Copyright

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A Grafton Original 1992

Copyright © William Hall 1992

William Hall asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780586217733

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Dedication

For Jeannie, Will, Juliette and Lena

with my gratitude for their inspiration,

support, and their patience.

Epigraph

‘A comedian need not necessarily be a humorous person. Indeed those who have been most successful in exciting laughter have often been men with a disposition towards melancholy.’

DOCTOR SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709–1784)

‘Oh titter ye not. No, listen. Lis-sen! Everyone is being very tittersome tonight.’ FRANKIE HOWERD (1917–1992)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword by Peter Rogers

Preface

1 Early Days

2 Early Signs

3 Basic Training

4 On the Road

5 Radio Waves

6 Sunny Interlude

7 The Spice of Life

8 The Other Women …

9 Ups and Downs

10 … And The Other Men

11 Carry On

12 Bottoms Up!

13 In The Wars

14 Fond Farewell

Epilogue

Filmography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Foreword

by Peter Rogers

It is easy to make unkind remarks about people. The very thought of them sometimes inspires bitchery that could rival Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward. But when it comes to saying kind things you find yourself at a loss for words, new words, words that haven’t been said before.

That is how I think of Frankie Howerd, how everybody I know thinks of him. What can you say about such a person? It was impossible not to like him. It wasn’t that magic ingredient misnamed Charm, the sort of thing usually associated with motorcar salesmen. Charm in Frankie would have been suspect. In fact, you could almost say that he was so completely lacking in charm that he actually charmed you. He grew on you, like friendly moss. You could never tire of his company because he was never aggressive or pushy. He didn’t talk about himself all the time as other actors do. He was a patient listener and always gave you the impression that he was interested in you and what you had to say. He made you feel wanted, possibly because that was how he felt himself. He, too, wanted to be wanted.

Professionally, he was a Master. He was the original Deliberate Mistake. No pause or hesitation in his act was unrehearsed or not carefully considered, and he had that gift of making you feel embarrassed for him as he walked up and down the stage looking as though he didn’t know what to say next. But he knew exactly what he was going to say next and exactly when. It was a very cunningly contrived ruse and quite original. And it worked every time. It was the most successful con trick of all time and every time it came off you admired the perpetrator more.

The most heartening and heart-breaking of Frankie’s appearances was the occasion when he appeared before the Oxford Union. It did your heart good to see the old trouper playing with such a young and critical audience and holding them in the palm of his hand. They loved him and he could do what he liked with them. I think that on this occasion if he had just stood on the stage saying nothing they would have loved him still because that’s what he was – someone to love.

In my own experience I know that I always looked forward to the day when Frankie was due on the set at Pinewood. I enjoyed watching him perform and I enjoyed meeting and sitting with him off-set. He never asked you what you thought of his performance, not because he wasn’t interested but, as was so natural to the man, he did not like to ask. To him such a thing was bad manners. And if you did praise his performance he would simply say: ‘You think so? Oh, good.’ It wasn’t said dismissively. He cherished your opinion, but didn’t want to be effusive. To him that would have appeared insincere.

It is a pity to have to talk about Frankie in the past tense. When I heard the news of his death I swore, as you would swear if you dropped your ice cream on your foot. That doesn’t mean to say that Frankie was no more important than a blob of ice cream. It means that his death was unnecessary. It seemed all wrong, a mistake, and I almost expected to hear that it was untrue, a rumour. Sadly, it was true and always will be. And that is the greatest pity of all. That dear amicable man is not here now and we notice the loss because he was so rare.

Preface

His letter came out of the blue.

It landed on my desk on a breezy March morning in 1966 as I stood by the window of the London Evening News looking down on the bright yellow vans parked the length of Tudor Street, just another envelope in the batch of morning mail.

Except that this one was different.

The address was badly typed, and unevenly spaced. But inside was an unsolicited letter from a comic I had found side-achingly funny, even when I wasn’t all that sure exactly why. Frankie Howerd had always made me laugh, usually in fits and starts and abrupt bellows rather than prolonged mirth. He had that quality of surprise that kept you on tenterhooks for the next line even as he jollied you along on some impossible foray into his own misadventures.

I had reviewed The Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery for the paper, and liked what I saw of Frankie amid the flying gymslips and stocking-tops of the little horrors of Ronald Searle’s warped imagination. The letter of thanks that he sent me was a reflection of the man who wrote it, with an appealing honesty, a heartwarming naïvety of sorts, to which you couldn’t help but respond.

We met numerous times after that, usually in his dressing-room after a first night with the congratulations flowing, but also in his London homes. And amid the uncertainty and self-doubt that plagued him, just as it does every great comedian, you could sense the warmth of someone who needed to be wanted – or was it the other way around?

It was this warmth that came through and touched the hearts as well as the funny-bones of millions, capturing a whole new generation of young people in his later years. It made Frankie’s, passing all the sadder when it happened.

But this book is mainly about the fun times, the ludicrous moments, the paradox of a man who brought laughter to millions yet too often for his own good was a soul in torment.

