character as ‘a shrewd, cunning, high-powered mug’. Roger Wilmut was more comprehensive in his cataloguing: ‘pretentious, gullible, bombastic, occasionally kindly, superstitious, avaricious, petulant, over-imaginative, semi-educated, gourmandising, incompetent, cunning, obstinate, self-opinionated, impolite, pompous, lecherous, lonely and likeable fall-guy’. Only a few redeeming qualities there, but then the funniest traits will always be the weaknesses.

That said, Hancock wasn’t just likeable – he was loved. His neuroses, grumbles and hang-ups were endemic in the larger proportion of his potential audience. As Philip Oakes has said, ‘He was truly representative and so he could be excused,’ right down, it would appear, to the murderer that lurks in us all. When he needs the cash to match a bet that he cannot go one better than Phineas Fogg and travel around the world in less than eighty days, he shows his shady resolve: ‘I’ll get the money. I’ve just remembered I’ve got a great grandfather up in Leeds – of a very nervous disposition. I think a good strong paper bag popped behind him should see me all right.’ He isn’t joking. On one occasion his attitude to Bill Kerr, humbled into carrying out some repair work underneath Hancock’s motor car, is positively sadistic: ‘I’ve a good mind to jump on his ankles. I’d love to see him spring up and hit his head on the big end.’ His disposition to petty larceny pales by comparison: when Richard Wattis checks his card at a hotel reception desk he soon discovers an outstanding issue from last time, ‘a little matter of four towels, a tea service and an ashtray’. The cleverness of the casting and character of Sid James as the great swindler rampant in Hancock’s life was that Tony himself was just as questionable in the honesty stakes. It was totally in character that he should be less successful at iniquity, although in one episode, The Scandal Magazine, he is revealed as being more corrupt than Sid. James is the editor who has the Chief Constable and the Director of Public Prosecutions in his pocket. After Hancock clears his name and wins a king’s ransom in damages, it soon emerges that the initial exposé on his sordid dalliance with a cigarette girl was not without foundation.

That may have been an extreme case. As Dennis Main Wilson explained, ‘The beauty of it was that you could identify him not with yourself, but with your Uncle Fred or your next-door neighbour. Johnny Speight gave the objectionable characteristics to Alf Garnett, but much more harshly, much more cruelly, in a much later, crueller world. We did the Hancock shows in a much happier world.’ At least they appeared to become happier as the new prosperity took hold. The analogy with Alf Garnett, as immortalised by actor Warren Mitchell, is significant, reminding one that much about Hancock would now be considered sexist, racist and politically incorrect. Much of his sexist disgruntlement was directed at the buxom and bounteous Hattie Jacques, in her radio role as the mountainous secretary Miss Griselda Pugh. When she is too busy to take a letter because she is knitting herself a jumper, Hancock acknowledges the fact: ‘Of course. I saw the lorry bringing the wool in this morning.’ When she is conscripted into service as a teacher at the school Sid has coaxed him into opening, she suggests adding ‘Cantab’ after her name, to which Tony responds, ‘No. I think Oxon would be better for you.’ In the music-hall era his comments would have been labelled ‘fat’ jokes. Here they serve the comedy of characterisation and produce some of his biggest laughs. When the similarly endowed Peggy Ann Clifford boards a crowded bus, he refuses to offer her his seat: ‘You wanted emancipation. You got it. Stand there and enjoy it.’ In the last television show Galton and Simpson wrote for him, he curtly dismisses one of the candidates for his hand in matrimony: ‘I can’t imagine her staying at home all day mangling.’

When Tony wishes to show solidarity with Sid he slaps him on the back with a triumphant, ‘Sid, you’re a White Man. When they made you, they threw away the mould.’ In the blood donor clinic the question of his nationality brings out a primitive nationalism: ‘Ah, you’ve got nothing to worry about there … British. Undiluted for twelve generations. One hundred per cent Anglo-Saxon with perhaps a dash of Viking, but nothing else has crept in … You want to watch who you’re giving it to. It’s like motor oil. It doesn’t mix, if you get my meaning …’ As Ray and Alan have observed, in those days no one batted an eyelid at material that would today be considered squirm-inducing: there were other things to worry about, not least ‘the threat of annihilation by a nuclear holocaust’. It was also a time when ordinary decent people were unconsciously fed the prejudices that emanated simply from feeling different from what they were not. And who is to say that the expression of such a difference could not then be channelled in the direction of comedy?

Hancock, as a gauge for the human condition and the worst excesses of its folly and aspirations, remains timeless. However, now – or in a hundred years’ time – it is conceivable that anyone from another time or place wanting an inkling of what it was like to live in the Britain of the 1950s could do worse than listen to Hancock’s Half Hour. It is certainly significant that as the man for his day he should reflect the three key prime ministers of the decade as colourfully as he did. We have already seen he was capable of a sly impression of Churchill when the mood took him. The bulldog image fitted all his own delusions of political grandeur, although these were not given full rein until May 1955 when in one episode Galton and Simpson exchanged No. 23 for No. 10, at least in Hancock’s dreams, by which time another Anthony, namely Eden, had been in office for two months. His espousal of the Homburg as his favourite headgear first reached television screens in July 1956, the month that Eden, with whom the style had long been associated, was confounded by Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company. Hancock later claimed, ‘Homburg hats have always struck me as the acme of self-importance.’ Most significantly Hancock’s peak period coincided with the period of office of the politician dubbed by Enoch Powell as the last of the old actor-managers, Harold Macmillan. If Galton and Simpson have a fondness for one facet of the Hancock characterisation, it is for the faded thespian reduced to dragging his threadbare cultural offerings to the far reaches of the kingdom. That tedious train journey to the Giggleswick Shakespeare Festival readily comes to mind. Later when Hancock finds himself reduced to appearing in a commercial for pilchards he sighs for the past: ‘Oh for the days of the actor-manager, me own theatre and that [the thumb goes to the nose] to all of them.’

Away from the political arena Denis Norden’s notion of the ‘Hancock’ canon as a novel sends one scurrying for literary parallels. The naïve, pompous, lower-middle-class Pooter from the George and Weedon Grossmith comedy classic, The Diary of a Nobody, is an obvious link. Significantly it began life as a Punch column, a device not a million miles away from the half-hour situation comedy device of sixty years later. Here the house in suburbia again backs onto a railway line, the curate calls, albeit not played by Kenneth Williams, and social aspiration dictates the life of the chief resident. A more complex character is Kenneth Widmerpool from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Military man and politician in a way that Hancock could only pretend to be, he is revealed by turns through a twelve-volume cycle as villain and victim, manipulator and fool in a way that chiefly serves to remind us of Hancock through the sympathy Powell manages to engage on his behalf, from his very first appearance at school wearing ‘the wrong kind of overcoat’. At times pompous to the point of ridicule, he gets by like Hancock, blustering against fate, cushioned by speeches of windy verbosity. A more light-hearted literary character has an equal claim to be considered Tony’s alter ego. In formulating the Hancock character Galton and Simpson found themselves reversing the anthropomorphism of Kenneth Grahame’s enduring creation from Toad Hall. In a television interview, Bill Kerr catalogued the similarities: ‘The bluster, the pomp, the dignity, the frailty.’ But more than that he looked like Toad. Once in a while television companies raid the current stock of familiar comic faces to cast the classic afresh. It is a tragedy that nobody gave Hancock the chance. Bubbling over with his own self-importance, all airs and graces, he would have made it impossible for another actor to follow in his amphibious tracks. To hear Toad rhapsodising on the prospects of motor travel, one might well be travelling with Hancock, tooting along on the open road to the Monte Carlo rally in one of his early radio shows: ‘The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today – in next week tomorrow! … O poop-poop!’ They could have changed places. The thought of ‘Toad’s Half Hour’ and a dressing room with his name on the door would have puffed up the creature’s ego even more.

