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Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic
Graham McCann
The authoritative biography of Britain's most subversive twentieth-century clown from celebrated biographer Graham McCann, author of Dad’s Army and Morecambe & Wise.Please note that this edition is text only and does not include any illustrations.The rambling perambulations, the catchphrases, the bland brown suit and chestnut hairpiece: such were the hallmarks of a revolution in stand-up comedy that came in the unique shape of Frankie Howerd. His act was all about his lack of act, his humour reliant on trying to prevent the audience from laughing ('No, no please, now…now control please, control').This new biography from Graham McCann charts the circuitous course of an extraordinary career – moving from his early, exceptional, success in the forties and early fifties as a radio star, through a period at the end of the fifties when he was all but forgotten as a has-been, to his rediscovery in the early sixties by Peter Cook. Howerd returned to television popularity with ‘Up Pompeii’, which led to work with the Carry On team. In his last few years he became the unlikely doyen of the late eighties 'alternative' comedy circuit. But his life off-stage was equally fascinating: full of secrets, insecurities (leading at one point to a nervous breakdown) and unexpected friendships.Graham McCann vividly captures both Howerd's colourful career and precarious private life through extensive new research and original interviews with such figures as Paul McCartney, Eric Sykes, Bill Cotton, Barbara Windsor, Joan Simms and Michael Grade. This exceptional biography brings to life an unique British entertainer.



GRAHAM MCCANN
Frankie Howerd

Stand-Up Comic



Copyright (#ulink_5e135eeb-4a6c-5477-bfee-0d29a8be9192)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005
First published by Fourth Estate 2004
Copyright © Graham McCann 2004
Graham McCann asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9781841153117
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007369249 Version: 2016-02-08

Dedication (#u7ad75f15-e744-5693-9e8f-7e0539193e5a)
ForMic,
who believed I could write it,and
Vera and Silvana,who believed I could complete it.

Epigraph (#ulink_51318d27-3410-54d7-b515-d6497c3a0f15)
I don’t go for this business of the broken-hearted clown.
Because I think a broken-hearted clown would be a damn sight more broken-hearted if he wasn’t a clown.
FRANKIE HOWERD

Contents
Cover (#u02e87cfa-6136-5b2b-bd96-912a0f9f66ea)
Title Page (#u5b385194-9dc1-50c5-9996-fbf86787c9f1)
Copyright (#u00ae5530-fd09-5faf-9e28-2ef2b2d9371a)
Dedication (#u034a1666-c3d7-5996-a404-a9f2ac451c50)
Epigraph (#u1df82326-8cfc-508a-a69b-ed5e00f9456f)
THE PROLOGUE (#u7e0be56a-b8f9-5e7b-a20a-4ada37d34e4d)
ACT I: FRANCIS (#u972ae04d-0626-5847-a5fe-410cb3bbe8fd)
1 St Francis (#ub88f0425-ea5b-5b32-ab47-d98581b7b343)
2 A Stuttering Start (#ud06d86e0-bc2d-5b7b-9170-af8790a05c73)
3 Army Camp (#u91178abe-3755-5b4a-8d4e-bfc69242362d)
ACT II: FRANKIE (#u6859a2be-f433-502b-8f59-2df7796a7b91)
4 Meet Scruffy Dale (#uae225351-6b2f-5afa-a4fe-07a215995640)
5 Variety Bandbox (#u2cee4a97-3408-5b2e-95fe-3b737b433232)
6 The One-Man Situational Comedy (#u33ab2e80-bade-5a3a-b12f-006634d48de6)
INTERMISSION: THE YEARS OF DARKNESS (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Ever-Decreasing Circles (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Dennis (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Breakdown (#litres_trial_promo)
ACT III: THE COMEBACK (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Re. Establishment (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Musicals (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Movies (#litres_trial_promo)
ACT IV: THE CULT (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Carry On, Plautus (#litres_trial_promo)
14 The Closeted Life (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Cult Status (#litres_trial_promo)
THE EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Performances (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

THE PROLOGUE (#ulink_e37bd104-96e7-5587-b82e-686a1e0afe8b)
Now listen, brethren. Before we begin the eisteddfod, I’d like to make an appeal …
Now, er, Ladies and Gentlemen. Harken. Now, ah, no: harken.
Listen, now. Harr-ken. Harr-ever-so-ken!
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It was not so much the look of someone who did not belong. It was more the look of someone who did not belong up there.
He looked as if he belonged in the audience. He looked as if he had strayed on to the stage by mistake. He fiddled with the fraying fringe of his chestnut-brown hairpiece, fidgeted with the folds of his chocolate-brown suit (‘Make meself comfy …’), and then he started: ‘I just met this woman – no, oh no, don’t, please, don’t laugh. No. Liss-en!’ He did not sound as if he was performing under a proscenium arch. He sounded as if he was gossiping over a garden wall.
That was Frankie Howerd. He did not seem like the other stand-up comedians. He seemed more like one of us.
The other stand-up comics of his and previous eras came across as either super-bright or super-dim.
(#litres_trial_promo) Most of them, like Max Miller, were peacocks: slick and smart and salesman-sharp, they were happy to appear far more experienced, more assured and more articulate than any of those who were seated down in the stalls. The odd one or two, such as Tom Foy, were strange little sparrows: slow, fey and almost painfully gauche, they were the kind of grotesque, cartoon-like fools to whom even fools could feel superior.
No stand-up, until Howerd, came over as recognisably real: neither too arch a ‘character’ nor too obvious a ‘turn’, but almost as believably unrehearsed, untailored, unshowy, unsure and undeniably imperfect as the rest of us. Frankie Howerd, when he arrived, was genuinely different. He was the first British stand-up to resemble a real person, rather than just a performer.
He became, as a result, the most subversive clown in the country. What made him so subversive was not the fact that he dared to make a mockery of himself – any old clown can do that – but rather the fact that he dared to make a mockery of his own profession. He was the clown who made a joke out of the job of clowning.
Everything about the vocation, he suggested, was onerous, absurd, unrewarding and unbearably demeaning. He bemoaned, for example, the routine maltreatment meted out by the management: ‘I’ve had a shocking week. Shocking. What’s today? Tuesday. It was last Monday then. The phone rang, and it was, er, y’know, um, the bloke who runs the BBC. Whatsisname? You know: “Thing”. Yeah. Anyway, he was on the phone, you see. So I accepted the charge …’
He also complained about his ill-fitting stage clothes: ‘Ooh, my trousers are sticking to me tonight! Are yours, madam? Then wriggle. There’s nothing worse than sitting in agony.’ Similarly, he never hesitated to express the full extent of his resentment at being saddled with such an ancient and incompetent accompanist: ‘No, don’t laugh. Poor soul. No, don’t – it might be one of your own. [To accompanist] It is chilly! Yehss, ’tis! [To audience] Chilly? I’m sweating like a pig!’ He also always made a point of acknowledging the poverty of his material: ‘What do you expect at this time of night? Wit?’
He never, in short, left his audience in the slightest doubt that he would have much preferred to have been doing something – anything – else. ‘Oh,’ he would cry, ‘I wish I could win the pools!’
He did not even bother to turn up with, in any conventional sense of the term, an act. His act was all about his lack of an act, his artlessness the slyest sign of his art:
Now, Ladies and Gentle-men – no, look, don’t mess about, I don’t feel in the mood. No. I want to tell you – I’ve had a terrible time of it this week, and, er, I haven’t been able to get much for you – so don’t expect too much, will you? No, but I always try to do my best, as you know, but, oh, this week – it’s been too much. Still, I’ve managed to knock up something – I’ll do my best, I know you want to laugh – but, oh, the time I’ve had this week! Still, I won’t bother you with it – I know you’ve got your own troubles and – mind you, it was my own fault …
These rambling perambulations revolutionised the medium of the stand-up comedian. They turned it into something much more intimate, intriguing and naturalistic, having less to do with the telling of gags and more to do with the sharing of stories.
So great has been his influence that nowadays, more than a decade after his death, the approach seems more like the norm than the exception. We have come to warm most readily to those who convey the core of their humour through character and context, while we have cooled on those who continue to rely on the creaky old conveyor belt of patently contrived one-liners.
Howerd, however, was the one who set the fresh trend. His decision to adopt such an extraordinarily ‘ordinary’ pose and persona back in the considerably less flexible show-business world of the mid-twentieth-century took real wit, imagination and guts. While his contemporaries remained content to step back and soak up the applause, he chose to step forward and make a connection.
That was his real achievement, his great achievement. Frankie Howerd really did make a difference. He was so much more than the casually patronised ‘cult’ figure, ‘camp’ icon and Carry On fellow-traveller who, according to far too many of the predictably trivial posthumous tributes and all of the tiresome tabloid nudges and winks, bequeathed us little more than a handful of over-familiar sketch shows and sitcoms, a few quaintly hoary catchphrases (all of which, thanks to their increasingly robotic repetition, have long since calcifìed into mirthless cliché) and a dubious fund of dusty double entendres.
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Frankie Howerd – the real Frankie Howerd – was truly special. A brilliantly original, highly skilful and wonderfully funny stand-up comedian – whose talent and impact were as prodigious and profound, in their own way, as those of Bob Hope, Jack Benny or any of the other internationally recognised greats – he deserves to be remembered, respected and celebrated as such.
Consider the extraordinary career: stretching all the way from the late 1940s to the early 1990s, and encompassing everything from the demise of music-hall and the rise of radio to the supremacy of television and the emergence of home video. Howerd stamped his signature upon each one of the media he mastered.
Consider, too, the incredible comebacks: written off by the producers, the press and more than a few of his fellow-performers on not one, not two, but on three profoundly harrowing and humiliating occasions, he returned each time not only to recover all of his old fame, fans and professional pride, but also to find himself a fresh generation of followers. Seldom has there been such a frail yet faithful fighter.
Consider, most of all, the exceptional craft. One critic called the on-stage Howerd ‘a very clever man pretending not to be’, and few descriptions could have been more apt. His comedy turned the traditional tapestry upside down: we were shown only the messiness – merely the ‘ums’ and the ‘ers’ and the ‘ahs’ – while the elaborate pattern – what Howerd liked (in private) to call ‘a beauty of delivery, a beauty of rhythm and timing – like a piece of music’
(#litres_trial_promo) – was kept well-hidden.
He acted more or less how most of us felt (and feared) that we would act, should we ever find ourselves forced into the spotlight up there instead of staying hidden in the dark down here. All of the key ingredients of Britain’s peculiar post-colonial character – the defiant amateurism, the nagging self-doubt, the public primness and the private sauce – were caught squirming in the spotlight, stuffed inside a badly-fitting brown suit topped off by an exhausted-looking toupee.