A complex, fascinating figure whose like we will never see again. I hope you enjoy meeting him.

WILLIAM HALL

London, August 1992

1

Early Days

The first memory Frankie Howerd could ever recall was falling downstairs as a toddler and landing on his head, thus uttering the first ‘Oooh … aaah!’ of the many that in later life would bring laughter to millions the world over.

He was almost two years old at the time, and it happened in the terraced house at No. 53, Hartoft Street, York, close to the City Hospital where he was born on 6 March 1917. It was young Frankie’s first bruising encounter with a world that would batter his emotions and his ego, turn him into a hypochondriac – yet provide the basis for a humour that in its own uniqueness will never be equalled.

At the start, who would ever have guessed it? His father Frank Howard – Frankie later changed the spelling – was a soldier, Private No. 6759 in the 1st Royal Dragoons, while his mother Edith worked in the Rowntree chocolate factory in the city.

Edith was petite, slim, with black curly hair that hinted at her Celtic background – she had a strict Scots Presbyterian upbringing – and possessed an appealing, almost soulful look that her eldest son would inherit and eventually exploit to its fullest advantage.

The portents were intriguing. Plotting his chart, Royal astrologer Penny Thornton would find that this particular Pisces with its Moon rising in Leo, a pronounced Jupiter, and Uranus and Mars in an opposing position to the Sun would all mean … that Francis was in for a rough old time.

‘He would be a born actor, sentimental, moody, volatile, quirky and acerbic. And predisposed to a certain irreverence and rebellion against authority,’ she asserted. All of which would prove to be spot on.

But at that point all he had was a headache. It was six months after the tumble that Francis Alick Howard, a lusty infant with a strong pair of lungs, was taken south with the family when his father was transferred to the Royal Artillery, promoted to sergeant, and posted to Woolwich. The family moved into a house at No. 19, Arbroath Road, Eltham, a terraced street in the poorer part of the area, much of it long since pulled down to make way for a housing estate on that faceless fringe of South London.

But in those days there was space, and plenty of it. Green fields, trees, hedgerows abundant with wild life, and a view that stretched away towards the Weald of Kent. The house had a large garden with a lot of lawn, and young Frankie grew up amid the greenery, playing happily for hours in the grass, inventing jungle games and becoming adept at climbing trees. Those early days would leave their mark on him, creating a fondness for the countryside that never left him.

Who else do you know who regularly rehearses his lines in front of a cud-chewing audience of cows? Frankie would go on to do just that, and describe them as highly appreciative of his talents.

But for now he was a chubby child with fair hair like his dad – Tennyson might have been writing about him when he penned: ‘Shine out, little head, sunning o’er with golden curls …’

Money was scarce in those early days after World War I, and the family were poor without being destitute. Sergeant Howard was based six miles away in the Woolwich Barracks, headquarters of the Royal Artillery alongside the imposing Royal Arsenal, founded by Henry VII, that took up a mile of choice Thames skyline on the south bank. Even though he would arrive home most weekends with the weekly pay packet, it was left to Edith to feed three mouths as well as her own – Frankie’s younger brother Sidney had come along, and a year after that his sister Betty was born. Frankie himself, who remained a bachelor all his life, always said he had a church named after him at his own christening: ‘York Spinster!’

Growing up into a tall and gangling lad, he saw relatively little of his father, and even less when Sergeant Howard was invalided out of the Royal Artillery and transferred to the Education Corps to supervise the academic training of young soldiers around the country.

His father was diagnosed as having a hole in his lung – brought on, like so many of his comrades, by the dreaded gas swirling around the trenches of Passchendaele in Belgium – another statistic of the War to End All Wars.

Frankie and his dad were never close, whereas he was his mum’s darling, and remained so until her death in 1962 at the age of sixty-nine. In fact, his father’s prolonged absences created a palpable tension in the family whenever Sergeant Howard reappeared out of the blue for a few days’ leave, and the barrier between him and his young son became insurmountable. ‘I positively resented his intrusion,’ Frankie would reveal later.

On one memorable occasion his parents did take him on a rare family night out – into the smoky interior of the local working men’s club, where little Francis, aged four, was given his first stab at fame: to go on stage, sing a song, and come away with a bag of sweets as a prize.

Frankie’s reaction? ‘I howled the place down. I was absolutely petrified, and struggled and screamed blue bloody murder to get off. But I still got the bag of sweets!’ He could have had no idea then, but it was the shape of things to come.

Stage fright would stalk Frankie for the whole of his career, often leaving him quivering in the wings or in his dressing-room, numb with terror, steeling himself to walk out and face the public gaze.

Growing up amid the rural Nine Fields of Eltham – a village, incidentally, that spawned another comic son in the shape of Bob Hope – young Francis found himself increasingly retreating into a solitary world of dreams and fantasy. He would go for long walks alone, creating his own scenarios like any imaginative young boy – but with a difference. His dreams took him out in front of applauding masses, bestriding the stage like a colossus, master of the theatrical manor and all he surveyed. At the age of ten he was even practising how to sign his autograph.