Of course, Hancock had the advantage over any fictional character in that on television he could look you in the eyes. As Duncan Wood, his principal television producer, said, ‘He looked like a beaten-up spaniel – even if the dog bites you, you still pat it on the head again.’ Alan Simpson risked stating the obvious on the matter: ‘He was a very sympathetic performer. Certain people on television – irrespective of how good they are – if they don’t like the look of you, you’re dead. The character of Hancock was such a terrible failure at everything he did, everybody felt sorry for him, even though he was very arrogant, very pompous.’ But there was another quality. For all he may have played a ‘mug’, and an often unpleasant one at that, there always bubbled beneath the surface of his BBC portrayal a level of charm, intelligence, not to mention enjoyment in the task at hand. Intuitively an audience picks up on such qualities and subconsciously enters a sharing game with the performer. It was partly in the words, but it was entirely in the playing. Dennis Main Wilson, who knew the man as well as anybody professionally, once said that ‘to be a great clown you have to have vulnerability and indeed humility and if you ain’t got them as a clown, you ain’t gonna be a star – no way!’ In its inner self the great British public sensed this in spades.

In time this book will address how much of the Hancock image was rooted in reality, how much the fictitious accretion for laughter’s sake alone. For the moment it is enough to know that Hancock himself had the full measure of what was going on. As was so often the case, it seemed to come back to the feet. He told a reporter on the Coventry Evening Telegraph, ‘You can’t get away from it – underneath the handmade crocodile shoes, there are still the toes.’ He saw the pretensions with which people clothed themselves as the key to his humour, his role being to puncture them. Six years later that was still his credo. In an interview in Planet magazine he explained, ‘What I portray is what I find pretentious in myself and others. I play up pretensions, pomposity and stupidity in order – I hope – to destroy them. Who first decides about the position of the little finger when you’re drinking a cup of tea? Or who first decided the correct way to hold your soup bowl? Let’s say we did a comic skit where two people had a great barney about the right way to hold a soup bowl, showing up the stupidity of the whole thing. After the show the audience might go somewhere for a meal and remember the skit when they started on the soup. The impression might not last very long, but it would be there.’ It is reassuring to know that he and presumably Alan and Ray were ahead of Denis Norden on that one. But he was always at pains to point out the one thing he was not. As he emphasised to Russell Clark on Australian television a few months before he died: ‘I wasn’t a little man fighting against bureaucracy. This is nonsense. I was always trying to make life a little less deadly than it really is, and a lot of it was extremely belligerent comedy.’ As Philip Oakes noted, ‘Hancock, far from being the classic figure of the clown (that is, he who gets slapped) was the first to slap back.’ But there was always the suggestion of uncertainty in the aggressiveness. It was inevitable in the case of a character that wanted the whole world and yet had no means of achieving it except on the cheap.

Chapter Two

‘YOU’LL GO FAR, MY SON’

‘A double feature, half a bar of Palm toffee, and three and a half hours in the dark – that was my idea of fun.’

He always claimed that his earliest recollection was of an egg timer. Later in life he went on record as being able to boil ‘a very good three-and-a-half-minute egg without having to glance at my watch once’. Eggs, with the attendant ‘soldiers’ to dip into their soft-boiled interiors, would provide a comfort factor – and at one point a professional windfall – in a life that began as Anthony John Hancock at 41 Southam Road, Hall Green, Small Heath, Birmingham, on 12 May 1924. The more grandiose middle names met in the previous chapter were the stuff of comic fiction. The house with its bay windows and turreted chimneys was the sturdy type of semi-detached that helped to define the identity of the British lower middle class between the wars and beyond. The ‘lower’ may be misleading in that the Hancocks were able to afford a nanny and a cook, whom Tony remembered as ‘a painfully thin woman who, no matter how much food she consumed, never put on a single pound’. The Hancocks were the original residents of the dwelling purchased new for the sum of £400 shortly after the arrival of their first son, Colin, in March 1918. By the time of Tony’s birth his father, John Hancock, had progressed in status to branch manager for the Houlder Brothers steamship line, which he had joined as a messenger boy in 1900, although his heart beat faster when he applied himself to his avocation as a small-time entertainer with a welcome entrée into the round of clubs, smoking concerts and masonics that thrived throughout the city. It is appropriate that in heraldic circles the name of Hancock did originally mean ‘son of John’, ‘Han’ being a Flemish form of John, ‘cock’ an affectionate term sometimes used to mean ‘son of’.

Hancock was what might be called a deadline baby, in that his father left it forty-two days before registering the birth of his second son at Kings Norton register office, the maximum period allowed by law. When the child was three years old, the family, prompted by medical advice in the matter of his father’s bronchial troubles, relocated to the purer air and more temperate, more genteel climes of Bournemouth. In later times Hancock would recall the event with typical deadpan insouciance: ‘What a brave band we were, striking south that summer morning. Every hamlet, every village, every town we passed through accorded us a truly remarkable lack of attention, exceeded only by the complete anonymity of our arrival in Bournemouth itself.’ By all accounts his father was a thrifty soul, refusing to buy enough petrol to take them beyond Bath, where they had to refuel for the final leg of the momentous journey. He had an automatic refrain when questioned why he didn’t fill the tank up completely, the same words of morbid circumspection he used when his wife constantly queried his purchase of one Alcazar razor blade at a time, rather than a packet of six: ‘You never know.’ The move was made viable by the monetary support of Tony’s maternal grandfather, Harry Samuel Thomas, an enterprising printer and lithographer whose success provided him with the financial cushion to serve for twenty-one years as a director of Birmingham City Football Club. His photograph is contained in the handbook published to mark the opening of the St Andrew’s ground in 1906. It was said of him by Harry Morris, a chairman of the club in the 1960s, that ‘he was always a very good judge of a footballer’. His daughter, Lucie Lilian, had married her husband eighteen days after the outbreak of the World War on 22 August 1914 at the parish church of St Oswald’s, Bordesley. On the marriage certificate she is recorded as two years younger than her partner, the son of William Hancock, a foreman builder. The Hancocks originally hailed from a family of stonemasons in the West Country. John, or Jack as he became known, was born in the Bedminster district of Bristol on 14 December 1887 to William, a carpenter and joiner, and his wife, Elizabeth. The family subsequently relocated to Sutton Coldfield. Tony’s mother entered the world on 4 September 1890 at 323 Cooksey Road, Small Heath, the child of Harry and his bride, Clara Hannah née Williams.

The search by Tony’s parents for a combined work and investment opportunity – subsidised in part by a £950 profit on the previous sale and in part by Thomas, who also fancied the idea of Bournemouth as a retirement prospect for himself – resulted in the purchase of an unlikely business in the northern hinterland of the resort. The Mayo Hygienic Laundry was situated on the south side of Strouden Road at Nos 144 and 146, washroom and shop respectively, with living accommodation over the latter, in the district of Winton. Hancock found himself genuflecting to this aspect of his heritage only once in his comedy career. As he settles down on his flight to an alpine vacation where the yodelling Kenneth Williams will prove particularly irksome, he stresses, ‘I needed this holiday – it’s been hard work in the laundry lately.’ In spite of the enthusiasm Lily expressly put into what had been an ailing business – a secondary outlet to receive and redistribute washing in the centre of Bournemouth being a decided asset in this regard – there was scant likelihood that the genial Jack would flourish in an environment which presented so little opportunity for the bonhomie of the social world. When, at the turn of the new decade, Strong & Co., the Romsey-based brewery, presented him with a chance to become the licensee of a central hostelry, little time was wasted. It may seem a big leap from running a laundry to managing a public house, but both were service industries and both left a pungent reminder on the olfactory sense of the future comedian: bleach and hops would provide him with a mental trigger à la recherche du temps perdu to the end of his days.