The implicit admission was unmistakeable: ‘I’m afraid I’m just not up to this job!’ The phases of failure were similarly familiar: the nerve would falter, the words would fail and the half-hearted gags would invariably fall horribly, hopelessly flat. No one born British was ever moved to wonder why there was so much ‘Oh no!’ in the show, and so little ‘Oh yes!’ That was life. That was our life.
Most, if not all, of the humour sprang from this world-weary acceptance of our own insurmountable imperfection. Whereas ‘proper’ performers would always insist on being allowed to entertain you, Frankie Howerd was prepared to advise you to please yourselves.
The net effect was the creation of one of the most openly, endearingly, reassuringly human performances that modern comedy has ever produced. Every grumble, every groan, every grimace and every sudden solemn squeak of admonition would coax from us one more furtive snigger of recognition. We knew what he knew, and what he knew was us.
Howerd knew our sort all right. It is time now for us to get to know him.

ACT I: FRANCIS (#ulink_f7ca9f56-33e4-5c06-93a1-3b3b8dfc2465)
Nervy – that was me. Nerves were the only thing that came easily.

CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_12281554-9bff-5991-bfb1-fe12383b55ed)
St Francis (#ulink_12281554-9bff-5991-bfb1-fe12383b55ed)
Poor soul.
If we were to begin where Frankie Howerd would have wanted us to begin, we would be five years out of date. According to all of his own public accounts,
(#litres_trial_promo) Frankie Howerd (whose proper surname, incidentally, was spelt ‘Howard’) was born on 6 March 1922. In truth, he was not: being painfully aware of the age-based prejudices of his own precarious profession, he arranged, in the first of many self-inflicted imprecisions, to have his real infancy erased.
The authentic beginning had actually arrived back on 6 March 1917, when Francis Alick Howard – the first child of the 30-year-old Francis Alfred William Howard and his 29-year-old wife, Edith Florence Morrison – was born in the City Hospital in York. An early photograph recorded the sight of a broad-browed, blown-cheeked and somewhat reproachful-looking baby, with a downy dome of fair hair, a pair of large protruding ears, and a mouth already puckered up into the now-familiar outraged pout (‘I was,’ the famous adult would always insist, ‘quite beautiful’
(#litres_trial_promo)).
The Howards’ first family home was situated at 53 Hartford Street, a small but rather smart red-bricked terraced house not far from the city centre in the Fulford district of York. Both parents, right from the start, went out to earn a wage. Francis Snr was a private in the 1st Royal Dragoons; following in the footsteps of his father (a former sergeant at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst), he served as a staff clerk.
(#litres_trial_promo) Edith, meanwhile, laboured long and hard as a ‘cream chocolate maker’ at the local Rowntree confectionery factory.
Before their child had the chance to acquire any real awareness of his loose northern roots – the solitary memory to survive to later life, apparently, would be of him tumbling down some stairs and bumping his head
(#litres_trial_promo) – the family was obliged to move down south. In the summer of 1919, when the baby Francis had reached the age of two-and-a-half, his father was transferred to the Royal Artillery, promoted to sergeant and posted to the Woolwich Barracks at Greenwich in south-east London.
The need for the switch had been accepted with some enthusiasm by the newly-elevated Sergeant Howard, who recognised that he was not only taking a modest but none the less welcome step up the professional ladder, but was also, as someone Plumstead born and bred, on his way back to a place that struck him as so much more like ‘home’. The acceptance of such a rude upheaval almost certainly came rather harder, however, to his wife, Edith, whose entire life, up until this point, had been lived in close proximity to her mother, father and seven siblings within the confines of the comforting walls of York.
The Howards’ new family home was located at 19a Arbroath Road in Eltham (which in those days was a relatively quiet and rural area situated on the borders of London and Kent). Once the Howards had actually settled in, however, it soon began to feel like a home without a family. The problem was that Frank Snr had to spend his weekdays based six miles away at the Royal Artillery barracks, while Edith was left on her own in an unfamiliar environment to bring up their infant son. Although the ostensible head of the household would duly return, with his wage packet, each weekend to be with his wife, the stark contrast in their newly separate styles of life – his brightened by the clarity of its routine and the quality of its camaraderie, hers dulled by a creeping sense of loneliness and a palpable loss of purpose – would in time breed tensions deep enough to shake the base of the bond between them.
For a while, however, the couple worked hard to find ways to remain committed. Frank Snr not only behaved responsibly in his role as the family’s sole breadwinner, but also invested a fair amount of effort into trying to make what little time he shared with his wife and son seem reasonably worthwhile. Edith, for her part, bit her tongue on all of the bad days, savoured each one of the few that were good, and buried herself in the business of being both a homemaker and a mother.
It was not just young Francis on whom she would dote. A second son, called Sidney, was born in April 1920, closely followed, in October 1921, by the birth of a baby daughter named Edith Bettina but known to everyone as Betty. Edith adored them all, and, making a virtue out of a necessity, she soon came to relish her role as the family’s singular parental figure.
As a mother, she gave her children a generous measure of encouragement and affection. A short, slender woman with dark, vaguely ‘gypsyish’ good looks, discreet but deeply sincere religious beliefs and a quietly cheerful disposition, she made sure that her family had fun, sharing with them her great love of music, humour and the art of make-believe. When she could afford to she would take the children out, and when the money was tight she would stay with them inside, but, wherever they were, she always ensured that they would laugh, play and consider themselves to have been richly and warmly entertained.
Assuming those duties that had been neglected by their absent father, she also instilled a fairly strong sense of discipline in each of her children, and tried to teach them a simple but solid code of conduct. Echoing many of the lessons she had learned from her own father, David (a stern and very strict Scottish Presbyterian), she would always stress the importance of industry, frugality and self-reliance, and insisted on treating others with a proper sense of fairness and respect.
Of all her three children, it was Frank (as he preferred to be addressed) who appeared the one most eager to please her, as well as the one who was most closely attuned to her own personality and point of view. He loved to sit and listen to her singing snatches from all of her favourite musical comedies (‘my first impression of show-business’), felt thrilled when she showed so much enthusiasm for any performance that emerged from out of his ‘idiot world of fantasy’, and was delighted to find that he shared her ‘way-out sense of humour’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In short, he adored her.
Even after he had started attending school – the local Gordon Elementary
(#litres_trial_promo) – and begun to acquire a broader range of friends, potential role models and adult authority figures, this special allegiance stayed as firm and true as ever. He would remain, totally and openly, Edith’s son.
He had never been, in any meaningfully emotional sense of the term, ‘Frank’s son’. Whereas young Sidney and (to a lesser extent) Betty would greet each fleeting visit from their strangely unfamiliar father with a fair degree of enthusiasm and excitement, their older brother never showed any pleasure at being in his presence, regarding him coldly instead as little more than a ‘gatecrasher’.
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When Frankie Howerd came to look back on this formative stage in his life, he would confess that the only thing that he had shared willingly with his father (aside, perhaps, from their fair-coloured hair) was the recognition of ‘a singular lack of rapport’. Frank Snr had seemed, at best, ‘a stranger’, and, at worst, a rival: ‘I positively resented his “intrusion” in the relationship I had with my mother.’
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He also genuinely resented the emotional pain he could see that his father was causing her. It was hard enough on Edith when the sum total of the time she could hope to share with her husband amounted to no more than two days out of every seven. It was harder still when he was transferred to the Army Educational Corps, and began travelling all over the country, and spending far longer periods away, fulfilling his duties as an instructor and supervisor of young soldiers.
(#litres_trial_promo) These many absences certainly hurt her, but then so too did her husband’s apparent belief that the mere provision of his money would more than make up for the patent lack of his love.
Even if her eldest son failed to understand fully the intimate nature of the causes, he was mature enough to appreciate the true severity of the effects. His beloved mother was suffering, and his father was the man who was making her suffer.
This alone might have been sufficient to explain the adult Frankie Howerd’s apparent aversion to any mention of his father, but, according to several of those to whom he was close,
(#litres_trial_promo) there was another, far darker, reason for the denial: his father, he would claim, was a ‘sadist’ who not only used to ‘discipline’ his eldest son by locking him in a cupboard, but also (on more than one occasion during those brief and intermittent visits back to their home in Arbroath Road) subjected him to abuse of a sexual nature. While there is no conclusive proof that this is true, Howerd himself remained adamant, in private, that such abuse really did take place.
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The story, if one accepts it, certainly makes it hard not to reread the fragmentary autobiographical account of the first decade or so in his life as a coded insight into a profoundly traumatic time. So many tiny details about that ‘incredibly shy and withdrawn child’
(#litres_trial_promo) – including a fear of authority that grew so great as to make young Frank appear ‘conscientious to the point of stupidity’; an early need to go off on long solitary walks ‘just to be alone in my own private, dream world’; the unshakeable conviction that he was ‘ugly and useless to man and beast’; and the longing for a place ‘in which shyness and nerves did not appear to exist ’ – seem to fit the familiar picture of someone struggling through the private hell that accompanied such abuse.
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It also appears telling, from this perspective, that towards the end of this period
(#litres_trial_promo) Frank suddenly acquired a serious stammer. It first started to be noticeable, he would recall, whenever he was ‘frightened or under stress, and in an unfamiliar environment’: ‘I’d gabble and garble. Always a very fast talker, I’d repeat words and run them together when this terror came upon me.’
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Failing health would gradually diminish any real physical threat posed by Frank Snr. Invalided out of the Army at the start of the 1930s following the discovery of a hole in one of his lungs,
(#litres_trial_promo) he struggled on, increasingly frail and emphysemic, as a clerk at the Royal Arsenal munitions factories until his death, in 1935, at the age of forty-eight. Memories of past threats, on the other hand, would prove impossible for his son to expunge. The real damage had already been done.
When, in 1969, a young journalist had the temerity to quiz Howerd on his feelings about his late father, he merely responded with a slightly too edgy, and therapy-friendly, attempt at a casual putdown: Frank Snr, he muttered, ‘was all right. He was away a lot. Look, I didn’t let you in here to ask me Freudian questions.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Seven years later, however, there was a far more obvious display of disdain in his autobiography, which all but edited out the father from the story of the son’s life. In stark contrast to its lovingly lavish treatment of Edith, not one picture of him was included, and no description was provided: aside from the acknowledgement (apropos of nothing in particular) that Frank Snr was ‘essentially a practical man’,
(#litres_trial_promo) the only recognition of his father’s existence was to underline his absence: ‘Most people have a mother and father,’ Howerd observed, before adding, more with a sigh of relief than any hint of regret: ‘I seemed to have only a mother.’
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His mother gave him a reason to focus on the future, and, more important still, a reason to believe that he still had a future. She represented precisely the kind of adult that he hoped he could become: someone kind, compassionate and honourable but also warm, amusing and refreshingly self-deprecating – ‘a “good-doer” rather than a “do-gooder”’.