The Howard children went to the local Gordon Elementary School, named after the hero of Khartoum, where Frankie proved a model pupil, anxious to please. So much so that on his first summer holiday when the school was set a mathematics task of three hundred sums to solve over the long nine weeks off, studious Francis was the only pupil to struggle through the lot. Mathematics was his best subject, geography his worst.

His mother’s Presbyterian background ensured that her eldest son was enrolled for Sunday School almost as soon as he was tall enough to reach the door handle of the church hall at nearby St Barnabas.

Frankie found himself instinctively drawn into this friendly, dedicated new family with all the security it represented. It was his first taste of religion and he became addicted to it.

In next to no time he had eagerly signed on for the Band of Hope and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Plus the local Cub Scouts, even though the weekly vow of ‘Akela, we promise to do our best’ made little impression on him – Frankie was, and remained, hopeless in anything of a practical nature.

Eagerly, Frankie would look forward to the Sunday School annual treat, a church outing to Herne Bay. The family were too poor to afford proper holidays, apart from a single week in Brighton for Mum and the three children when school packed up for the summer.

Edith Howard did her best with precious little in the kitty and Frankie could recall a magical evening when he was first taken to the pantomime: Boxing Day 1925, aged seven, to ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ at the romantic tribulations of another dreamer, Cinderella no less, at the Royal Artillery Theatre, Woolwich. His mum took her brood along on the bus to join the Boxing Night throng for the cheap seats in the gallery. They queued for two hours for the 8.00 p.m. performance – but Frankie, cheering Nora Delaney as Prince Charming and booing the Ugly Sisters for all his little lungs were worth, treasured the memory all his life.

Thirty years later he would step on to that same stage for his own show, and be surprised at how small it was. At the age of seven, it looked huge.

‘I was hypnotized by the fairyland magic, a world in which everything was beautiful and glamorous,’ he would recall. ‘It was an exciting, glittering, over-the-rainbow world, and I wanted to become a part of it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He banned it.

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

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

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

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

Poll tax is a tax on parrots.

People go around Venice in gorgonzolas.

A senator is half-man and half-horse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

Early Signs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next day Frankie enrolled for acting lessons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He records what happened next in graphic detail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And the answer came: a comedian!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ah that! That’s seagull droppin’s!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone in the audience tittered.

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

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

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

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

Frankie got off the stage. His eyes were streaming with tears of humiliation.

It was a chastening experience, the kind where a brave soul might say to himself: ‘One day I’ll laugh about this …’ And he did, years later, with Derek Roy. But not then. Frankie turned up his coat collar and crept away into the night.

He tried again, this time with the Carroll Levis Discoveries – nothing to do with jeans – that would eventually become a hit TV talent-spotting show. He keyed himself up no fewer than four times. ‘Comedy, impressions, comic monologues, dramatic speeches, I tried them all.’ Result? ‘Nothing. It was no good.’

Successful amateur, failed pro. Frankie Howard’s curriculum vitae could have been summed up in those few words, and it hardly made impressive reading. He could make people laugh with his sketches and gags on a local level – church hall audiences loved him. But when it came to the ‘real thing’, as far as a career in comedy was concerned, he was up against a brick wall and he knew it. Worse, he could see no way round or over it.

Then the war came, and with it a chance to conquer fresh pastures. That’s if he could conquer his nerves first.

3

Basic Training

Five months after war was declared on 3 September 1939, Frankie received his call-up papers. Why the War Office waited until February 1940 before deciding that Howard F.A. should do his bit for King and Country has never been made clear. As it turned out, for the first two years of his service he lived up to his initials, and did just that.

He applied to join his dad’s old regiment, and was duly accepted for the Royal Artillery. First stop: the barracks at Shoeburyness where they fitted out his tall, ungainly figure in khaki, found him a bunk in one of the dormitory huts, and set about turning the new recruit into a fighting soldier.

Of course, it was hopeless from the start. Frankie was willing, no doubt about that. But his innate nervousness led him into all sorts of scrapes, the kind that would not be out of place in one of the Carry On farces he would later adorn.

First, basic training. It was nerves, he insisted, that led him to answer back to the fearsome Sergeant Major Alfred Tonks at his first appearance on the parade ground. To actually mutter the words ‘Speak up!’ when the sarge was bellowing his guts out in a roar that scattered the pigeons, smacked suspiciously of potential suicide rather than a wish to see the war through.

From that moment Private Howard’s fate was sealed. He was singled out as a troublemaker, and paid the price accordingly.

A fellow recruit, Private Peter Enright, recalled the early days of square-bashing with a nostalgic smile. ‘They had us out there all day and every day trying to drill some kind of discipline into us. But poor old Frank just couldn’t get it together. When the sarge shouted “Right wheel!” once, Frank actually headed off to the left. And when the order came to “Mark time!” – guess who bumped into my back and sent me sprawling into the bloke in front? Right first time.’