A valuable eye-witness to these times was the aforesaid nanny, Elsie Sparks, who joined the family at the age of seventeen on a salary of £1 10s. a week. More than sixty years later in an interview for the Bournemouth Evening Echo she recalled Tony as ‘a lovely chubby little chap’ who wouldn’t let her out of his sight, although ‘you could always tell when he’d been naughty or done something he shouldn’t have done because he’d hide under the table. And if you ever took him to the park and there were other boys around, he’d run off and bring their caps back to you!’ Tony, like herself, was not too happy with his first impressions of the holiday town: ‘He couldn’t understand the accent, and the sea frightened him.’ It was through Sparks that Hancock had been christened Anthony: long before he was born she could not stop talking about the previous charge she had left in order to attend initially to his brother, Colin. Lily was convinced her second child would be a boy and made a promise that if correct she would call him by the same name to keep her happy. As his brother surged ahead of him, Anthony redivivus became her sole charge. On nature walks in the lanes and fields that encroached upon the new home, she soon observed an introspection and lack of confidence that she sensed was set off by the move south: ‘He disliked meeting anyone new, trying anything new … he couldn’t wait to get home. In fact, the only place he was really happy and relaxed was in the small, fenced-in back garden.’

By Christmas the unhappiness and heavy heart had been joined by a physical setback. The doctor soon diagnosed the swelling around his wrists and leg joints as rickets. Not funny at the time, the disorder left him with that hollow-chested, hunched-shoulder look that became part of his comic vocabulary throughout his adult life. An attempt in childhood to straighten himself out led to exercises that involved hanging from a bar until his arms gave way. The procedure came to an abrupt end the day he caught sight of his shadow: ‘I looked like a bloody great bat,’ he grumbled. It is also the consensus of opinion that he grew into an untidy child, a fact with which Hancock concurred: ‘Mother would take us out on a shopping spree and set us up in smart new suits, but so far as I was concerned she was wasting her time. Colin and Roger would arrive home looking as spruce as you could wish, but I always let the side down. My suits had a way of looking old and ill fitting the moment I got into them.’ The uneasy feeling with clothes persisted through the years of his greatest success.

In retrospect the move to Bournemouth with its bustling entertainment industry both in and out of season provided Hancock senior with the ideal milieu in which to vent his frustrated skills as an entertainer. He would soon be caught up again in the whirl of concerts, ladies’ nights and private bookings that had made life in Birmingham more bearable, culminating in November and December 1923 in two broadcasts, billed first as a ‘humorist’ and then as an ‘entertainer’, on the radio station 5IT that broadcast from the city between 1922 and 1927. Now as the landlord of the Railway Hotel at 119 Holdenhurst Road, near to Bournemouth’s town centre, he had discovered the perfect environment in which to combine business, the entertainment of others and the ability to socialise with the colourful parade of theatricals that frequented the venue, both as occasional drinkers and overnight guests. The hostelry epitomised the racy side that between the wars bristled alongside the more respectable image the resort has always seemed anxious to cultivate. In many respects it may be no different from other South Coast seaside towns with their palm court and putting green aspirations to genteelness, but where else but Bournemouth do you discover illuminations that still shun neon-lit vulgarity in favour of a flickering wonderland of candles each lit by hand in its coloured glass jar?

Remembered from his Birmingham days as great company – ‘he always had three words to your one,’ recalled Harry Morris – Jack Hancock, in the few photographs that survive, is revealed as a worldly cross between the music-hall lion comique tradition of ‘Champagne Charlie’ and his fellow coves, and the debonair, dapper precision of a Jack Buchanan. One picture shows him in the convivial company of that definitive boulevardier from the halls, Charles Coborn no less, immortalised in song as ‘The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. Another image, posed as a publicity shot, reveals a slim, sharp-eyed alertness as he looks into the camera. His black bow tie and white wing collar stand to attention, and one can almost hear the overture playing. Everything is right about him. One line in his act is still lodged with affection in the comic lexicon of his youngest son, Roger, who was only four when he died. He would swagger on stage with a folded copy of The Times, then acknowledge an invisible presence in the wings: ‘Put the Rolls in the garage, George. I’ll butter them later.’ The act then segued into a succession of stories and topical comments that he would read from the newspaper – a device not dissimilar to that used in the breakfast-oriented openings to his son’s radio series – in addition to monologues and impressions.

George Fairweather, his friend and fellow semi-professional, recounted his first impression of the tall, handsome figure in top hat and tails, with white scarf and silver-topped cane to complete the image: ‘he was over-dressed even for a formal night out, but within seconds the audience identified with him … he may have been dressed as a toff, but there were no class barriers … he joked about the same things and poked fun at the same people as they did.’ This in part confirms his middle son’s recollection of him as ‘a dude entertainer’ with an upper-crust stage voice. According to George, there was more than a touch of the Terry-Thomas about him, right down to the elegant holder from which he would chain-smoke the Du Maurier cigarettes he kept in their gold case. Tony himself identified show business as ‘undoubtedly the real love’ of his father’s life: ‘He enjoyed nothing better than making people laugh … Mother used to accompany him at the piano. I am told that she laughed so much at his gags, however often she heard them, that she could hardly play a note. That must have been a great comfort to him on the odd occasions when things weren’t going so well with the audience.’ The act often included a monologue about a lonely old man and a little dog. It would reduce his wife to hysteria with tears irrigating her cheeks. When in later years she recalled it for her famous son, it produced an equally convulsive effect. Their marriage was strengthened by his gift for comedy. ‘She could never stay cross with Dad for long,’ remembered Tony. ‘He would pull a funny face, or use a silly voice, and that was that.’

When she was not wiping her eyes from laughter, the hotel gave his mother a new sense of purpose. She soon revealed herself as her father’s daughter as she set about capitalising on its unique situation. Only a hop, skip and a jump from the main railway terminus, it quickly became a magnet for the business customer out of season as much as for the holidaymaker and day-tripper within. In the spring of 1931 press advertisements announced the opening of the New Palm Lounge within the hotel: ‘The ideal rendezvous for ladies and gentlemen, and the most up-to-date retreat in central Bournemouth.’ The tag that followed was a product of Jack’s own sense of humour: ‘It is said that trams stop by request – others by desire!’ He was himself an integral part of the attraction. Peter Harding, a Bournemouth journalist who included the hotel in his regular round, was himself reported as saying that you never saw Hancock’s dad working behind the bar. He always had his regular place at one end where he held court, occasionally leaving it to greet someone he knew, but only to bring them back to his corner: ‘By the end of the night he would be surrounded by a group of laughing men and women and always with a household name among them.’ The presence of the theatrical profession only emphasised the overall ambience of the place, the spiritual ancestry of which would have suggested the cheery backchat and cheeky banter of the music halls.

The family were domiciled in the claustrophobic attic flat at the top of the building. Tony and his brother Roger, who was actually born there on 9 June 1931, have both admitted that a business with an often chaotic twenty-four-hour claim on the attention of its owners did not provide the environment most conducive to a traditional family life style. His mother once explained in an interview: ‘Tony once asked why he couldn’t have a home life like the other boys. But it was impossible – I was busy with the customers all the time.’ For Hancock the answer to the impersonal, though unintentional, disregard by his parents was to raid the petty cash and find escape in the silver screen: ‘Will Hay was my favourite. A double feature, half a bar of Palm toffee, and three and a half hours in the dark – that was my idea of fun.’ At a later time and in different circumstances Roger would cope with a similar situation in the same way, claiming that the constant exposure to the cinema taught him everything he knew about judgement and material, the grounding for his successful career as a literary and theatrical agent.