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Clinging tightly to this ideal, he heeded his mother’s advice and, once enrolled for Sunday School at the Church of St Barnabas (known locally as the ‘tin church’ because of its run-down appearance and rusting corrugated roof
(#litres_trial_promo)), threw himself into the culture of organised religion: ‘It gave me a feeling of belonging; some comforting communal security.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was like, in his eyes, a Variety show with morals: lessons, songs, lantern slides and sermons. He loved it, and was spurred on to join ‘the Band of Hope, the Cubs, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel – I joined everything religious in sight’.
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His mother was impressed. Delighted – and more than a little relieved – to see the calming (and edifying) effect these spiritual activities were having on her shy and introspective young son, she began to harbour the hope that he might one day find his vocation as a clergyman. Frank himself, in fact, was already thinking along similar lines, although his sights were being aimed somewhat higher: his ultimate goal was to become a saint.
As improbable as it now sounds, the general drift of the ambition was sincere: ‘I really thought in those pre-teen years that if I lived a good, pure life in the service of God I could end up as Saint Francis of Eltham, and go to Heaven.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He knelt down each night to say his prayers, kept the Bible by his bed and never failed to read at least a page before setting off to sleep. The strong appeal that the idea of Heaven held for him centred on the belief that it promised to be ‘this world without this world’s miseries: its poverty and sickness and stammering shyness’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The trainee St Francis might not have known much about where he wanted to go, but his understanding of what he wanted to leave behind could hardly have been any clearer.
Heeding his mother’s advice that a good formal education, while no guarantee in itself of canonisation, was at least vital to becoming a vicar, Frank began studying hard to win one of the two London County Council scholarships that were then being offered by the local fee-paying Woolwich County School for Boys – soon to be renamed Shooters Hill Grammar
(#litres_trial_promo) – to potential pupils from poorer backgrounds. Always an academically able young boy, with a particular aptitude for mathematics, he duly passed the entrance examination and, on 1 May 1928, Frank Howard, aged eleven, proudly took his place at the ‘posh’ school.
The first year proved difficult. He felt that he looked out of place – an unusually tall, very thin, slightly stooping scholarship boy – and feared that most of his middle-class, fee-paying classmates were mocking him behind his back for being nothing more than a mere ‘charity’ case.
(#litres_trial_promo) His sense of discomfort was made even more intense by the fact that, having exchanged a ‘safe’ school environment that he had known so well for ‘the terrifying question-mark of a strange unknown’,
(#litres_trial_promo) his stammer had started to worsen.
From the second year on, however, he began to feel more at home and increasingly happy, forming a fairly large circle of friends, producing consistently solid if unspectacular work in class and performing considerably better than he had expected at cricket. He even developed ‘a great crush’ on one of his fellow-pupils, a young girl named Sheila, although it led only to humiliation when the draft of a love letter was discovered by a mischievous classmate and subsequently displayed for all to see on the school notice board.
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His extra-curricular interest in religion, meanwhile, appeared stronger and deeper than ever. Indeed, he came to be regarded as so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the subject that in 1930, when he had reached the age of thirteen, his vicar at St Barnabas, the Reverend Jonathan Chisholm, invited him to become a Sunday School teacher. It all seemed to be going smoothly and swiftly to plan: ‘I was happy teaching, despite my diffidence, for being religious I was anxious to serve.’
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Religion, however, was far from being Frank’s only serious interest. The world of popular entertainment had by now come to rival it as a source both of fascination and inspiration.
As with so much else that felt positive in Frank’s young life, this appetite had been inherited from, and cultivated by, his mother. Although devoted to the solemn code of the black book, Edith was far from averse to sampling the odd bit of sauciness culled from the ‘blue’ book, and she was always happy to hear her eldest son repeat the latest jokes in circulation (though she did draw the line – and administer a crisp clip round the ear – when, without knowing quite what it meant, he included a certain four-letter word he had overheard being uttered by the local greengrocer).
She also introduced him to the potentially thrilling spectacle of live entertainment when, on 26 December 1925, she took him to the Woolwich Artillery Theatre to see his first pantomime, Cinderella, featuring the fragrant Nora Delaney as the principal boy: ‘It was an exciting, glittering, over-the-rainbow world, and I instantly wanted to become a part of it: not specifically as an actor or comedian or singer or anything else, but just in order to escape to wonderland.’
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From that moment on, Frank seized every opportunity to see, hear, read about or re-enact the very best that the stage, screen and radio had to offer. There were countless outings to the various local cinemas, which in those days ranged from the upmarket Palace (which boasted a ‘well-appointed’ café lounge) to the downmarket Little Cinema (or the ‘Bug Hutch’, as Eltham’s youngsters preferred to call it,
(#litres_trial_promo) which during the silent years featured a piano accompanist called Lena Crisp – a future Frankie Howerd stooge). There were also many sessions spent in front of the wireless set, listening to all of the big dance bands (first Jack Payne’s, later Henry Hall’s), plenty of revue and Variety shows (such as Radio Radiance and Music Hall) and the first few broadcast attempts at sketch and situation-comedy (starting off with Myrtle and Bertie).
(#litres_trial_promo) There were even, when Edith’s meagre funds allowed, occasional excursions to local clubs, theatres and fairs, as well as a visit to the novelty ‘Air Circus’ that was held one summer on (and above) Eltham’s green and pleasant Nine Fields. In addition to all of this, of course, there remained the keenly anticipated annual pilgrimage to the pantomime.
The urge to imitate and emulate these glamorous forms and figures grew stronger with each passing year. Inside the Howard home, Frank started out by entertaining his mother and baby sister with peep-shows created from old cardboard boxes, and original plays that came complete with a miniature theatre (made out of rags, sticks and Edith’s best tea tray, and populated by a cast of cut-outs from well-thumbed copies of Film Fun), as well as a selection of self-authored gags, funny stories and painful puns grouped together under the banner of Howard’s Howlers.
It was not long before he began hankering for a bigger and broader audience, and he soon managed to persuade the girl next door, Ivy Smith, to help him form a ‘two-child concert party’. The duo managed to perform several surprisingly lucrative Saturday matinées at the bottom of his back garden, charging other children a farthing a time for the privilege of admission, before a startled Edith stumbled upon the event (or ‘robbery’ as she called it) and demanded that everyone present be reimbursed without delay.
(#litres_trial_promo) His response was to transform the operation into a scrupulously charitable affair, performing a further series of concerts (first with Ivy and then later with his similarly-minded sister, Betty) designed to benefit a variety of worthwhile local causes.
By the time, therefore, that Frank began his spell as a Sunday School teacher, his strong sense of duty to the Church was already prone to distraction from his even deeper desire to perform. Things soon grew worse, as far as spiritual matters were concerned, when he found himself obliged, as part of the preparation for his new duties, to join his fellow-tutors each Monday evening at Reverend Chisholm’s home in Appleton Road for tea, cake and very, very, lengthy hermeneutical advice: ‘I remember how I’d look at him, trying to be attentive, but with my mind wandering to films and music and the theatre.’
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The problem was not just that so little now seemed to be seeping in; it was also that so much that was already in seemed to be leaking out. With nothing more to rely on than a wafer-thin recollection of the basic theme of the kindly but rather dull Reverend Chisholm’s latest briefing, Frank would find that he had no choice but to improvise his way through each one of his own Sunday School sessions, spending more time regaling his audience with tales of Robin Hood, Morgan the Pirate and Sexton Blake than he did engaging them with any pertinent biblical issues, axioms or events. His popularity soared as an unusually entertaining teacher, but so too did his sense of guilt as an increasingly heavy-lidded trainee saint: ‘I thought I’d let God down in some way.’
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He soldiered on for a while in a state of stubborn denial, unable to face up to the fact that he was on the verge of disappointing a mother who seemed so proud that he had found what she had taken to terming his ‘calling’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Then, to his great surprise and immense relief, he stumbled upon a compromise: the deceptively perceptive Reverend Chisholm, sensing that his protégé was an extrovert trapped in an introvert’s cassock, encouraged him to join the Church Dramatic Society. It struck Frank immediately as an inspired piece of advice: now, instead of having to abandon the Church for the theatre, he could accommodate the theatre within the Church.
The Society’s upcoming project was a revival of Ian Hay’s 1919 Cinderella-style drawing-room comedy Tilly of Bloomsbury, and the newest member of the company made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was ‘pathetically eager’ to take part.
(#litres_trial_promo) Although the play had acquired a certain reputation for containing several roles that were suitable for the most ‘wooden’ of actors (even the BBC’s notoriously teak-taut Director-General, John Reith, had managed to march his way through a recent amateur production without appearing too out-of-place
(#litres_trial_promo)), it was immediately clear to the current producer, Winifred Young, that Frank represented a serious casting challenge. Auditioning for the relatively undemanding part of Tilly’s working-class father, he was excruciatingly bad, reading his lines ‘in an incoherent gabble, flushing in a manner that would make a beetroot look positively anaemic, knocking over the props in my clumsiness – and embarrassing everyone in my anxiety to please’.
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When the ordeal was finally over, Mrs Young took him to one side, smiled a soft, sympathetic smile and then asked him: ‘Will you let me help you?’ Astonished that he was not being admonished, he stuttered an eager ‘Yes’ in grateful reply.
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From that moment on, this gifted and compassionate amateur director worked as Frank’s private – and unpaid – tutor. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, he would spend two taxing but hugely rewarding hours at her house, gradually learning how to overcome his stammer, start the process of mastering his role and, perhaps most importantly of all, begin believing in himself: ‘She taught me how to “ee-nun-cee-ate,” to be calm, to concentrate on the performance – and to forget myself as a self-pitying nonentity.’
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He would later claim that he owed ‘as much to Winifred Young as to anyone else in my career’, speculating that without her intervention ‘there might not have been any career, merely bitter frustration’.
(#litres_trial_promo) There was certainly no doubting her immediate effect: she transformed him, within a matter of a few short weeks, from a painfully awkward-looking nervous wreck into the show’s most notable success.
Frank came through it all without offering the audience more than barely a hint of his former hesitation, anxiety and self-doubt, and, in spite of the modest size and nature of his role, his performance had drawn the warmest of all the applause. For the first time in his life, he felt triumphant.
Someone who happened to encounter him backstage after the show told him matter-of-factly: ‘You should be an actor.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Those five words, regardless of whether they were uttered out of honesty, politeness or perhaps even a playful sense of sarcasm, triggered a profoundly positive effect on the still-exhilarated novice performer, serving as ‘a sudden and instant catalyst on all my vague hopes and half-dreams, fusing them into an absolute certitude of determination’.