It was worse when it came to weaponry. After his initial introduction to the heavy .303 Lee-Enfield rifle, Frankie knew they were not destined to be friends. As someone who never got beyond the primary school level in Do-It-Yourself — his later boast was that he couldn’t even change a light bulb, let alone a fuse – Frankie was as out of place stripping down a rifle as a car mechanic performing a heart transplant.

Sergeant Major Tonks dubbed him the ‘Unknown Quantity’, and made his life a misery. But the one thing Frankie did know about himself was his desire to get back on the boards.

‘I couldn’t help myself. Even while I was square-bashing on the parade ground I was day-dreaming about it. Performing was something that was absolutely compulsive, and I must have had some sort of innate belief in myself to flounder on,’ he would claim later.

At that point in his life he needed all the faith in himself that he could muster. The Lewisham débâcle had been the start of the first low point in a career that would see him soar to the heights of stardom and sink to the depths of despair. But that was for later. Right now, if there was a graph on the wall of Frankie’s personal profit-and-loss account, it would show a minor dip.

His ego had been further dented on the actual outbreak of war, when he immediately applied to ENSA (Entertainments National Services Association) to offer his own services. ‘I wasn’t trying to dodge the column,’ he stated later. Just trying to do what he thought he was best at — entertaining.

Frankie’s best wasn’t good enough. He found himself alone on the vast stage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which was frightening enough in itself, auditioning in front of an Army major and a group of colleagues, all of them in uniform. Years later he would hold that stage, and a 2,000-strong packed house, in the palm of his hand. Right then, gawky and uncertain at twenty-two, the sight of the khaki-clad line-up in the fourth row was too much.

Maybe it was a combination of the brooding atmosphere of the huge auditorium and the gaze of the critical authority. But once again his ‘nervous tendency to go to pieces at the wrong moment’ – Frankie’s own words – got the better of him.

The message was: Thanks a lot, but no thanks. Frankie gave them a weak salute, and found himself out on the street.

But now, at last, came his chance to shine. If not at the Front – well, at the back. The rigours of square-bashing day after day over the hard Tarmac at Shoeburyness were behind him, a memory of wasted hours and sore feet. He was transferred away from the basilisk stare and frightening lung power of Sergeant Major Tonks to B Battery in another section of the barracks, accorded the rank of Gunner, and taught the rudiments of the British Army’s fire-power in the face of a forthcoming Nazi invasion.

Because the threat was very real. The ill-fated British Expeditionary Force on the beaches of France had its back to the Channel, and the little boats prepared to sail for Dunkirk. All leave was cancelled. France was about to fall. From the safety of the garrison walls on the north bank of the Thames Estuary, Gunner Howard watched the small craft edge past the Maplin sandbanks on their way from Canvey Island, Westcliff and Southend to brave the Luftwaffe dive-bombers and write their own page into history.

And he waited for the call.

Which never came.

Instead he whiled away the hours until a different, unexpected demand came through: the urgent need in these darkest of hours to boost morale and give the chaps some diversion. In other words, camp entertainment. Frankie would prove adept at that, in every sense.

He stepped forward smartish, offered his services as a comic, and was snapped up on the spot by a grateful Entertainments Officer, possibly because there wasn’t too much other noticeable talent around at that time. At the first Sunday night concert in the Mess, he was introduced as ‘Gunner Frankie Howard’ – another first, because up to then he had always been called Frank. Away from the footlights he would remain Frank to his friends and relatives, Frankie to the profession.

‘I didn’t like Frankie too much,’ he admitted later. ‘It seemed positively babyish.’ But to the regiment he became Frankie, and to his comrades that’s how he stayed.

He went down a treat. Officers and lower ranks alike guffawed and cheered at his jokes. The Lewisham Hippodrome faded into obscurity.

The memory of those early days watching the North Sea stayed with him forever, to be recalled whenever the talk returned to ‘What did you do in the war … ?’

He remembered the sandbags along the beachfront at Southend, with Gunner Howard stretched out face downwards in their protective shadow, toes and elbows digging into the sand, peering along his rifle barrel through the barbed wire at a grey horizon with palpitating heart, waiting for an invisible enemy to appear. Frankie always likened it to that scene in the war epic The Longest Day when the helmeted German manning a pillbox on the coast of France saw the D-Day armada emerging out of the mist. ‘I knew how he felt. I think I’d have had a fit if that had happened to us.’

It didn’t. There was no German armada, just rumours.

Frankie told a nice story about how he and a young Welsh rookie were seconded to guard Wakering, a village not much more than a speck on the map located on the Essex marshes below Foulness Island. Actually there is a Great Wakering and its sister hamlet of Little Wakering, and it was their duty to ensure the two hundred-odd residents slept peacefully at night, knowing the British Army was on hand to protect them.