If Hancock took his theatrical flair from his father, his energy and strong-mindedness must have come from his mum. Known to all as Lily – and, to the annoyance of her family, to her husband as ‘Billy’ – she had denounced Lucie almost as soon as she could talk. Lily survived her son and therefore came within the acquaintance of many of those who figured in his career. To the writer Philip Oakes she was funny and racy, with a warm practicality that cut to the quick of her son’s excesses: when on one visit to the Oakes’ home Tony’s boozy obsession for conversation and music showed little respect for the midnight hour, she finally drew herself up and turned to Philip’s wife: ‘I’ll put my gloves on … it always worked with his father.’ It usually worked with Hancock too. His agent Beryl Vertue first met her on a Mediterranean holiday and was immediately impressed: ‘You could almost see where he got some of his mannerisms from in terms of delivery and everything … she would strut across the beach, full of funny anecdotes and with a kind of feigned vagueness about how to tackle any particular problem.’ As her son ribbed her about her food foibles they became like a double act together. Lily’s friend, the theatrical hairdresser Mary Hobley, recalled for Jeff Hammonds the suddenness with which she would go from being jolly and bright to being serious: ‘She’d talk about life and all that – she seemed a bit mixed up in some way, but she was fun … Tony was like her in a way – he was very bright, but underneath there was this sadness.’

Their close relationship even spilled over into a mutual love of sport. He talked about her to the journalist Gareth Powell, in one of the last interviews he gave in Australia: ‘My mother is seventy-seven and a bit of a card. I telephoned her when I was sailing on the Andes. I said, “I think I’m going to play a bit of cricket with the Australians.” And she said immediately – and I’m talking to her on a boat, on the Andes – “Now I would suggest three slips, one gully, two short legs …!” and she went through the card on this bloody thing. And she’s got no right to do this. A very funny woman indeed. Seventy-seven years and fighting as she goes.’ Even sex was not off limits in their conversation. When, in an echo of Les Dawson’s hypochondriac travesty of a Northern housewife, she delicately referred in company to having something wrong ‘down below’ Tony couldn’t help himself. ‘Get your legs round a good man,’ he would guffaw. ‘That’ll put you right.’ Modesty dictated she would not be drawn further, although it is tempting to imagine the spirit of Tony’s friend Dick Emery, another fine comic transvestite, intruding on her behalf: ‘Ooh, you are awful!’ Indeed, looking at pictures of her in later life one surely gets some idea of how Tony would have looked in drag. The popping eyes and chubby cheeks are there, although school friend Ronald Elgood remembers the very domineering, almost Wagnerian presence of the lady who would collect her son at term’s end. Their love was unquestionable and she remained supportive of him until the end of his life, although others have referred to a negative side in their relationship. ‘She never let me grow up,’ he once said to Joan Le Mesurier. ‘Once we were out on a drive and she said to me, “Look at the choo-choo puff-puff.”’ When Joan queried what was wrong with that, he replied, ‘I was thirty-two at the time.’ Arrested childhood development would provide Galton and Simpson with another common trait in the years to come: finger games, matchstick men drawn on windows and the announcement of the sight of ‘Cows!’ as if they were Martians all dominate that wearisome television train journey to the North.

Roger was well aware of the closeness between Tony and his mother, and assesses his own standing in the triangle between them with honesty: ‘There was a sort of fixation there between the two of them and I was not part of that. It doesn’t worry me. I don’t feel any lack of affection. I think I’ve come out of this very well, actually. I could have been a screwed-up mess, but I’m not because I think I accepted the special relationship between them. It really was.’ Not that everything was always well between them. Lyn Took, Tony’s secretary at the height of his fame, found it hard to discern a maternal presence at all. His friend, the actress Damaris Hayman, thought she exerted a rather unhealthy hold on him: ‘He used to say that she was very fond of “my son, the celebrity” and she sort of dined out on it, to use the phrase.’ Roger is prepared to admit that she aggravated her son at times: ‘I can understand that, because she’d go off on cruises and she’d always sit at the captain’s table and she’d come home and say, “I don’t know why I’m sitting at the captain’s table.” And I’d say, “It’s because you’re always telling everyone who you are and dishing out signed photographs of Tony into the bargain. Why else do you think you are?” She was the cruise queen. He paid for them. He was wonderful to her and rightly so because she had been so wonderful to him. From my point of view it was totally understandable.’ Hancock became resigned to the humour in the situation: ‘One day I caught her in a pub distributing signed portraits of me all around the bar all in one quick, deft movement as if she were dealing cards at Las Vegas. There they were drinking their beer and playing shove-halfpenny and suddenly before I could do anything about it, they found a Hancock picture in their hands.’ More importantly, on his Face to Face interview with John Freeman Tony described as his most vivid memory of his mother ‘the encouragement she gave me to do what I wanted to do, though I showed no sign at all of being able to do it initially’. Roger is not prepared to admit that his mother may have seen more of the father – and the vicarious realisation of his father’s theatrical dreams – in her middle son. Tony, in the same interview, acknowledged the lead his father gave: ‘I think in many ways it was a deep thing with me to try and justify it. Because I believe he was pretty good.’

Roger scarcely knew his father. His only memory is a poignant one: ‘He was going upstairs and he paused half way up on his way to the top floor. I sort of indicated that I wanted to come up with him and he said, “No, don’t – don’t come up.” By that time he was dying, but I didn’t know. Why would I know?’ Jack Hancock died of peritonitis aggravated by both lung and liver cancer at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Boscombe, on 11 August 1935. He was forty-seven and had been ill for nearly a year, the last month in the hospital. By that time the family, spurred on by the resentment shown by the brewery to Jack’s extracurricular activities as an entertainer and promoter of his own shows around the district, had moved from the Railway Hotel to their own independent venture. By August 1933 they were installed at the Swanmore Hotel and Lodge at 3 Gervis Road East, a select but neglected property within easier reach of the sands huddled beneath the East Cliff. According to his youngest son, a piece of advice handed down in the family by his father over the years had been, ‘Whatever you do, it’s your face that matters, not your arse!’ The posher new address with its wide pavements and leafy feeling away from a bustling main road met the criterion. To make it sound even more exclusive it was rechristened the Durlston Court Hotel after the preparatory school in Swanage where the eldest son, Colin, was a boarder.

Designated by its proprietors as an ‘Ultra Modern Private Hotel’, the new venue boasted forty bedrooms. Private suites could be had for 12 guineas a week and ‘Residents’ were deemed a ‘Speciality’. The ambience now had less to do with the music hall and the saloon bar and was more, as Hancock pointed out, in keeping with a Terence Rattigan Separate Tables type of existence endorsed by ‘a solid core of elderly gentlefolk who have come to the coast to see out their days on their modest means’. But the theatricals, who continued to keep their allegiance to his father, were still welcomed. This was a world where Country Life and Tatler, in which his mother advertised assiduously, jostled side by side with TitBits and the Stage. The clash between the refined respectability of one outlook and the rorty raffishness of the other would inform Hancock’s comic outlook for the rest of his life. On 7 August 1935, sadly only four days before Jack’s death, a feature article on the recently reopened and refurbished premises appeared in the Bournemouth Daily Echo and singled out its ‘unrivalled advantage of a natural environment of extreme beauty without artificiality’, adding that ‘the tender green of the lawns contrasts pleasantly with the strong white surface of the building’. The article was accompanied by an advertising feature in which all who had been involved in the renovation work displayed their calling cards. Tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner of the page was a box that read, ‘The whole of the Electrical Installations for the above by R.G. Walker.’ It gave his address as 37 Palmerston Road, Boscombe. He would soon move back to the hotel in another capacity.