(#litres_trial_promo) That moment, the adult Frankie Howerd would always say, was the special one, the turning point, the moment when – all of a sudden – he really knew: ‘[F]rom that night on I never deviated from a sense of destiny almost manic in its obsessive intensity.’
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There would be no more talk of St Francis. The future was for Frank the Actor.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_d942c0d4-ce8e-5253-86c1-a58050513231)
A Stuttering Start (#ulink_d942c0d4-ce8e-5253-86c1-a58050513231)
Well. No. Yes. Ah.
They coined a new nickname for Frank Howard at Shooters Hill school: ‘The Actor’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He loved it.
He loved the idea that an actor was what he was set to become. It might only have been 1932, three long and arduous maths-and Latin-filled years before he was due to leave school, but already, as far as he was concerned, acting was the only thing that really mattered.
Having acquired his initial theatrical experience under the auspices of his church, Frank now proceeded to advance his acting ambitions inside his school, joining its own informal dramatic society and establishing himself very quickly as one of its most lively and distinctive figures. Gone, in this particular context at least, was the insecure loner of old, and in his place was to be found a far more sociable, self-assured and increasingly popular young man: his whole manner and personality appeared to come alive, growing so much bigger and bolder and brighter, whenever the action switched from the classroom to the stage. Here, at least, he knew what he was doing, and he knew that what he was doing was good.
Right from the start, he made it abundantly clear that he was eager to try everything: acting, writing, direction, production, promotion – whatever it was, he was willing to do it, work at it and, given time, perhaps even master it. Everywhere that one looked – backstage, in the wings, centre stage, even at the table with the tickets right at the back of the school hall – Frank Howard seemed to be there, still slightly stooped, still slightly stammering, but now entirely immersed in the experience.
As a performer, he progressed at quite a rapid rate. Although he was hardly the type, even then, to lose himself in a role – his playful disposition, in addition to his distinctive voice and looks, conspired against the pursuit of such a style – his obvious enthusiasm, allied to his lively wit, ensured that each one of his stage contributions stood out and stayed in the mind. At his most inspired, such as the occasion when he played the spoiled and rascally Tony Lumpkin in Oliver Goldsmith’s satire She Stoops to Conquer, he showed real comic promise, relishing the chance to release all of the dim-witted verve that he had found lurking in the original text.
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As a fledgling playwright, on the other hand, the great amount of faith he invested in his own ability struck most of those whose opinions mattered as gravely misplaced. An audacious attempt to squeeze a rambling one-hour play, entitled Lord Halliday’s Birthday Party, into a tight ten-minute slot in a forthcoming concert was thwarted by the school’s headmaster, the rather dour Rupert Affleck, who deemed the script (which featured a messy divorce, a brutal murder and several other striking themes lifted straight from some of the movies Frank had recently seen) ‘far too outrageous and bold to be performed by young boys’, adding (according to Howerd’s own rueful recollection) that he was ‘appalled that a fifteen-year-old could be so depraved as to write such filth’.
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Embarrassed but undeterred, Frank proceeded to write several more scripts that Mr Affleck, had he seen them, would no doubt have considered to have been of far too sensational a nature. When, however, a play that he did manage to get performed – his blatantly derivative murder-mystery, Sweet Fanny Adams – elicited nothing more audible (let alone encouraging) from the auditorium than the lonely sound of tumbleweed being blown through the desert, he resolved in future to keep the rest of his ‘masterpieces’ to himself.
(#litres_trial_promo) Always a populist, Frank reasoned that if the current market demand was restricted to his acting, then his acting, for the time being, would have to be the sole commodity that he would seek to deliver.
In 1933, at the age of sixteen, he began attending an evening class in acting offered by what in those days was called the London County Council (or LCC). It was there that he first encountered his next great mentor: Mary Hope.
Hope – an experienced stage actor herself – became one of Howard’s tutors, and, just like Winifred Young before her, she soon found herself intrigued by the young performer’s quirky appeal. First, she encouraged him to join the LCC Dramatic Society – a vastly more serious and rigorous kind of company than either of Howard’s previous two theatrical troupes – and then, after seeing how richly original was his potential (and also how open he was to instruction), she advised him to aim his sights on securing a scholarship at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). If he was interested, she added, she would be willing to work alongside him as his coach.
Howard, his eyebrows hovering high and his bottom lip hanging low, was, as he would later put it, ‘a-mazed’. Listening back to the phrase as it echoed around inside his head – ‘Was I interested?’ – the only word that sounded out of place was the ‘was’. He was almost too thrilled to speak: ‘Choked with emotion, I managed to stammer that it was the most exciting prospect imaginable.’
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Before he could commit himself with a clear conscience, however, he knew that he would have to find a way to win his mother’s blessing. This did not seem likely to be easy. Edith, after all, had set her heart on seeing her son acquire a good education and then pursue a suitably upright and worthy religious career; now he was set to dash both of these treasured hopes at a stroke. Frank’s great sense of guilt grew even worse when he reflected upon the many sacrifices that had been (and still were being) made, not just by his mother but also by everyone else in his family, so that he could see through his education at Shooters Hill.
The loss of the ailing Frank Snr’s Army salary, occurring as it did right at the time when the country was deep in the depths of the Great Depression, had forced Edith to find work as a cleaner in order to help pay the mounting pile of bills. A further, and far more painful, consequence of the family’s shrunken income was the fact that it had made it impractical for either Sidney or Betty to match the length (or the quality) of their elder brother’s education: both, it had become clear, would have to leave school as soon as they reached the then minimum age of fourteen (Sidney, as things turned out, for a career in the Post Office,
(#litres_trial_promo) and Betty for a job in an office
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‘Children are inclined to take a tremendous amount for granted,’ the adult Frankie Howerd would come to reflect, ‘and for my part I never fully appreciated […] the degree of the hardship involved in keeping me at Shooters Hill.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The teenaged Frank Howard, however, in spite of his youthful self-absorption, knew enough to know how great a blow the news of his apparent recklessness would be, and how easily his sudden change of plan could be taken as a betrayal. He hated telling them, but he had to.
When he did, he could not have been more pleasantly surprised by his mother’s outwardly calm and remarkably compassionate reaction. Instead of initiating a bitter debate or administering a furious rebuke, she just sighed, smiled resignedly, and said: ‘That sounds like a nice idea.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Frank’s relief and gratitude were immense: if his redoubtable mother was still on his side, then she would ensure that the entire family remained on his side. ‘I think she was disappointed that I wasn’t going to enter the Church, after all,’ he would recall, ‘but since her primary concern was for my happiness, she gave me all the support she could.’
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He returned, suitably emboldened, to his coach Mary Hope, and started working hard – ‘harder than I’d worked for anything in my life’
(#litres_trial_promo) – in preparation for his forthcoming RADA exam. There were three set pieces to master: one a short speech from a contemporary play, and two soliloquies from Shakespeare. With the momentous event only a matter of months away, the schedule was unrelenting: day after day, week after week, the context of each discrete piece was studied, the character of each speaker explored and the rhythms of each line assessed. Hope also worked with Howard on keeping his nerve, controlling his stammer and coping in general with the unfamiliar experience of being up there on show all alone. Rehearsal followed rehearsal, critique followed critique, until both of them were happy that they had secured a strong start, a solid centre and a suitably big finish. When the time finally came, Frank Howard felt sure that he was ready.
The big day started cold and grey. Rising from his bed early, having barely slept throughout what had felt like an impossibly long night, Frank washed, fussed over his fine curly hair, and then put on his best, barely worn, brown suit – which hung limply off his tall, skinny frame like a large sack would have done from a stick. Studying the effect in the mirror, he thought that he looked rather good. There was just time to go downstairs for a quick cup of tea in the kitchen and some welcome words of encouragement from his mother, and then he was up, out and off to meet his fate.
Clutching the packet of cheese sandwiches that his mother had made for his lunch, he caught the train from Eltham to Holborn Viaduct, and then, with a growing sense of trepidation, walked slowly through Bloomsbury, with all of the lines from the three speeches rattling around inside his head, until he arrived outside the entrance to the grand-looking RADA building at 62 Gower Street. What happened next was an experience that Frank Howard would never, ever, forget.
Shuffling inside, he found himself at the back of a vast room that appeared to be almost full of his fellow-applicants. It only took one quick glance over at them – smart, smug, matinée idol types – and one furtive glance back at himself – suddenly revealed as a scruffy, shambling, ‘sweating oaf’
(#litres_trial_promo) – for all of the old demons to come crashing back. The others looked as if they belonged; he felt that he did not. As he stood there, rooted helplessly to the spot, he held on tightly to his packet of sandwiches (‘I had to cling to something’), and felt sure that he could hear more than a few mocking laughs.
(#litres_trial_promo) He knew what he had to do, but at that singularly vital moment, in spite of all of those months of lessons and learning and desperately hard work, he knew that he had lost all faith in his ability to do it.
Called in for his audition, he walked over to his spot, still clutching his packet of cheese sandwiches absent-mindedly to his chest, and then, sensing that he was having some trouble in keeping still, looked down and noticed that his left leg had started to tremble. The more he tried to stop it, the worse the quivering became. When he looked up in embarrassment at the examiners (one of whom – the imperious actor Helen Haye – he recognised immediately as the haughty wife of the master villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s recent movie, The 39 Steps), he found that they were all staring back not at his face but straight down at his leg. Panicking, he took his right hand (which remained wrapped around his squashed packet of sandwiches) and slammed it down hard and fast against his left knee, praying that the violent gesture would at least bring the shaking to a stop.
It did not. The hand did not stop the knee; the knee started the hand. All that the attempt to end the action achieved was to provide the row of open-mouthed examiners with the even more peculiar spectacle of a crumpled young man and what was left of his crumpled sandwiches being shaken ever more wildly by a wildly shaking left leg. It looked a bit like a dance, and a bit like an exorcism, and a bit like a fit, but it was definitely a disaster. When, eventually, his leg, and the rest of him, finally came to a halt, his sandwiches had showered the examiners in a mixture of shredded cheese and breadcrumbs, and his suit was in almost as bad a shape as his frazzled nerves.
‘Begin,’ he was told, and so, red-faced and reluctantly, he did: ‘Yes … Well … Um … To-to-to … er be … or not-not-not to … um … Yes, well … To be … Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? …’ He was well aware that it was already over, right there and then, but, somehow, he struggled on to the bitter end: ‘I should have thrown up my hands and run for my life,’ he would recall, ‘but beneath the panic lay that hard subsoil of determination, and so I stumbled and stammered and squeaked and shook my way through all of the three set pieces.’
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They thanked him. He thanked them. He went out. The next candidate came in. The grey day turned black.
Howard spent the train journey home slumped deep inside ‘an anguish of desolation and shame’: ‘I’d let everyone down: my mother, my headmaster, my schoolmates, Mary Hope – and myself. I was a complete and utter failure.’