In fact the British Army consisted of Frankie, Dai and a tent in which they took turns to sleep while the other stood guard on round-the-clock twelve-hour shifts. In that summer of 1940 Frankie would clump around the country lanes, with his rifle in his hand and ideas for comedy sketches churning in his mind.

Back in the tent they had set up with a local farmer’s permission in a secluded corner of a turnip field, he would jot down the gags and save them for – who knew when?

One day the farmer emerged from his gate to accost Frankie in the lane. ‘You know, son, we’re really grateful to you,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ said Frankie. ‘Why’s that, then?’

‘Well, we can hear your boots marching up and down, and it gives us a great sense of security. If there is an invasion – we know you’re there!’

Yes, thought Frankie. Me and my rifle and ten rounds of ammunition to hold back the hordes. He thanked the farmer, and stomped on down the road, extra loud.

In fact, it was an idyllic time – and idle. If there was a war on, he wouldn’t have known it, apart from the blackout curtains over the windows of the farmhouses and the occasional plane flying overhead. Otherwise, in that hot dry summer, the only sounds to disturb his train of thought were the tractors in the fields and the cheery hum of insects in the hedgerows.

It was with mixed feelings that Gunner Howard was ordered back to the garrison as the first chill breath of autumn filtered through the trees. Sorry to leave the friends he had made in the village. Glad to have another crack at the concert parties and try out his new material.

Back at base, Frankie was swift to approach the Entertainments Officer. His enthusiasm proved infectious and soon he was practically running the weekly shows single-handed.

‘Tact’, he admitted, ‘was never my strong point. I tend to speak my mind.’ And speak it he did, with increasing volume and acerbity as the Sunday nights drew nearer and nerves started fraying. ‘There weren’t too many comedians around, so I largely had the field to myself. Just as well, because I wanted – nay, Francis, insisted – on being top of the bill!’

His rivals for the place of honour were usually singers, both from the Royal Artillery and the women ATS, who would help vary the bill, plus an assortment of conjurors, musical maestros, jugglers, even dancers. But Frankie was already virtually a semi-pro, head and shoulders above the rest, and he could pull rank on them all – in expertise if not in authority.

Insisting on anything in the Army when you are a lowly gunner may seem out of step with reality. But with a cunning combination of ‘Francis at his most charming’ and friendly persuasion, plus his sheer talent for making people laugh, Frankie invariably found himself where he felt he belonged. Top of the programme, closing the show. And always to the clamour of cheers, clapping and boot-stamping that are music to a performer’s ears. Particularly to one with a swollen head.

Because Frankie was cocksure, and he didn’t mind who knew it. ‘Yes, I was arrogant,’ he would admit. ‘I thought I knew it all. I mean, I felt some of them weren’t out of short trousers when it came to performing.’

The weekly Music Hall was a kind of military ‘Sunday Night is Talent Night’. Now, for the first time, Frankie was not afraid to exploit his nervous stammer. He found it got laughs, and began to capitalize on it.

First step: get the audience on your side. Frankie did this by the simple method of creating a conspiracy with his listeners. ‘Rather than acting to them, I did it with them. I told them my misfortunes as if I was gossiping over the garden fence. It’s the sort of thing you hear any night in any pub in the country. Everything happened to me, except that I let it get completely out of hand, and carried it to extremes.

‘It worked because people identified with my troubles. There but for the grace of God …

‘I was a bit raw in those days. But the essence of my act was born there, the seeds were sown in that Army camp on Sunday nights in the Mess.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only this time he was in drag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the boys and girls in khaki loved it.

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

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

‘Gerroff! Now —!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4

On the Road

In 1942 Bombardier Howard was transferred to Wales, and found himself ensconsed in an Army Experimental Station in a remote coastal area near Swansea. It was while he was there, pushing a pen for Requisitions by day and writing comedy sketches with it by night, that word of an Army concert party called Stars in Battledress reached his ears. It had been formed on the lines of ENSA to boost the morale of the boys at various bases along the Allied Front. It could mean being sent into Europe or North Africa or to the Far East, wherever a war zone was located.

Frankie volunteered the same day he heard about it. In all, he volunteered four times – but on each occasion his audition was given the thumbs-down. If a bad workman blames his tools, and a bad comic is tempted to blame his material, Frankie, who was by now a remarkably good comic, must be unique in this case in being able to blame his audience. Of one.

The lone stranger was the ‘interviewing officer’, who behind the pips and a bored expression sat alone in large empty Nissen huts while the would-be stars in battledress did their best to impress him. Frankie needed a full house, a large audience to tease along. His ‘Oooh, no – now lis-sen!’ had the hollow echo of failure, and he knew it almost before he left the hut to await the verdict a week later.

It was their loss – but in those days, who could know? Frankie tried not to feel disillusioned, but it wasn’t easy. Especially for a performer whose opinion of himself seesawed wildly between adrenalin-fuelled buoyancy and the stricken depths of self-doubt. The station was too small to warrant a regular concert, so he joined a local amateur dramatic society to keep his feet near the footlights.