Tony was eleven at the time of his father’s death and his memories were more concrete. He confided in Philip Oakes the image he cherished of his father in the back of a taxi putting himself together in readiness for his act. It is easy to see why it appealed to him. To a man who was congenitally dishevelled like Hancock the idea that somebody could reassemble himself in the back of a cab as a paragon of wedding-cake elegance was heroic. When in 1967 David Frost asked him who had most influenced him as a comedian, Tony used the question to reminisce fondly about the one occasion his father managed to top the bill: ‘It was at St Peter’s Hall (in Bournemouth). In those days a semi-professional entertainer used to wear one of those collapsible top hats and a monocle, always! There was one entrance to the hall – through the front. And he was refused admission, in spite of his gear, because he hadn’t got a ticket! He explained that he was top of the bill, and they said, “Sorry, no ticket, no entry.” So he was out. In the end, he climbed through the lavatory window. The show must go on, you know. But it didn’t go on with him again. He never got a return date.’ On another occasion Hancock added, ‘If that had happened to me, I would have gone straight home and to hell with them! But I hope he brought the house down for his pains.’

Jack Hancock was a practical joker too. A story was passed down in the family concerning another car journey. Jack suddenly turned to his friend and fellow publican, Peter Read, and with reference to a prop basket on the floor of the car shouted out, ‘It’s gone again … quick, get the flute and play it, otherwise we’ll never get it back in the basket!’ The driver, increasingly agitated, pulled up on the verge: ‘Either you get that snake back in the basket or we don’t budge another inch.’ Other memories were more sombre. He proved a trooper to the end and even in the last stages of his illness, when he was severely emaciated, Tony remembered him wrapping a sheet around his jaundiced shoulders and regaling the patrons with an impression of Gandhi. As Eric Morecambe would have said, ‘There’s no answer to that!’ His last performance had been given at a midnight matinée at Bournemouth’s Regent Theatre the previous Christmas, when he shared a bill with radio favourite Ronald Frankau and his old friend George Fairweather and tore the place down with his impersonation of Stanley Holloway delivering the monologue, ‘Albert and the Lion’.

When asked by the journalist Ray Nunn in the summer of 1962 whether he thought his father’s death had had a lasting effect on his personality, he replied, ‘I prefer not to answer that.’ With respect for the response, Nunn moved swiftly on to his next question, ‘What do you hate most of all?’ ‘Any form of cruelty,’ said Hancock. Osborne’s Jimmy Porter had been ten years old when his father had died: ‘For twelve months I watched my father dying … he would talk to me for hours, pouring out all that was left of his life to one lonely, bewildered little boy, who could barely understand half of what he said … you see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry – angry and helpless.’ It would be wrong to read such intimacy into Hancock’s situation, but Damaris Hayman, who sensed the love Tony had for him, recalled an emotional moment when he told her his father reminded him of the stag in Bambi, the moment when the young fawn acknowledges him as his sire and his mother explains, ‘Everyone respects him … he’s very brave and very wise. That’s why he’s known as the Great Prince of the forest.’ ‘Obviously,’ says Damaris, ‘his father was an almost god-like figure to him.’

On that same appearance with David Frost, Hancock reminisced about one of the songs his father used as a closing number. He couldn’t remember the words, but a member of the viewing public later obliged and he was invited back on the following evening’s show to interpret them. The song was called ‘First Long Trousers’ and it took the son some emotional effort to get to the end:

Say, young fellow, just a minute,

These are your first long trousers, eh?

Your little grubby knee breeches

Are for ever put away …

… Gee, you look well in them, sonny!

I can’t believe my eyes.

It doesn’t seem a year ago

When you were just – this size!

A little pink cheeked youngster,

Why, you toddled more than ran

Every night to meet your daddy –

Now you’ve got long trousers on.

Oh, I don’t know how to tell you,

But I want to, yes I do,

That your mummy and your daddy both

Are mighty proud of you.

And we’re going to miss the baby

That from us this day has gone.

But that baby we’ll remember

Though he has long trousers on.

By that time there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

It was only after his father’s death that Tony was sent away from home to school. He had spent the autumn term of 1929 at Summerbee Infants School, now the Queen’s Park Infants School, at Charminster, about half a mile from the family laundry. A conversation between Hancock archivist Malcolm Chapman and a fellow pupil revealed that he turned up in a smart brown suit, which was most unusual at a time when most parents in the area could not afford that kind of apparel. When the family moved into the hotel trade, his education climbed a notch up the social scale. Saugeen Preparatory School, founded in 1873, announced itself to prospective parents as ‘a preparatory school for boys for the Public Schools and the Navy’. It could boast of John Galsworthy as an old boy and had links with Robert Louis Stevenson (Lloyd Osbourne, the stepson for whom he wrote Treasure Island, had gone there as well). Coincidentally, the building in Derby Road is now occupied by another hotel, the Majestic. Coincidentally again, Treasure Island provided a leitmotif that would resonate in Hancock’s stage act down the years. The young Tony was now obliged to adopt a school uniform that comprised Eton collar, short jacket and black pinstripe trousers. The establishment provided the choristers, the young Hancock among them, for St Swithun’s Church only a few hundred yards away both from his parents’ second hotel venture and the school itself. In the spring of 1935 Saugeen School relocated to nearby Wimborne.

Events moved quickly in Hancock’s life after his father died. On 1 January the following year his mother remarried. A few days later he followed in the footsteps of his elder brother, Colin, and was enrolled as a pupil at Durlston Court School in Swanage. That he made the move halfway through the academic year suggests his mother may have needed to regroup and give herself the additional space to manage the business and her new life. It may merely signify that Saugeen School – had he continued to attend its new Wimborne location – closed down or was about to close down around this time. In his will Jack Hancock left the gross value of his whole estate of £13,961 to ‘Billy’ for ‘her unstintable [sic] and loving kindnesses during my life’. The remarriage so relatively soon after her first husband’s demise caused some consternation among many of the family’s friends. George Fairweather had little time for Robert Gordon Walker, twelve years his wife’s junior, the electrical contractor involved in the renovation of Durlston Court Hotel. A man of athletic appearance, he had played for Boscombe football club as a semi-professional for ten years. Within six months of the marriage he had sold his electrical company and was registered as a joint director of the hotel.

According to Roger, however, there was little question of his becoming a major presence in the lives of the three brothers: ‘My mother always said, “You mustn’t have anything to do with him. You’re my son and I’m the one who makes all the decisions. You’re not to take any decisions from him.” She rather put him down.’ When years later Roger himself married, he took his bride down to Bournemouth to meet his stepfather: ‘I’d always been put off him by my mother. When Annie met him for the first time, she said, “I think he’s lovely.” And for the first time in my life I realised he actually was a very nice person, but I’d always been talked out of it by my mother.’ It is understandable to imagine that any guilt or embarrassment Lily felt in the circumstances may have been channelled into brainwashing her children in this way. In her lifetime she married three times, but as Roger stresses, ‘Never for money! Never for money! Except the last one, who dropped down dead at her feet. He was a multi-millionaire. They were about to be married. There was going to be a fourth.’ One thing he will never take away from her is the intensity with which she threw herself into running the business: ‘She worked so bloody hard. Twenty-four hours a day.’ If she was not in the office, she was in the kitchen. Not that she was without back-up staff. Her youngest son recalls the Swiss chef who used to chase everyone around the kitchen with a knife when his anger was roused. Colin was by now managing the accounts, when, that is, he was not indulging his passion for tap-dancing. When questioned about the social contradiction in how a relatively modest family could afford to process three offspring through private education, Roger can only point to her industry: ‘I wish I had known my mother better. She was so supportive. She paid all the school fees. But children don’t think of that at the time. It wasn’t as if they were well off. She grafted so hard.’