(#litres_trial_promo) When he arrived back in Eltham, he found that he simply could not bear to face anyone, not even his mother, and so he went instead to a field at the back of his house, where he sat down in the long grass and started to sob. ‘Never before or since,’ he would say, ‘have I wept as I did on that day.’
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He stayed there for two blank and miserable hours. Eventually, however, once the sobbing had stopped and the tears had started to dry, a bright thought burst through the gloom. Perhaps, he reflected, he had not reached the end at all, but had merely taken a wrong turn. Sitting bolt upright, he then said to himself:
You’re a fool. A fool … You must have courage. Courage. The way you’re behaving is absolutely gutless … Look, you believe in God, don’t you? And you know that God seems to have given you talent. You feel that to be true … Now God is logical. He must be, otherwise life is stupid. Pointless. Without meaning … OK, perhaps RADA and straight acting aren’t for you. What then is the alternative?
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It did not take long for this characteristically brusque internal inquisition to summon up an acceptable response: ‘Comedy? Is that the alternative? If you’re not meant to be a great Shakespearean, are you meant to be a comedian? Is that it? … Why not try and see?’
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There seemed only one answer to such a question, and that was: why not, indeed? ‘I didn’t have anything to lose,’ he concluded, ‘except my pride – and that was wounded enough already after such a traumatic day.’
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He got up, dusted himself down and walked home, where his worried mother had been waiting most of the afternoon for her son to return. When he told her tearfully about his terrible day, she just held him for a while and gave him a consoling kiss on the cheek. When, a little later, he hinted at his belief that his ‘calling’ was now, yet again, about to change, and that this time it was set to be a career in comedy, she simply assured him that she still had ‘an unswerving faith’ in the inevitability of his eventual success.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sensing how badly the fallen St Francis felt that he had already let her down, she did all that she could to discourage any further growth in guilt: ‘As long as you’re kind and decent,’ she stressed, ‘I don’t care what you do.’
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According to the neat dramatic myth engendered by the memoirs, what the 16-year-old Howard did next was to leave school (‘I’d betrayed the faith they’d had in me there: the Actor was now the Flop. No, I couldn’t go back’
(#litres_trial_promo)) and find a job while he waited impatiently for the arrival of some kind of bountiful show-business break. The unromantic truth, however, is that he returned to Shooters Hill, subdued and semi-detached, and, reluctantly but dutifully, saw out the last two years of his secondary education.
(#litres_trial_promo) Although his academic studies never recovered (he would leave with only a solitary school certificate to count as a qualification), his actorly ebullience most certainly did: according to the fond recollections of one of his contemporaries,
(#litres_trial_promo) Howard managed not only to strengthen his reputation as a much-talked-about ‘character’, but also somehow contrived to ‘bring the house down’ with his portrayal of The Wall in the school’s 1935 production of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ (the play-within-a-play from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
When, at long last, the day approached when he really was able to leave – at the start of the summer of 1935 – he intended to start scouring the local area for the kind of relatively well-paid but undemanding short-term job that would complement a young man’s pursuit of a career in comedy. Before, however, he even had the chance to commence such a fanciful plan, his father died, on 12 May, and all of a sudden Frank Jnr, at the tender age of eighteen, found himself elevated to the position of the senior male in the Howard household.
Out of desperation, he took a menial job as a filing clerk with a firm by the name of Henry A. Lane, Provisions and Produce, at 37–45 Tooley Street in the East End borough of Southwark. The work was dull and the pay was poor (just £1 per week, which was meagre even for those days), and the only solace that Frank would find was within the walls of the nearby cathedral, where he spent most of his free time either sitting alone in prayer or sometimes listening to recitals.
He lived and longed for the evenings, when he could still feel, at least for an hour or two, that he was pushing on with his ‘proper’ ambitions: performing in local plays, pageants, concert parties, benefits, balls and revues – anything, in fact, that seemed to carry even the slightest scent of show business. He not only remained a keen contributor to the various productions put on by his colleagues at the local church, but he was also now an extremely active member of the Shooters Hill Old Boys’ Dramatic Society (where he was free to test his acting talents on slightly more challenging forms of fare).
Not even the playful evenings, however, could make up for the laboured days. As he sat there in Tooley Street, shuffling papers and watching clocks, Frank Jnr could feel himself turning slowly but surely into Frank Snr – another career clerk, another man without any discernible drive or dreams or pride, just going through the motions, just getting on with getting through life. It was demoralising – and it was made even worse by the man who was Frank’s boss.
As far as Frank Howard was concerned, the bluebird of happiness had never even come close to perching on one of Henry A. Lane’s sloping shoulders. With wounds from the Great War that had left him with a tin plate secreted in his head, a patch wrapped over an eye and a limp in one leg, he was no stranger, Howerd would say, to moods of ‘bitter malevolence’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The one in-house factor guaranteed to trigger the eruption of such moods, it soon became clear, was the blatantly bored and permanently distracted Frank Howard: ‘If a cup of tea stood ready to be spilled in his lap then I, in my clumsiness, spilled it. If a bottle of ink waited to be knocked over, I knocked it. He truly despised me and terrorised me, and the more sadistic his behaviour, the more of a gibbering idiot I became.’
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Lane was not the only one who found young Frank to be more than a fraction less than adequate. Most of his colleagues – noting his peculiar habit of suddenly making wild facial expressions in the direction of no one in particular, and his equally odd tendency to mutter, shriek and sometimes even squeak to himself behind the covers of a file – considered him slightly mad. The underlying reason for such eccentric behaviour was that Frank was actually spending the vast majority of each day’s office hours furtively studying his scripts (‘I simply had to,’ he later explained; ‘my nights and weekends were almost completely occupied with rehearsals and performances’
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After ten weeks of trying to combine the day job with his multiple play jobs, Howard was tired, run-down and covered in a rash of unsightly boils. Something had to give, and it was no surprise what did. Thanks to the chronically distracted Frank, a large consignment intended for the United States of America ended up in the Republic of China, and a folder dispatched to Leningrad was found to contain, among other things, a programme for Frank Howard’s Gertchers Concert Party. Henry Lane snapped, and Howard was sacked.
After he had endured the humiliation of a fortnight on the dole, his anxious mother intervened. Knowing that one of the wealthy people for whom she now cleaned was a part-owner of the United Friendly Insurance Company, she asked for – and duly received – a favour, and a suitable position as a clerk was found for her son at the firm’s head office in Southwark Bridge Road. Frank had landed on his feet: not only was the pay (thirty shillings per week) a little better, but the hours were better, too: ten to six from Monday to Friday, with half-day shifts on alternate Saturdays. He was also greatly relieved to find that his new boss – a single woman aged about forty – was as kind as his old boss had been cruel (‘I think she fancied me,’ he would later claim
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There was still not the slightest danger, however, of him ever wavering in his show-business ambitions and warming to his work as a clerk. He continued to pour all of his creative energies into his countless amateur performances, and even found the time, and the vanity, to form his very own tiny troupe – consisting of himself, his sister Betty, and one or two of their mutual friends – called Frank Howard’s Knockout Concert Party (‘the ego was in full flight again’
(#litres_trial_promo)). This troupe went on to stage innumerable 21-sketch-long revues – all of them strictly for charity (Edith was still watching) – based on whatever Howard had time to write in the office and whatever he and the others found the wit and the will to improvise in front of the audience. They toured all of the scout huts, church halls and retirement homes in the Eltham area, carrying their homemade scenery, costumes and props along with them on the tram, and did far more good than harm.
Even when he was part of a group, however, Howard always remained, in spirit, an incorrigible solo artiste. His instructions to his fellow-performers tended to take the following self-serving form: ‘Now you, Betty, will go on the stage and say something. Anything. Then I’ll say something. Then Charlie here will say something. We’ll make it up as we go along – always remembering that we’re aiming for the tag-line … Which I will deliver!’
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Few talent contests in South London went ahead without the participation of Frank Howard. It was easy enough to execute: most of the old music-halls used to accommodate some sort of cheap and cheerful ‘Talent Night’ spot once a week on one of their bills, and all any amateur performer needed to do was to turn up, sign on and then try their luck. Such occasions were not for the faint-hearted – a bad act, or a good act that just happened to be having a bad day, would soon be loudly booed and crudely abused – but, for those with thicker skins or stronger dreams, these events were the places where hope would spring eternal, because, regardless of how awful it might have been on any one particular night, there would always be the promise of another week, another audience and another chance.
Howard, in spite of his notoriously pronounced susceptibility to stage fright, was one of those determined characters who kept going back for more. The first time, he walked on, delivered a comic monologue, and then walked back off again to the lonely sound of his own footsteps. The following week, he returned to try out a few impressions (the list included Noël Coward, Charles Laughton, Maurice Chevalier, James Cagney and Gary Cooper), but, once again, the act fell horribly flat. The week after that, he reappeared dressed like an overgrown schoolboy and proceeded to sing a novelty comedy song: that, too, sank like the proverbial stone.
One week, he even tried changing his name to ‘Ronnie Ordex’, but when that failed to change his fortunes, he promptly changed it back again, and then proceeded to try something else. He went on, and on, and on, into his early twenties, trying anything and everything that did not demand any great degree of physical dexterity. ‘I kept trying,’ he later explained, ‘because the utter conviction that I did have talent was stronger than the flaws of personality that crucified me when it came to an actual performance.’
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Not even an exceptionally humiliating on-stage experience at the Lewisham Hippodrome would shake this underlying faith in his own potential. It was during a talent night here – on a bill that boasted some of the biggest names (including the band leader Jack Payne and the crooner and stand-up comic Derek Roy) on the current Variety circuit – that Frank Howard discovered just what it really meant, in the cutthroat world of show business, to ‘die a death’ in front of a large live audience.
The root of the problem was the fact that, as the slot for new talent came straight after the interval, Howard was obliged to follow the comedian who closed the first half – and the comedian who closed the first half was Jimmy James. Soon to be dubbed ‘the comedians’ comedian’,
(#litres_trial_promo) Jimmy James was already widely admired as an inimitable performer, an inspired ad-libber and an exquisite timer of a line. With his woozily lugubrious looks (suggestive of a bulldog whose water has recently been laced with Scotch) and downbeat demeanour, he was a masterful droll, and Howard, who watched him fascinated from the wings, was left, quite understandably, feeling utterly awestruck.