The war dragged on. The only significant event in Frankie’s life was when he was promoted to Sergeant, and put in charge of a large Army lorry packed with soldiers. With only half a dozen driving lessons behind him – ‘Well, there’s the Army for you, always ready to test new talent’ – Frankie lost control inside a minute, and drove the giant vehicle through a hedge and into a tree. No one was hurt, and Frankie never got behind a driving-wheel again in his life.

His brother Sidney was in the RAF and sister Betty was doing her bit for King and Country in the ATS. Frankie was actually part of the D-Day force that set out for the dawn invasion on 6 June, but neither the Germans nor more than a boat-load of men in his own Royal Artillery battalion were aware of it. The merchant ship that took him across to the beaches was unable to disembark its troops because of heavy seas, and wallowed in the swell until the first wave of the invasion had long passed on its way. Frankie was only dimly aware of what was going on – to boils and pneumonia, add sea-sickness.

He was posted to Lille, then transferred to Brussels as part of the Military Establishment. Frankie would tell a hilarious story of how he personally liberated Holland, simply by being in the first staff car to arrive at The Hague after his convoy became lost in fog. His bewildered uniformed figure was hoisted aloft by cheering crowds, and carried shoulder high through the cobbled streets. ‘I was even asked for my autograph,’ he said. There’s a first time for everything.

Frankie was demobbed three months after VE Day brought the war to its final end. He had served six years and given of his best. And if he had made little obvious dent in the German war machine, those noisy nights in a smoke-filled Mess would prove a useful training ground for his future forays into the front line. Like other wartime entertainers, Frankie had instinctively acquired the special gift of getting through to fighting men in battlegrounds across the world. He would put it to good use.

Meanwhile he had a living to earn. And no real qualifications, apart from a one-page reference from a Major Richard Stone, who later became an agent, in appreciation of his concert party efforts.

So began the daily slog around West End agents. It was tiring, demoralizing and ultimately mind-numbing. Immediately after the war was a period when cinemas and live theatre were on the upswing, reflecting the euphoria of the times. People wanted to laugh, to be entertained. With no television to keep them glued to the flickering screen in their homes, they went out looking for their fun. Music halls were packed. Variety was king, and Frankie was desperate to be one of the courtiers.

But the agents were all powerful. Without their backing, it was almost impossible for a struggling hopeful to get on the boards – although Norman Wisdom, with admirable tenacity, had managed it. He had hounded the owner of Collins Music Hall for three weeks until the poor man finally succumbed to his pleadings and gave him a week’s work – paying him a fiver, which the Scrooge immediately took back as commission.

It was a hard world and you had to have enormous faith in yourself to survive. Frankie grew used to climbing flights of wooden stairs in Soho backstreets, where he’d sit with other hopefuls on hard chairs in a small room waiting for the summons into the inner sanctum. He got to recognize the same faces, thumbing through dog-eared copies of The Stage, the performers’ Bible. And always it was the same. ‘I must have tramped across half London every week,’ he said. ‘They would ask: “What are you working in now?” Honestly! The daftness of it.

‘“Nothing,” I’d tell them. “If I was working I wouldn’t need you, would I?” That’s common sense, isn’t it? But somehow it still got me nowhere.’

Nowhere, that is, until he chanced on an agent named Harry Lowe. ‘Tell you what,’ said Harry, taking pity on the dejected figure sitting across the desk from him. ‘Why don’t you get yourself a spot on the Stage Door Canteen, and I’ll come to see you.’ That was one option Frankie hadn’t tried, mainly because the Stage Door Canteen didn’t pay any money. It was an ex-Servicemen’s bar in Piccadilly, with an adjoining concert hall where big names entertained the Services, waiving their fees, and the supporting acts came from the ranks. The atmosphere was one of beer mats and nostalgia, and Frankie, putting an inquiring nose round the door, felt instantly at home.

There was one snag. Civilians weren’t allowed on the stage unless they were topping the bill, by invitation.

Undeterred, Frankie hurried back to his bedroom in Eltham, opened the battered suitcase he’d left on top of his wardrobe and pulled out the uniform he had folded neatly away, never really expecting to use it again. And off went Sergeant F.A. Howard that same afternoon, taking the bus to Piccadilly, and all the time in a sweat in case a redcap military policeman tapped him on the shoulder and demanded to see his papers.

He marched into the secretary’s office, snapped to a smart salute, and produced the creased reference from Major Stone. And to his astonishment was told: ‘All right. You’re on next week. Friday, seven o’clock sharp.’

Frankie raced for the phone in the corner of the bar, and called up the agent. ‘I’ll be there,’ Harry promised.