Tony Hancock remained at Durlston Court School in Swanage until the summer of 1938. When he joined, there were around sixty-five boys on the register. Converted in 1903 from a large mid-Victorian private house, it occupied a commanding position overlooking the bay and the resort’s monumental Great Globe, 40 ornamental tons of the Portland limestone that characterised the area. Between 1928 and 1965 it could boast the redoubtable Pat Cox as headmaster, immortalised later by another Durlstonian, the scriptwriter and producer David Croft, as the part-inspiration for Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army. ‘It’s not that he was a pompous man,’ David recalls, ‘more that he represented all the best characteristics of being British, loyalty, and the old school.’ Cox had been a junior officer in the Durham Light Infantry during the Great War at the age of seventeen. ‘It’s not if we win the war, it’s when we win the war,’ he would pontificate during the later conflict. Croft arrived just after Hancock left. He recalls that the mistress in charge of the junior school had with some foresight told Hancock that if he didn’t sit up straight and hold his head erect he would grow into a round-shouldered old man. Sadly he did not need to reach old age to fulfil the prophecy. According to Roger, himself an old boy, the school’s motto, engraved on its crest beneath the imperial Roman eagle, was ‘Erectus Non Elatus’. This quickly translated into ‘Upright, not boastful’. Hancock might have preferred the line from the old George Formby song: ‘I’m not stuck up or proud – I’m just one of the crowd – a good turn I’ll do when I can!’

It was inevitable that he would apply himself to the drama life of the school. He made his first public appearance cast as the ‘celebrated, underrated nobleman, the Duke of Plaza-Toro’ in an end-of-term production of The Gondoliers. This required him to lead a train of noblemen on stage and announce with great dignity, ‘My Lords … the Duke!’ On opening night, the nobility was assembled, the audience was expectant, and his moment came. Hancock raised his hand in an impressive gesture, his lips parted, but the only sound that emerged was a strangled gargle. The voice of a master from the prompt side urged him to go off and come on again. The crocodile traipsed back into the wings. At the second attempt things were even worse. Tony recalled, ‘My jaws worked hard – like a gramophone without a record on it. Not one other sound could I raise but for a mouse-like squeak. “All right, Hancock,” said the teacher, “you’ve had your moment of clowning.”’ The school magazine reported, ‘The part of the Duke had to be played silently in mime!’ He progressed sufficiently to be offered a part in the next production, The Pirates of Penzance. Tragically, between auditions and casting his voice broke, ‘which was just as well considering what little I had done with it in its intact state,’ wrote Hancock. ‘I sounded like a cross between Lily Pons and Paul Robeson.’ The master, knowing full well that parents were paying large sums for small boys to flaunt their exhibitionist tendencies in this manner, clutched at a particular straw: ‘What I really want is a good stage manager.’ But Hancock’s determination knew no bounds. By making a nuisance of himself he was allowed to join the chorus on strict instructions: ‘Remember, Hancock, you can whack your thigh. But you must not sing.’ Eventually he was reduced to demanding roles like falling out of cupboards and wardrobes: ‘I can claim to have died the death in more ways than one at Durlston Court. The odd thing was that the more I failed as a child actor the more I determined to succeed as an adult … setbacks and adversity in general have always stiffened my resolution and it was so maddening to lie there on the stage being stepped over and prodded for heart beats when I felt I had it in me to make people laugh.’ There was little doubt about that. Many years later his mother told an Australian newspaper that he had been a ‘funny little lad’ since the age of three: ‘He used to do such funny little things that had everyone laughing and always had a funny saying at the tip of his tongue.’

For the moment he was markedly more successful on the playing field. The school records reveal that as a victim of measles in his first term he got off to a slow start both academically – coming twelfth out of twelve in his class – and athletically. He rallied sufficiently to win the school’s welterweight boxing final ‘by a narrow margin – he is quick and hits very hard and showed that he can take as well as give punishment’. He went on that year to excel on the cricket field, taking thirty-five wickets with an average of 6.3 including seven for six against Old Malthouse School. At soccer he scored twenty-two goals in fourteen matches. The following year saw cricket figures of seventy wickets in thirteen games, including one return of eight for twelve. A member of the school shooting team, he was awarded his First Class marksmanship badge in his final year, and on sports day 1938 the Victor Ludorum Cup. His final cricket season revealed figures of fifty-seven wickets at an average of 4.3. The headmaster wrote, ‘In Hancock, A. J. we have one of the best bowlers Durlston has ever had.’ He had been more specific at an earlier date: ‘He always bowls a good length with plenty of nip off the pitch and swings in from the leg rather late.’ As for lessons, he managed to win the prizes for English and French in his final year and to achieve 76 per cent in the Common Entrance Algebra exam to secure his place at public school.

He moved on to the long-established Bradfield College, near Reading, in the autumn of 1938. It might appear he was set securely on the educational ladder to British middle-class success. He stuck it for little more than three terms. His housemaster, J.R.B. Moulsdale, confirmed his aptitude for sport, but as for academia: ‘he was not academically very bright – no qualifications at all – and it is rumoured that his housemaster once wrote a report that said, “this boy thinks that he can make a living by being funny”’. As if to substantiate the pupil’s opinion, Moulsdale added as an aside on another occasion, ‘He was much, much better at imitating his masters. His mother told Joan Le Mesurier of how one visiting day she had gone to the Dean’s office to discuss his academic progress. The news was not encouraging. As she left he told her that she would find her son leaving the hall with the rest of the school. She expressed her concern how she was going to pick him out of the crowd. “It’s simple,” replied the Dean with a twinkle. “He’ll be the only one with his mortarboard stuffed under his arm and his gown trailing on the ground.”’ The impression of a Just William caricature has been endorsed by Richard Emanuel, for whom Hancock acted as fag: ‘He was permanently untidy. His clothes never appeared to fit, his tie veered towards the back of his neck and his collar had a life of its own. He invariably had inky hands and not infrequently ink on his face. His hair was generally in keeping with his collar and tie.’ Whatever his natural propensity for untidiness, Hancock was registering a protest: he hated the place. Soon after the beginning of his fourth term he literally, in his brother’s words, ‘threw the mortarboard and gown away under a bush and jacked it in in disgust’. Fortunately his decision to quit the system, without any apparent opposition from his family, forestalled the prospect of being haunted by a public-school accent for the rest of his life. It is always feasible that family economics were the reason for his departure and that Hancock was at last putting on a good acting performance. The prospect of war could not have had a settling influence either. According to Ronald Elgood, when in the early 1950s Tony found himself playing the Palace Theatre, Reading, ten miles away, Moulsdale invited him back to the alma mater for old times’ sake. He refused point blank, saying how much he loathed Bradfield. Moulsdale appeared somewhat surprised, as though he had not realised his old pupil had this particular chip on his shoulder.