Then, after the short interval, it was his turn. The curtain rose back up, he strode on to the stage, and was immediately blinded by the most powerful spotlight he had ever encountered. He winced, blinked, shifted from side to side in search of a shadow, winced and blinked again, and then gave up and began his act. It was no good: whatever he tried to remember, whatever he tried to say, he could not get that blinding light from out of his eyes or out of his mind. His mouth dried up, the beads of cold sweat crept down his brow, the eyes froze open and one of his knees, inevitably, began to tremble. The stage seemed to be getting bigger, and he was getting smaller. He squinted out at the audience, and the audience stared back at him. For one puzzled moment, there was just silence and rapt attention, but then, as the unmistakeable scent of sheer naked fear drifted its way slowly out over and beyond the stalls, there came a reaction: ‘The audience began to laugh, but it was the most dreaded of all laughter for a performer – derision. And the more they fell about, the worse I became. The orchestra leader hissed from the pit: “Do something, or get off!” I stumbled off – in tears.’
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He realised, as he sobbed backstage, that he could not take any more of this, but he also recognised, as he dried his eyes, that he would be unable not to take any more of this. He was trapped, and he knew it, and so, yet again, he resolved to go on.
He tried more talent nights, but won none. He staged more plays, concerts and revues, but most of them faded from memory soon after they were done. He auditioned on no fewer than four separate occasions for Carroll Levis, the powerful talent scout, but the result of each one of them was the same: rejection. The recurring problem was not that people failed to glimpse any potential; it was just that, far too often, the nerves kept getting in the way. No matter how many times someone said ‘No,’ however, Frank Howard never stopped believing that, one day, someone would say ‘Yes’: ‘I was the most undiscovered discovery of my day!’
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This, for the foreseeable future, was what he would remain. A war was about to break out. His own personal breakthrough would have to wait.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_32c45e46-c8ce-5c7c-886d-8e67c579b042)
Army Camp (#ulink_32c45e46-c8ce-5c7c-886d-8e67c579b042)
So, anyway, he said, ‘I was wondering if you could go to the lads,’ he said, ‘and give them a turn. ’ Yes! That’s what I thought – cheeky devil!
This time, he did not even need to audition: the British Army showed no hesitation in signing him up for the duration. It had taken the outbreak of a war, but, at last, Frank Howard was able to feel that he was wanted.
The precise date of his admission is a matter of some dispute. Howerd – that notorious biographical dissembler – would claim that it had arrived one day in February 1940
(#litres_trial_promo) – more or less a month short of his twenty-third birthday, and a decidedly dilatory-sounding four months after his name was first registered for conscription.
(#litres_trial_promo) On this particular occasion, however, he was probably telling the truth: his call-up papers remain unavailable for public scrutiny, but, given the bureaucratic inefficiency that is known to have dogged the entire process of mobilisation, the date is not quite as implausible as, at first glance, it might seem.
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His initial hope, once war was declared, had been to join ENSA (an acronym that stood formally for ‘Entertainments National Service Association’, and informally for ‘Every Night Something Awful’).
(#litres_trial_promo) The motivation, he later took pains to explain, had not been ‘to dodge the column’, but rather ‘to try to be of service at something I thought I was good at: entertaining’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even at that early stage, however, the ENSA organisers were already managing to attract a sufficient number of suitably-qualified applicants (ranging from ageing music-hall performers to a younger breed of actors, comedians and musicians) to make them feel able to pass on such a raw and unconventional talent, and so Howard was forced to try his luck elsewhere.
He ended up as just another regular soldier in the Royal Artillery – his father’s old regiment – and was posted to Shoeburyness Barracks, near Southend-on-Sea, in Essex. It was there that, within a matter of days, ‘The Actor’ acquired a new nickname: ‘The Unknown Quantity’.
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The name was first spluttered in exasperation by the latest authority figure to loom large in Frank Howard’s life: a loud and irascible little man called Sergeant-Major Alfred Tonks. Howard – a gangling, slouching, stammering and startlingly uncoordinated creature in crumpled khaki – managed to make his Sergeant-Major angry, distressed, amused and confused in broadly equal measure.
He always struggled to look half-smart, made a shocking mess of stripping down his rifle, never seemed to know when he was supposed to march quick or slow, mixed up ‘standing at ease’ with ‘standing easy’, and was often a positive menace on the parade ground. ‘Frank just couldn’t get it together,’ one of his former comrades recalled. ‘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.’
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As if intent upon making matters even worse, Howard sometimes also failed to fight the urge to answer back. On one particular occasion, straight after Sergeant-Major Tonks had shrieked out his standard sequence of critical clichés – ‘You ’orrible shower!’ – young Private Howard actually had the temerity to mutter in response: ‘Speak up!’ It was ‘merely a nervous reflex’, he later explained, but it was more than enough to spark another noisy rant from his ruddy-cheeked tormentor.
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The only thing that saved him from spending one long spell after another stuck in the glasshouse was the fact that Tonks, though clearly impatient to hammer this risibly unconventional soldier into some kind of vaguely acceptable shape, could never quite decide whether he was dealing with a ‘truculent rebel’ or merely a useless idiot.
(#litres_trial_promo) He settled for thinking of Howard as his ‘Unknown Quantity’ – partly because the act of classifying the unclassifiable made him feel as if he was restoring at least the semblance of order to his environment, and partly because he was probably quite relieved to leave the true nature and extent of that ‘quantity’ undiscovered.
Once the trauma of basic training was finally over, Howard was transferred away from Tonks – no doubt much to their mutual relief – and into B Battery in another section of the barracks. Accorded the rank of Gunner, Frank began busying himself with the business of providing a proper form of defence for an area of Essex surrounding Shoeburyness.
His thoughts, however, were seldom far removed from the much more pleasant world of show business. As soon as he started to settle, he found that all of the old ‘passion’ and ‘fire’ that had recently been ‘damped down by the practicalities of circumstance’ now suddenly ‘burned hot again’.
(#litres_trial_promo)Hearing that some of his fellow garrison personnel were putting on a concert each Sunday night in the local YMCA, he eagerly sought out the Entertainments Officer and offered his services as a stand-up comic. The out-of-his-depth officer, who had been anxiously patrolling the corridors asking anyone and everyone he encountered if they might just possibly be able to ‘do anything’, accepted the offer without hesitation. Frank Howard the performer was free to make his comeback.
When he stepped on to the stage the following Sunday, however, he was more than slightly surprised to hear himself introduced by the compère as ‘Gunner Frankie Howard of B Battery.’ He did a quick double-take: ‘Frankie Howard?’ He had never allowed anyone to call him ‘Frankie’ before – ‘I didn’t like Frankie a bit; it seemed positively babyish’ – but, once the show was over, he soon came to find that it had caught on, and, in time, he would reluctantly become resigned to the fact that the name was destined to stick (‘A pity, really’).
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The performance itself had gone down rather well. Most of his four-minute spot was filled with the kind of tried and tested material that had been blatantly ‘borrowed’ from professional comedians – most notably Max Miller – but he did manage to make at least one elderly gag sound vaguely original:
I was at a dance the other night in Southend. At the NAAFI. And this girl was there. Very nice, she was. Yes. So after the dance I said to her: ‘May I see you home?’ And she said: ‘Oh, er, yes. Thank you very much!’ So I said: ‘Where do you live?’ She said: ‘I live on a farm. It’s not very far from here. It’s about a half-an-hour walk.’ So I said: ‘Oh, right, that’s fine.’ Then she said: ‘The only thing is, you see, I’ve got a couple of packages to pick up, from my uncle, to take back home to the farm. Would you mind?’ So I said: ‘No, no, we’ll call in. What are they, by the way, these packages?’ She said: ‘Two ducks.’ I said: ‘Ducks?’ She said: ‘Oh, it’s all right. They’re not dead. They’re alive. But they won’t flap. They’re all sort of bound up a bit.’ So we went down to this uncle, and he gave her these two ducks. So I – the perfect gentleman – said: ‘Please, let me. I’ll carry them.’ So I put one under each arm. And then off we traipsed, down this lane and across this field. Pitch dark it was. And all of a sudden this girl fell back against a hedge and went: ‘Ooo-aaa-eee!’ I said: ‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ She said: ‘I’m frightened!’ I said: ‘What on earth are you frightened of ?’ And she said: ‘I’m frightened of you!’ I said: ‘Frightened of me?’ She said: ‘Yes. I’m frightened that you’re going to try and make love to me!’ I said: ‘How the hell can I make love to you with a duck under each arm?’ So she said: ‘Well, I could hold ’em for you, couldn’t I?’
He also sang the song, in his own inimitable style, for which he would later be infamous – ‘Three Little Fishes’:
Down in the meadow in a little bitty pool
Lived three little fishes and their mommy fishy too. ‘Swim!’ said the mommy fishy, ‘Swim if you can!’ So they swam and they swam right over the dam.
Each subsequent verse was disrupted with comic interjections, and each chorus became an excuse for a quite extraordinary array of high-decibel shrieks and yelps:
There was Tom: ‘Boop-boop-dittem-datten-wattem, choo!’
And there was Dick: ‘Boop-boop-dittem-datten-wattem, chooo!’ And there was Cecil: ‘Baa-oop-boop-dit-tem-dat-ten-wat-tem, choooo!’ (Oh, he was a snob! He was dying to get into an aquarium!) And they swam and they swam right over the dam …
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Snobbish Cecil, needless to say, met with a particularly grisly end.
It was the same routine that he had performed so many times before, but, on this particular occasion, it really seemed to work. There were relatively few noticeable stammers or stumbles, and plenty of well-rehearsed cues for laughs; compared to most of the others taking part, Howard looked as if he knew what he was doing – even when he was pretending not to know what he was supposed to do. His audience, though captive, was genuinely appreciative. He left them calling for more.
More was just what they were going to get. Buoyed by this initial success (‘for me the smell of greasepaint had the same effect as a whiff of cocaine on a junkie’
(#litres_trial_promo)), Howard threw himself back into his old routine, and, within a matter of a few short weeks, he had practically taken over the running of these Sunday night productions. He pestered his ostensible superiors until they agreed to let him improve the quality of the programmes; demanded – and received – a bigger say in the title, running order, writing and staging of each production; and he not only bossed about all of the officer-performers during rehearsals but also – much to the amusement of his many new friends among the audience – reduced them to mere stooges during the concerts themselves (‘I treated them as bad performers and not as men with pips on their shoulders’
(#litres_trial_promo)).
He also worked hard at improving his own act. Always a perceptive student of other performers, he was now able to stand back and think remarkably dispassionately about how best to shape and display his own peculiar talents. His stammer, for example – which had for so long been considered nothing other than a troublesome impediment – was now quite consciously transformed into a positive technique. Instead of struggling vainly against it, as he had done to such distressing effect in front of those grim-faced RADA examiners, he started using it, and sometimes even exaggerating it, along with all of the other obvious aspects of his general nervousness, to help accentuate his originality.