Butterflies once again, having a field day. But looking out at a familiar sea of faces in uniform, Frankie felt the nerves dissipate, to be replaced by a feeling of sudden elation. There was no sign of Harry Lowe, but he presumed the agent was somewhere at the back, watching from the shadows. And Frankie gave it all he’d got, the big butcher’s hands flying about as he patrolled the stage, pressing the palms together, squeezing his nose, pulling at his chin, regaling the audience with his Army adventures until they were dissolved into helpless laughter. Especially D-Day. That was the one, he recalled later, that went down best. ‘There I was, rolling about in the scuppers … yes, the scuppers, well and truly scuppered I was… And pea-green … don’t laugh if you haven’t tried it, sir … Oh, I see by your shirt that you ’ave … Never mind, it’ll wash out …’

And the cowardly approach. As a raw sentry, he told them, he jumped out of his skin when the sergeant crept up on him. ‘What would you ’ave done if I’d really been a German?’ bellowed the sarge.

‘I’ve already done it!’ was the anguished reply.

That night was a riotous success, apart from one slight drawback – Harry Lowe never turned up.

‘I went out, flogged myself to death, and thought: “This is it, Francis. You’re in!” But when I looked for him afterwards – no sign. I was sickened. I’d put so much into it, built up all my hopes. What a let-down.’

Not entirely. By luck, another agent had dropped by for a drink in the bar that night. Attracted by the gusts of laughter from the hall, Stanley Dale walked over and slipped inside the door to stand quietly at the back. Stanley, then with the powerful Jack Payne agency, would later carve his own niche as the man reputed to have the biggest private collection of music hall posters in Britain. He would also become Frankie’s manager. Right then, he was just starting out.

He didn’t waste time or mince his words. As the downcast comic trudged towards the exit, Stanley grabbed him by the sleeve. ‘Would you like us to represent you?’

Frankie gaped at him. Ex-bandleader Jack Payne was one of the most influential agents in the business and an impresario who could put on his own shows too. Forgetting all about the danger of being run in for impersonating a member of the armed forces, Frankie said yes on the spot – and went home to tell his mum. Edith Howard was thrilled for her son.

But first there was one more hurdle to overcome. Frank Barnard was the agency’s general manager and vetted all the applicants wanting to be taken on the books. Florid, stocky and intimidating, Barnard put the fear of God into any newcomer who passed nervously within the portals of his office. But his reasoning was simple. If the hopeful could survive the first ten minutes with him, he could win over an audience.

Frankie had his first taste of it when he faced the formidable presence over a large glass-topped desk and a haze of cigar smoke two floors above Mayfair. A piano stood in one corner of the office. Barnard glowered at him. ‘Well,’ he barked. ‘Have you got your band parts?’

Frankie had come with full hopes but empty pockets. No sheet music. No accompanist. He had had no idea he was on trial and supposed to give an audition.

‘Er – do you have anyone who can play “Three Little Fishes?” he ventured lamely.

Barnard stunned him by launching into a tirade of invective that rocked him back in his seat. The general theme was that the Jack Payne agency was not in the business of bolstering Amateur Night Out for incompetents. Poor Frankie was told to wait outside.

He was allowed to sit and run the gamut of emotions from shivering with fear to simmering with suppressed fury … for four hours. What he didn’t know was that Stanley Dale had given him a huge build up, and that the agency was genuinely interested. It was a serious lapse in communication.

Finally Barnard summoned him back – just when Francis had worked himself into a full head of steam, and didn’t care what he said. In short, he went in and gave his potential mentor an earful.

Through the clouds of anger he was dimly aware that Barnard was now the one to rock back in his seat as Frankie stammered and stuttered, first in a-mazement, then with laughter. Pulling out a handkerchief the agent wiped his eyes and said: ‘OK, you’re in! That was wonderful!’

‘It was?’ said Frankie, totally demoralized. But he was in, and that was all that mattered.

Spring, 1946. The Jack Payne organization was going through its books, preparing to go out on the road for nine long months with a variety show that would encompass every major theatre in the country. It was to be called For the Fun of It, and Frankie felt the excitement mounting as he got ready to embark on his first professional engagement.

This was the moment he decided to change the spelling of his name. There were just too many Howards cluttering up the cast lists, from Trevor to Arthur to Sidney, and he felt he was getting lost in the crush. So ‘Frankie Howerd – The Borderline Case’ was born, and found its way on to billboards up and down the country. ‘At least I’ll be noticed for the misprint,’ he told his agents.

Someone else would be on the tour with him. A brash unknown described by Stanley Dale in a letter to BBC producers when he was giving his new client the big sell as ‘A talented young impressionist who is going to make his mark’. His name was Max Bygraves.

Frankie first set eyes on Max when they found themselves reporting to the Aeolian Hall in Mayfair for an audition to appear on a BBC variety show, prior to the start of their own tour. Both of them were keyed up. Max covered his nervousness with a veneer of ‘Let’s go out and slay ’em’. Frankie merely looked petrified.

Frankie went in first. He did his comedy routine in a bare room with only a table and a microphone for company. Plus a glass panel through which the auditioning producer sat watching with a critical eye. Max followed, and did his impressions to the wall. At the end he felt like climbing it.