Elgood was a contemporary of Hancock at both Durlston Court and Bradfield. His abiding memory, aside from the fact that there was nothing lugubrious about him – ‘that came later’ – is of a sense of mischief: ‘He was fairly streetwise. I don’t know if he came from a state school. I well recall a game of football with Tony at centre forward. We were naïve little gents and he tapped the ball with his hand when the referee wasn’t looking. We were amazed.’ His tone suggests that they also secretly admired his cheek. He is certainly remembered ‘as a good-natured boy, a nice guy’. To Pat Cox’s wife he was ‘just an ordinary likeable schoolboy’. To Peter Wilson at Bradfield he was ‘a cheerful soul – full of jokes and the joys of spring’. There is no evidence to suggest that he suffered adversely from the notion that it helps to build the character of children by the enforced separation from their loved ones in a repressive, potentially alienating environment, although his brother does point out that he was a shy child. Another Bradfield contemporary, Nigel Knight, observed a ‘complete and utter silence, uncommunicativeness (markedly towards groups)’. Tony admitted to John Freeman being an extrovert till the age of about fourteen, ‘and then it sort of packed up’. He had no idea why. Roger puts it down to public school: ‘You were kept away from the punters. Later I cracked it. I went to a party, at the House of Commons of all places, and I thought nobody knows anybody at this party. I’m no worse off than anybody else. So I started going up to people. But Tony was not particularly gregarious. He was shy. If he did crack it later, it was with the drink, but not without. But it was a wonderful education, particularly in the business my parents were in when you really had no home life. So you were going back to school and seeing your friends, which is really the reverse of what you would expect.’

Preparatory and public school, albeit minor, provided an unlikely background for a professional comedian who would go on to achieve mass appeal. On radio and television the Hancock character often goes to great pains to recover his imaginary past – scholastic, military, ancestral, professional – by asserting a status he apparently never had. Had his true educational history been common knowledge, the radio episode The Old School Reunion, in which Tony regales Sid, Bill and Hattie with his boyhood triumphs at ‘Greystones’ – ‘seven of the happiest years of my life: started off as a fag and worked my way up to head cigar’ – might not have been as funny, even if the dénouement does insist that he turned out to be the worst school porter they ever had. Galton and Simpson also indulged his passion for sport in many an episode. It is comforting that their grandiose Roy of the Rovers soliloquising on his behalf was rooted in a certain schoolboy truth: ‘Picture the scene – Wembley Stadium 1939 … the ball was cleared high in the air – I caught it on my forehead – balanced it there – tilted my head back and with my nose holding it in position I was off. Past one man, past two men, forty-five yards, the ball never left my head. I was holding the lace in my mouth …’ But his soccer skills were nothing to his cricketing ability. He claims he is known in cricketing circles as ‘Googly Hancock’, and not as Bill Kerr suggests because of the way he walks: ‘Perishing Australians! What do they know about cricket, anyway?’ snorts Hancock with disgust.

Cricket became something of an obsession, a passion that lingered until the end of his life. He developed into a fine medium-pace seam bowler, and one of his proudest moments came at a charity match in 1958 when with little dispute he bowled out Ian Craig, the Australian captain, lbw with only his second ball; unfortunately the umpire, acknowledging the crowd had come to see the touring side, gave ‘not out’. His mother recalled that as a boy, ‘He used to go round the hotel swinging his arms. He was always bowling at something.’ It also provided the defining bond between the two brothers, in spite of the age gap between them. ‘I suppose,’ says Roger, ‘that between seven and ten I got to know him better because we played a lot of cricket in the yard at the back of the hotel.’ His real-life athletic prowess would have especially pleased his father, who had engrained the love of sport in his son. Among his other accomplishments Jack had been an extremely good billiards player, a superb golfer and a boxing expert. He had coached boxing on an ad hoc basis at Durlston Court School and boasted a certain notoriety as a licensed boxing referee officiating at tournaments at the Winter Gardens, the Stokewood Road Baths, and elsewhere locally. His youngest son claims that he was ‘the most unpopular referee in Hampshire – as soon as he was announced, he was booed’. Tony had his own memories: ‘Regularly we trotted along to his fights, sat ourselves down in free ring-side seats and promptly stood up and booed every decision he gave. Very popular we were, I don’t mind telling you.’

In his Face to Face interview Tony made it quite clear why he left Bradfield: ‘I wanted to get into the theatre … I felt I could do it somehow … I don’t know why really.’ He emphasised to John Freeman that he had wanted to be a comic for as long as he could remember. Ever disparaging of his appearance, he added, ‘perhaps looking like this it was perhaps the only thing I could do’. He would not be the first comedian to turn such a deficiency into a workable option. At another level, however, one needs to jump back to when he was around six or seven years old to discover the emotional heart of the matter. There would have been no single moment of annunciation. Whatever the schools he attended, the most engaging, most enduring part of his education occurred as he fell under the continual spell of the variety artists who clustered around his father in the hotel bar in the early 1930s. In later life he revealed that he had the measure of them exactly: ‘They fascinated me. Those old pros were so much more extrovert than people in the business today. It seemed as if they would go into an act at the drop of a hat. They were different from any other kind of people I had ever met in my life. They seemed to get so much more out of life simply by being alive.’ In later years he would parody the world of ‘no business like show business’, but he never lost his respect for the professionalism of the variety trade that catered for a million eventualities in the tireless round from one venue to another.

It was a significant time in the development of British entertainment. A new breed of performer was breaking through in variety, a more sophisticated type whose talent, often nurtured in concert parties, had been lifted to success in the radio studios of the day. In comedy a more sophisticated approach underpinned humour that still somehow managed to remain accessible to a wider audience, as the Oxbridge satirical movement would thirty years later. How could a boy of impressionable years not be impressed by both Pavilion favourites and Hancock hotel patrons like Norman Long, billed as ‘A Song, a Smile and a Piano’, the Western Brothers, listed as ‘The Singing Songwriters’ with their admonition, ‘Play the game, you cads,’ and Gillie Potter, ‘The Squire of Hogsnorton’, with his erudite ramblings about his mythical but oh-so-real village? Their billing matter beckoned as Tony gravitated towards his destiny. The week commencing 3 October 1933 was a red-letter one. Placarded on the posters around town as ‘England’s Premier Radio Stars in Person’ were the ‘In a Spot of Bother’ double act Clapham and Dwyer, Tommy Handley of later ‘ITMA’ renown, and Elsie and Doris Waters all wrapped up in one bumper fun parcel. The last two were especially significant with their portrayal of ‘Gert and Daisy, the Radio Flappers’, comedy where the accent was less on jokes, more on characterisation as the public seemingly eavesdropped on a conversation driven by the minutiae of existence, the tedium of bus queues, shop queues, cinema queues, in short the sluggish inertia of suburbia writ large. No comedian would come to embrace those aspects more effectively than the adult Hancock.

Looking back from the vantage point of his own success Hancock would single out the occasional act. The select members of his extended dream family included ‘Stainless’ Stephen, billed proudly as ‘The British Broadcasting Comedian’, a Sheffield-based performer who knew Jack Hancock extremely well. His speciality was a form of ‘punctuated patter’, articulating the symbols that add meaning to the words in a way that predated Victor Borge’s splendid verbal games for a later generation: ‘Somebody once said inverted commas comedians are born comma not made. Well … slight pause to heighten egotistical effect comma … let me tell my dense public (innuendo) that I was born of honest but disappointed parents in anno Domini eighteen ninety something … end of first paragraph and a fresh line.’ A sometime schoolmaster whose real name was Arthur Clifford Baines, he heightened the effect on stage by wearing a costume that embraced a stainless-steel waistcoat and a bowler hat with steel rim to match. Hancock later acknowledged that by listening to Clifford he first learned the importance of timing in lifting a relatively trite script to a more exalted level. Moreover, according to Tony, it was ‘Stainless’ Stephen who ‘gave me my first whiff of greasepaint by taking me behind the scenes at the Bournemouth Pavilion Theatre. That was a magic night for me and thereafter I made a beeline backstage at every opportunity.’ Recently completed in 1929, the Pavilion Theatre on Bournemouth’s Westover Road rose majestically in its commanding position like a red-brick Taj Mahal. His school uniform soon became as familiar a sight in the wings as the stage manager’s pullover. One incident there loomed large in the notes he made in 1962:

One night the Houston Sisters were on, Renée and Billie. Renée looked so sweet and attractive that I stood there entranced. Then she came off and said a few sharp things to the man who was handling the lights. She really gave him the works and I was twenty-five before I knew what all the words meant. It was a shock for a lad of eight wearing his school cap, imagining he was in some wonderful fairyland until – whoosh! That lovely creature came bursting into the wings and shattered all his illusions. Renée was right, though. That man was making a pretty fair hash of the lighting.