First, he thought of how much more distinctive and real and funny it would sound if, instead of just parroting the polished patter of a well-known professional, he actually appeared to relate the story to his audience as if it had really happened to him. Second, he realised how much easier it would be to fill up his allotted time on stage, and disguise the paucity of his original material, if he mastered the art of, as he put it, ‘spinning it out’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Max Miller, for example, would deliver the following joke, word perfect, at his normal rat-a-tat-tat pace:
’Ere’s a funny thing happened to me this afternoon. A girl said to me: ‘Hello, Max!’ I said: ‘I don’t know you.’ She said: ‘It’s my birthday. I’m twenty-one today.’ She said: ‘Will you come up to my fiat for coffee and games?’ I said: ‘Don’t bother with the coffee – but I will come up.’ Well, it was raining outside, and there are only two things to do when it’s raining. And I don’t play cards. ’Ere!
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Howard, however, would take this basic joke and, through hesitation, deviation and repetition, make it seem entirely his own:
Oh, no, don’t, n-n-no, please, don’t. No. liss-en! Um. Ah! You’d have screamed! Oh, you would! Yes. I have to laugh meself when I think about it! Yes. I do. No, er, the thing was, th-th-there was this girl, you see. Yes. This girl. And, oh, she was pretty! What? Pretty? Oh! I should say so! Pret-tee! Yes. This girl. Oh! Ever so pretty. And, er – where was I?
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On and on he would go, moving forward, pulling back, stepping sideways, moving forward again, drawing his audience deeper and deeper into his distinctive comic world, until, when he sensed that they were ready, he finally hit them with the punchline.
He was no longer trying to hide his own inadequacies. He was no longer trying – and failing – to be like the other stand-up comics. He was now trying – and, increasingly, succeeding – to be more like himself. He started using everything – his arching eyebrows, his skewer-shaped mouth, his swooping vocal inflexions, his risible sartorial awkwardness, his occasional lapses of memory – to make a strength of his imperfection.
Most important of all, he began performing with, rather than to, his audience. They now became ‘a vital part of the act’:
I told these stories of misadventure in the form of a cosy ‘just between you and me’ gossip, as though leaning over an invisible garden fence or chatting to cronies in the local pub. And just as Mrs Jones can evoke laughter and sympathy by telling her neighbours about her troubles, so I found I could create laughter and sympathy by making the audience share the preposterousness of the improbable (but not impossible) situations in which I put myself as the innocent and misunderstood victim of Them (i.e. authority).
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It worked. It made ‘Frankie Howard’ work.
From now on, he would appear irrepressible. The Sunday concert parties grew to seem far more like ‘The Frankie Howard Show’ than any orthodox form of ensemble entertainment event. He appeared four or five times during each evening before, inevitably, returning yet again as top of the bill. Not content with his multiple solo spots, he also persuaded his sister, Betty, to take the train from Fenchurch Street to Shoeburyness every Sunday morning in order to join him on stage in an all-singing, dancing, joking double-act (she ‘could have been a pro’, he later reflected, ‘but her energies were always to be channelled towards furthering my career’
(#litres_trial_promo)). He was everywhere, he was always involved, and it was only a matter of time before he was completely, and officially, in charge.
It was the padre who did it. Howard was still a sincerely religious, churchgoing individual, and, from the moment he arrived at Shoeburyness, he had instinctively gravitated towards, and confided in, the garrison’s resident chaplain, the Reverend Mackenzie. Mackenzie, in turn, followed Howard’s progress with interest, and, after watching him blossom as an entertainer, helped facilitate a transfer to the Quartermaster’s Office – a move that promised not only a promotion to the rank of Bombardier, but also, more importantly, the prospect of slightly more time for planning performances.
That was by no means the end, however, of the padre’s well-meaning interventions. Keen (for the sake of camp morale in general as well as that of his protégé in particular) to encourage Howard’s countless passionate plans to improve the standard of the garrison’s in-house entertainment, Mackenzie arranged for him to write a letter to the Commander-in-Chief at Shoeburyness, setting out precisely what was wrong, what needed to be changed, and who should be charged with the power and responsibility to change it. It proved, recalled Howerd, to be ‘an absolute stinker of a letter’:
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In no uncertain terms I said that it was outrageous that officers should dictate to the men the way they should entertain and be entertained … That there was too much censorship … Too much patronising paternalism by the Entertainments Officer … That an entertainments committee should be set up on which the men should be represented – instead of this vital matter being left in the hands of an Entertainments Officer completely lacking in any semblance of qualifications for the job.
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The note went on, he would recall, ‘florid with such adjectives as disgraceful, stupid, appalling [and] ridiculous’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Naivety, rather than any conscious desire to cause offence, had prompted such a diatribe: ‘Had I been more discreet in my wording, and wrapped the modified result in such phrases as “It seems to me, sir” and “May I respectfully suggest, sir” it might have been all right – but I was far too ignorant for such circumspect subtleties.’
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The result, unsurprisingly, was that Bombardier Howard was dispatched to the guardhouse and charged with gross insubordination. Luckily for him, the Reverend Mackenzie stepped in and saved the day: he sought out the furious Commander-in-Chief and sowed a few seeds of dubiety into his fevered mind, assuring him that the offending letter had, after all, been solicited by his good self, and, though its style and tone had obviously fallen far short of Sandhurst standards, its author had clearly only been trying to be honest. The General relented, and Howard was reprieved.
In fact, he was more than merely reprieved. He was actually given his head. As his letter had suggested, an entertainments committee was established, censorship was relaxed and a higher level of commitment was demanded. Bombardier Howard became the de facto controller of the Shoeburyness concert parties. His superior officers, having reasoned that it was better to have a character such as him operating on the inside instead of on the outside, then sat back and waited to see if he would sink or he would swim.
He swam. He swam length after length. He was practically amphibian. Glorying in the greater stature, power and security that came (at least in his eyes) with his crowning as the unopposed ‘Mr Sunday Night’ of Shoeburyness, Frankie Howard pushed on with all of his brightly ambitious plans. The concerts grew bigger and bolder. The material became considerably more irreverent (a deliberate change of policy by such a playful anti-authoritarian) as well as a little ‘bluer’ (a trend whose start had far more to do with naivety than any conscious desire for greater vulgarity: ‘Nobody realised that I was genuinely innocent,’ he protested. ‘Such is the way reputations are made!’
(#litres_trial_promo)). There was also a change in sensibility: it gradually became more ‘camp’.
‘Camp’ is one of those terms that has since been stretched to encompass everything from a marked preference for matching genitalia to a chronic weakness for placing words within quotation marks,
(#litres_trial_promo) but, in the early 1940s, it meant little more than men mocking the supposed rigidity of their own masculinity – sometimes, but by no means always, in drag. It was a safe and playful form of release: a chance for homosexual men to behave less like heterosexual men, as well as a chance for heterosexual men, tired of going through the motions of military machismo, to behave less like heterosexual men.
It was a release for Frankie Howard, primarily, because it suited his overall comic style and sensibility. He had not been drawn to, and influenced by, other comedians because of their actual or supposed sexuality; he had been drawn to them because of their allegiances – always us against them, workers against bosses, women against bullying men, men against bullying women, the powerless against the powerful – and their devious methods of attack – such as George Robey’s tactic of provoking anarchy by demanding order (‘Desist!’), or Robb Wilton’s use of characterisation as a means of critique (‘The wife said, “You’ll have to go back to work.” Oooh, she’s got a cruel tongue, that woman!’), or Jimmy James’ subversive air of disingenuousness (STOOGE: ‘Are you puttin’ it around that I’m barmy?’ JAMES: ‘Why, are you tryin’ to keep it a secret?’).
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Howard was especially inspired, at this stage in his career, by the drag act of Norman Evans. As ‘Fanny Fairbottom’ – a mob-capped, bulbous-bosomed, voraciously nosey Lancastrian harridan – Evans would lean over a back-street wall and exchange gossip with an unseen neighbour:
What did you say? Who ’as? Her? That woman at number seven? ’As she? Is she? Oooooh, gerraway! Oh, no, I won’t say a word, no, I never talk. But, well: fancy! Mind you, I’m not surprised. Not really. I told her. She would go to those illuminations! It was the same with her next door to her. Oh yes, and that wasn’t the first time. I knew what she was as soon as I saw ’er! Oh yes. That coalman was never away, you know! I mean, don’t tell me it takes thirty-five minutes to deliver two bags of nuts! He’s a bad lot! Oh yes. I knew what was goin’ on when I saw him shout ‘Whoa!’ to his horse from her bedroom window …
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Off-stage, there was nothing remotely effeminate about Evans – and no one was in any doubt that he was a happily-married heterosexual
(#litres_trial_promo) – but, on stage, he relished the role of this gossipy old woman. Howard was impressed by his acting skills: ‘Even though [he] was talking to an imaginary person you could always hear the replies he was getting from his phrasing. He produced a personality on the other side of that garden wall without you ever seeing that person.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Howard was also fascinated by the fact that Evans, when dressed as – and behaving like – a woman, could get away with the kind of material that, if it had been delivered by (or, in his case, as) a man, would have sounded far too ‘blue’.
It was this sense of serving up an audience sauce through indirection, of sending out an encrypted signal of naughtiness, that drove Howard himself deeper and deeper into the camp sensibility, and often into drag. He wrote a new musical comedy routine, entitled ‘Miss Twillow, Miss True and Miss Twit’, and, alongside two of his male colleagues, performed it dressed up as ATS girls. The trio (with Howard centre-stage as Miss Twit) began the act as follows:
Here we come, here we come,
The girls of the ATS –
Miss Twillow, Miss True and Miss Twit.
(Repeat)
The huge amount of work we do,
You know, you’ll never guess.
But in Army life we fit …
To bend we never ought,
Because our skirts are short.
But they really do reveal
That we’ve got sex appeal.
And if you want a date,
Enquire at the gate
For Miss Twillow, Miss True and Miss Twit …
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It went down well inside the boisterous barracks, and it also proved popular on those occasions when they were given permission to perform outside as part of a touring concert party called the Co-Odments.
(#litres_trial_promo) It ran into trouble, however, when, right in the middle of one lunchtime performance in the Mess, the air-raid siren started up. As the audience stampeded for the exit, Howard had just enough time to remove his wig, the two balloons that passed for breasts and the painfully tight woman’s shoes, and wriggle out of the borrowed ATS outfit and slip back into his own uniform – but, in the rush, the thick layer of make-up and the strip of ruby-red lipstick were forgotten. Out on parade, he stood stock still with his rifle, pack and painted face, looked straight ahead, and hoped for the best.