‘It was a very depressing experience for both of us,’ Max recalls. ‘Neither of us had a chance to put our personalities across. Frank couldn’t pull faces. My impressions had to be strictly sound only. We could have got away with it, but the atmosphere was all wrong.

‘Frank had gone out and bought a suit specially for the audition. He chose his usual colour – brown, which he felt was warm and relaxing for the audience. He wanted to appear as if he was chatting in a pub, or had just come in off the street for a natter.

‘The sleeves on the suit were too short, but when I pointed it out all Frank said was, “I know. It’s deliberate. I talk with my wrists.” A lot of good that did him on radio!

‘Afterwards he was in a high old state. “I was bloody awful, wasn’t I?” he moaned. “I couldn’t stop myself ooh-ing and aahing …”’

As for Max, he swung valiantly into impressions of Hutch and all five of the Inkspots crooning ‘I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire’.

He didn’t. Nor did Frankie. The impression both of them made on the producer was of the kind that says ‘Don’t call us …’ and they found themselves wandering disconsolately down Bond Street together, wondering if they were in the right business.

Luckily they were both on the books of the bustling Jack Payne agency, and on the variety tour of For the Fun of It. Bottom of the bill, but who cared? They were in, which was what mattered, and a summer of work beckoned.

First stop: the Sheffield Empire. Frankie and Max were billed on the posters in a curious little box announcing ‘They’re Out!’ With them was a third act, a contortionist named Pam Denton. She was a vivacious, attractive girl who tied herself happily into sinuous knots – and captivated Frankie from the moment he set eyes on her.

He had always been fascinated with speciality acts, and the more bizarre they were, the better he liked it. Women who could do strange and exciting things with their bodies or their talent were a turn-on. When he finally was able to command his own show, he always insisted on at least one ‘spesh’ act in his tours around the country. Blonde Joan Rhodes, the ‘world’s strongest woman’ was one he took to Northern Ireland with his troupe. He even discovered his most famous – and long-suffering – lady pianist Sunny Rogers when she was a rope-twirling cowgirl!

Now, in that heady summer of 1946, it actually seemed on the cards that Frankie would tie this particular knot himself. ‘Frank was head over heels in love with Pam, totally enamoured,’ Max Bygraves recalls. ‘The three of us teamed up together, and Frank and I shared a room in boarding house digs up and down the country.’ But as often as not Frankie was spending more nights with her than in the room with Max.

The star of the show was singer Donald Peers. His chirpy pianist Ernie Ponticelli made up a friendly foursome as the variety ‘circus’ travelled the length and breadth of Britain, spending a week at each venue. They found themselves in typical theatrical digs, a gas fire in one corner, faded curtains, occasional lumpy beds, a constant smell of floor polish – and the tempting aroma of bacon and eggs to bring them downstairs for breakfast in the morning.

Four was a good number, they found. ‘The landlady was pleased to see that many of us, and somehow we could make the food last longer,’ says Max. The average charge was £2.10s. a week for bed, breakfast and a late evening snack after the show, with a meter for the gas and electricity. They were earning £12 a week, sometimes a quid or two more.

The variety joke about their lodgings was to say: ‘I’m staying at the George and Dragon.’ Meaning? ‘If a man answered the door when we knocked, we’d say: “You must be George!”’ Max still chuckles at old memories – and the old jokes that went with them.

They would talk about comedy into the small hours, the adrenalin still running long after the curtain had come down on the show. One of Frankie’s long-standing idols was W.C. Fields and he regaled Max, Pam and Ernie with some of the great man’s patter. Like:

Fields: ‘We must think of the poor.’

Stooge: ‘Which poor?’

Fields: ‘Us poor.’

And Frankie’s favourite, with Fields sternly telling his straight man: ‘Have I not been a father and mother to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘A brother and sister –?’

‘Yes.’

‘An uncle and aunt and two cousins …?’

Frankie liked that one.

The tour lasted nine months, and Frankie dubbed it ‘Our Tour of the Empire’. Adding: ‘The Empire Sheffield, Wigan, Huddersfield, Glasgow …’ For Frankie, they were nine of the happiest months of his life. He was ambitious, he was out on the road where he belonged, buzzing with new ideas and routines. He was among friends. And eventually he was in love – with Pam.

He wasn’t bad looking, exhibiting the gauche charm of a young Michael Crawford. His insecurity, which he never bothered to hide, meant that women were drawn to him by quite simply wanting to mother him. With no financial responsibilities, Frankie was as carefree as any doubting comic can ever be when he is crippled by nightly nerves.

‘Max and I were total opposites,’ he would say later. ‘I was in a continual state of panic. He brimmed over with confidence. I was a-mazed how we hit it off!’

But they did. Frankie would stand in the wings and observe the other two-thirds of the They’re Out! trio. The pair of comics had eight minutes each, Pam had six. Max would return the compliment, and afterwards all three would hold an inquest over supper, comparing notes. Frankie was living dangerously, an unknown comic daring to face his audience full-frontal, so to speak, and talk to them, berate them – ‘What, are you deaf or something?’

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