Few performers made a greater impression on him than the traditional double act Clapham and Dwyer, who claimed a complete paragraph in his jottings:

It may sound strange now when my own line of comedy is so remote from anything they ever did, but nevertheless that pair taught me the rudiments of the job. Charlie Clapham – in topper and monocle, again – was the funny one, a spry, scatterbrained whippet and quite a dog in every way. Billy Dwyer was the mastiff of the act, but in his solid fashion he was great fun. In fact, he bore out what I have always felt about these comedy partnerships; that the straight man is invariably much funnier than he is credited with being. In a way the Clapham and Dwyer relationship reminded me of Laurel and Hardy’s. I have always thought that Hardy was as funny as Laurel and Billy Dwyer used to amuse me enormously. I followed their act all over the place and often stayed with the Dwyer family. They may not always have wanted me but they got me just the same. Bill had an odd quirk of humour. When I arrived at his home he would say, ‘Goodbye!’ and tell me, ‘There’s a good train back at 6.30 tonight.’ Sometime I wonder whether he actually meant it, but I prefer to think it was one of his little jokes.

And then there was Sydney Howard, who was a movie star as well. If back then a cross between a soothsayer and a casting agent had been looking to replicate the Hancock of the future, they need have searched no further. His rotund build, his equally rotund speech, his ‘googly’ gait, his sense of comic mournfulness were all spot on. He too epitomised pomposity in the context of a frayed, shabby gentility. To watch him today in one of his most successful low-budget comedies, Fame, is a revelation. He plays the floorwalker in a department store. When a boy insults him, he goes to swipe him with his hand before thinking better of it and quickly converts the movement into an insincere pat on the head: one can almost hear a muted ‘Flippin’ kids!’ – the catchphrase that defined Hancock’s early radio success. At another point he asks a customer what kind of jumper she requires. Her answer is enough to send Howard off into the patriotic travesty of a bargain-basement Richard II: ‘A Fair Isle – this fair isle – this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this Eden, demi-paradise, this fortress built by nature for herself against infection and the hand of war, this happy breed of men, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea …’ and so on until the drapery department curtains come crashing around his head. Later Hancock would make his own comic capital out of the speech. There is no evidence that he saw the film, although it is exceedingly unlikely that he did not. But, crucially, any similarity is in the attitude.

On one of Howard’s visits to his parents’ hotel, Tony plucked up the courage to tell the great star he was keen to go on the stage: ‘He told me I would be crazy if I did. “Keep away from it, lad,” he said. “I wouldn’t let a dog of mine go into show business!” Then a pause, and Sydney said in his wonderful Yorkshire way, “But if you do get into it, let me tell you one or two things.” And he took me into a corner and showed me all sorts of tricks of timing and hand movements.’ It may have been the most important ‘lesson’ of his life. They met on at least one other occasion. When Tony was about ten years old the Hancocks and the Howards found themselves holidaying by chance at the same hotel in the South of France. The comedian and his wife made a fuss of the young Hancock, incongruously cocooned in his prep-school uniform as the Riviera sun streamed down. One day Sydney spotted a loose thread on the Eton jacket. He went to remove the offending strand. As he pulled it away, it just kept coming. The other end, far away, was on a spool secretly threaded through from Tony’s pocket. Hancock may well have picked up the gag from Chaplin’s City Lights, a film that had a life-long impact upon him, although its origins are probably enshrined in the annals of the practical joke. ‘You’ll go far, my son,’ said the astonished comedian with a gleam of surprise in his eye.

One mealtime during this holiday Tony was served a whole fish, complete from head to scaly tail. According to his mother he took one look at the lifeless eyes of the forlorn creature staring up from his plate and declared, ‘I’ll stick to good old bread and fromage, thank you.’ It is good to know that his father was able to witness his son’s slowly emerging comic style. To Tony, his father shared something of the vitality and example of his famous friends and provided that last zing of incentive for him to pursue his chosen path. Ultimately he needed no other justification. When he was nine, his dad pulled strings to secure him a film test, although nothing came of it. Years later in his dressing room at the Adelphi Theatre he read out the letter of invitation to appear in the 1952 Royal Variety Performance to their mutual friend, George Fairweather. He burst into tears as he explained, ‘If only Dad could have been here.’ ‘He will be,’ assured Fairweather. ‘I wish I could be as sure,’ added Tony, extracting a promise that George would attend the gala evening in his father’s place.

To her credit his mother ensured that after his father’s death laughter continued to ring though the rooms of the family apartment at Durlston Court Hotel. The extent of the family’s capacity for letting its hair down has been conveyed in her memoir by Joan Le Mesurier, with Lily at the forefront of the hilarity: ‘When the family was all together they were always laughing. His brother Roger would try to climb up the wall. Tony would roll on his back and wave his legs in the air, and Colin would kneel on all fours, banging his fists on the ground, all of them fighting for breath.’ Roger recalls the roles somewhat reversed: ‘Tony literally climbed up the wall if he was hysterical, and we were hysterical a lot of the time.’ It extended into young adulthood when the brothers would send their impromptu parody of the popular panel game Twenty Questions spiralling into Rabelaisian heights – or depths. ‘What is mineral with an animal connection?’ ‘Could it be the spade up the dromedary’s arse?’ responded Tony with Isobel Barnett primness. According to his brother, he would become literally helpless with laughter at such sessions. A photograph survives from an earlier time showing Tony in the company of his mother, stepfather and two brothers. He is mugging self-assuredly at the camera without a care in the world.

In time he came to translate his conventional boyhood fantasies into his first comic material. As a very young boy he nursed an ambition to become the Wyatt Earp of a make-believe town he referred to as Toenail City. The upper precincts of the Railway Hotel rattled to the ricochet of toy-town gunfire. One Christmas he received the gift of a sheriff’s outfit from his parents. Later he complained about the pains in his legs. His mother admitted that only then did they discover that he had strained the muscles from walking around all day bow-legged. Roger recalls that with time he gave the fantasy the comic treatment in an early recitation entitled ‘The Sheriff of Toenail City’.

I’ve come here to give you a story

Of the rip-roaring wild woolly west,

Where the Indians chew nails and drink liquor

While the men grow sweet peas on their chest.

In the township of Toenail City

Lived the Sheriff, a man of good class,

But he drank like a fish did the Sheriff,

Till his breath burned a hole through the glass.

But the pride of his life was his moustache –

It was famous as Niagara Falls

And his missus when washing on Fridays

Used the moustache to hang out the smalls.

His moustache was so long and whippy

People spoke of it under their breath

And the old-timers said that the Sheriff once sneezed

And it practically flogged him to death.

But whenever the Sheriff was shaving,

You could see him all covered in gore.

His whiskers just blunted the razor,

So he hammered them back in his jaw.

’Twas with Hortense, the bartender’s daughter

That he finally found his romance

Till one day she sat down beside him

She got one of his spurs in the pants.

She walloped him hard in the pants,

Her temper was starting to foment,

But the Sheriff’s false teeth just flew out with a pop

And bit her on the spur of the moment.

Then Hortense turned round on the Sheriff

And kicked him real hard on the jaw

And hearing the cowboys applauding

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!

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