A young subaltern arrived to inspect the ranks. He approached Howard, gave him a cursory glance, moved on, stopped, shook his head, and then turned back for another, closer look. For a moment, neither man spoke: Howard stared blankly into the distance, trying his hardest not to twitch or tremble, and the officer, head cocked slightly to one side like a quizzical cocker spaniel, stared fixedly at his face. Finally, the officer managed a cough, which Howard took as the cue for him to offer some kind of explanation. ‘C-concert party,’ he stammered, the panic strangling his voice into a squeaky falsetto. ‘The alert went,’ he struggled on, ‘in the m-middle of the c-concert party.’ The officer seemed dazed: ‘Concert party … Er, yes … Mmmm … Concert party … Jolly good.’ He moved on along the line, stopping every now and again for a nervous glance back and a quick shake of the head, before departing hurriedly off into the distance. It had been a narrow escape, but it would not be the last time an officer would stare at Howard, in or out of drag, and shake his head and think: ‘Er, yes … Mmmm …’
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The fact was that Frankie Howard was a homosexual. It seems that he had not always been entirely sure, in his own mind, about the true nature of his sexuality, but military life, with its all-male community, had started to draw out his deepest desires. He formed his first relatively intimate adult friendship with a fellow-soldier at Shoeburyness, a young man whom some of his contemporaries (reflecting the casual homophobia so common at that time) freely described as ‘sissified’.
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There appears to have been little doubt, among the other soldiers in the garrison, as to what kind of relationship it was (or at least had the potential to become), but, fortunately, few seemed inclined either to report or condemn it. Although, in those days, homosexuality was illegal, it has since been estimated that at least 250,000 homosexuals served in the British armed forces during the Second World War, and, ironically, most of them were accorded a far greater measure of tolerance, compassion and respect, informally, than many of their successors would receive in peacetime. ‘All the gays and straights worked together as a team,’ recalled one who was there, explaining: ‘We had to because our lives might have depended on it.’
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Howard and ‘his right-hand man’ (as some teases took to calling him) knew and understood the unwritten rule: so long as they were discreet, the relationship would probably remain safe. According to one of their old Army colleagues, Tom Dwyer, the couple never dared to attempt anything more demonstrative, in the presence of others, than the odd furtive touch of hands in the darkness between their beds. One night, Dwyer recalled, he noticed, as he drifted off to sleep, that each man was lying on his own bunk, but was still linked to the other by a shadowy outstretched arm: ‘They were, like, holding each other’s little finger.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Such was often the sum of stolen intimacies to be treasured by those soldiers who sheltered ‘secret’ loves.
For Howard and his partner, however, there was always the unique freedom afforded them by the stage, with its licence for ‘larger than life’ personalities and playful poses, and, for a while, the relationship had room to thrive. ‘They got on like a house on fire,’ remembered Dwyer.
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Then came an enforced separation. Howard was posted to a new Ministry of Defence ‘Experimental Station’ over on Foulness – the largest of the six islands forming an archipelago in south-east Essex. He still returned each night to sleep in the barracks at Shoeburyness, but, with less time to spend with his partner and more time to spend on planning his concert parties, some of the original passion began to dissipate.
The camp attitude, however, did not. It was now part of him, as well as part of his act. It was the means by which he protected himself, preserved his sanity and made palatable his own occasionally prickly personality. A mixture of candour, sarcasm and self-parody, it could almost always be relied on to elicit a laugh, or at least an indulgent or confused ‘Er, yes … Mmmm’, when a blast of invective might otherwise have been expected.
It came in particularly handy when Howard, during one of his fleeting visits back to Southend to appear with the Co-Odments concert party, found himself on stage with a piano accompanist called Mrs Vera Roper (he had worked first, and often still did during this period, with another member of the party by the name of Mrs Blanche Moore, but on this particular night it was Mrs Roper who was seated at the piano). Although Roper had performed with Howard before without experiencing the slightest form of a mishap, on this particular occasion her mind seemed to be elsewhere – much to her young colleague’s evident irritation. Cue after cue was missed, as she stared off into space and he stammered and struggled to cover up the mistakes. Howard’s patience finally snapped after she twice failed to hear – or at least respond sufficiently promptly to – a carefully rehearsed question he had asked her. ‘That’s all I need,’ he growled, ‘a deaf accompanist!’ and the audience, assuming it to be part of the act, laughed uproariously.
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That was all that was needed to spark another bright idea into life. What the conventional, sober sensibility responds to merely as an embarrassing error or unnecessary imperfection – something to be corrected or edited out and smartly erased from memory – the camp sensibility seizes on with relish, tweaks up a notch or two and then celebrates with a nudge and a wink. This was precisely what Howard did: he took the immensely frustrating experience of being ignored by a pianist who ‘was pondering how many meat coupons she had left in her ration-book’, and used it as the basis of a brand-new comedy routine: the ‘daft situation’ of him being saddled with an accompanist – ‘Madame Vere-Roper, known to me as Ada’, or ‘Madame Blanchie Moore’ – who appears incapable of providing any accompaniment.
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It would always progress (or, more accurately, fail to progress) along the following uneven lines: switching back and forth between a piercing shriek to make himself heard by his accompanist and the sotto voce tones required to confide two-facedly in his audience, Howard struggled in vain to get started:
I thought tonight, ladies and gentlemen, er, I’d give you a bit of music, yes, which, er, if my pianist has sobered up, we’ll do now. It’s called ‘A Night in Old Vienna’. Yes. It’s an operatic aaaria. Yes. It’s lovely, this. Lovely. Here we go. [Madame Vere-Roper, sealed at the piano some distance back, prepares herself to play] N-n-no, no, don’t clap – she’ll want money. I’ve told her this is an audition. Yes. No, the thing is, she can’t hear very well. No, she can’t hear much. And she’s very bitter with it. Yes, she’s a real misery guts. She really is. [Turns, with a forced smile on his face, to acknowledge her] Evening. We’ll do the song now. Yes, chilly. ’Tis, yes. The song. We’ll do the song. I SAID WE’LL DO THE SONG NOW! [Turns back to audience] No. Don’t laugh. No. Don’t, please. You’ll make trouble. I beg of you. Don’t laugh. No, she can’t hear, and, oh, she’s a funny woman, you know! Mind you, she’s had a terrible life. Oooh, shocking life! Oh, yes, terrible! [Shouts in her direction] I’M TELLING THEM YOU’VE HAD A TERRIBLE LIFE. Yes, it is very chilly tonight! Yes! I know! Chilly! Yes! There’s a wind blowing up the passage tonight! Yes! Very chilly tonight! ’Tis, yes! Think winter’s back! I SAID WINTER’S BACK! Yehss! [Talking to the audience again] Poor old soul! Well, she’s past it, y’know – that is, if she ever had it! No, really, no, she should be in bed …
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It was what Howard did best: appearing to fail dismally at doing his best.
Over the course of the next half-century, he would use no fewer than eight of these ‘deaf’ pianists,
(#litres_trial_promo) but the nature of the routine never changed. The attempt to produce ‘a bit of culture’ produced nothing better than a bit of chaos, and more or less everyone in every British audience, from the nervous young soldiers of the early 1940s to the not-so-nervous young university graduates of the early 1990s, could find something to identify with, and laugh at, in that.
Before Howard could expand and develop his promising act any further, however, he was uprooted once again. Early in 1942, he was posted to a new Army Experimental Station at Penclawdd – a small fishing village on the Gower peninsula near Swansea in South Wales – and assigned an uninspiring but time-consuming office job in Requisitions.
Penclawdd was hardly the most congenial of locations for an aspiring entertainer. The village itself consisted of a tiny, quiet and close-knit community of cockle-gatherers, while, on its outskirts, the Experimental Station amounted to nothing more than a cluster of Nissen huts. There was a small local amateur dramatic society of sorts (which a grateful Howard joined ‘to keep my hand in, as it were’
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Fearing that his ambitions would soon start to atrophy in such sleepily prosaic surroundings, he persuaded his Commanding Officer to allow him to apply to join the cast of Stars in Battledress – the big new Army Welfare concert party (a sort of entertainment ‘flying squad’) that had been formed to tour all of the major fighting zones along the Allied Front.
(#litres_trial_promo) He expected, bearing in mind all of the recent success he had enjoyed in front of audiences at Southend and Shoeburyness, that his act was now sound enough to assure him of a swift and easy admission. He was in, however, for a shock.
Auditions for Stars in Battledress were usually held in the nearest available cookhouse in front of an interviewing officer (and, invariably, it was only one) who had some kind of experience of show business. When, one dark and rainy morning, Frankie Howard arrived for his, he found himself at one end of a vast hall (still reeking of yesterday’s soggy vegetables and watery gravy), and, far away at the other end, a stem-faced officer who had worked before the war as a part-time conjuror. Instantly, the old RADA feeling returned.
He suddenly realised just how helpless he was without a proper audience with which to interact. Alone in front of this single distant figure, in a room where every ‘ooh’, ‘aah’, and ‘er’ was left to die a lingering death of lonely echoes, Howard was beaten before he started. The left knee trembled, the stammer took over, the mouth dried up, the wide eyes glazed over: he conveyed nothing to the interviewing officer apart from the unbearable intensity of his frustration and fear.
He failed. Worse still, he went on to fail no fewer than four auditions in all. When the last of them was over, Howard went back reluctantly to the cockles and corrugated iron of Penclawdd, nursing an ego that had been badly bruised by the realisation that the very men who had been detailed to ferret out fresh talent ‘didn’t think I was worth ferreting’.
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He began to feel desperate. After having made so much progress as a performer, here he was, stranded in a rusty little Nissen hut in South Wales, shuffling papers and filling in forms. He had grown up coping stoically with just the lows, but now, after experiencing his first real high, the lows felt worse than ever. At the start of March 1944, following one too many dull and drizzly days, he cracked, and marched off to see his CO: ‘[C]an I please do something positive for the war effort,’ he pleaded, ‘even if it [is] my destiny only to get my name in the papers as one of yesterday’s casualties?’
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The Commanding Officer smiled indulgently – he had grown used to this sort of thing by now – and assured Howard that the problem had already been solved. Earlier that very morning, he revealed, a new batch of orders had arrived on his desk – and one of them (relating to preparations for the imminent Allied invasion of France) entailed, among other things, a new posting for Bombardier F.A. Howard. He was off, without delay, to Plymouth: ‘For the big show,’ the CO added with the suspicion of a smirk, ‘and I don’t mean telling jokes, what?’
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A Commando course in Devon was not what Howard, in a cool hour, would have requested by way of a radical change, but, like everyone else in the services, he had to accept what he was assigned. It was just a relief to be doing something, anything, other than sitting around an office. Always fitter than he looked, he coped rather well with all of the shinnying up and down ropes and scrambling over assault courses. With neither the time nor the energy for the usual pursuit of stage-based activities, he got on with the job in hand, and the general opinion was that he did it ‘jolly well’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, such was his burst of enthusiasm (and temporary physical felicity) that he won a promotion to the rank of Sergeant, and was then sent off on a driving course.
That move precipitated a dramatic reversion to type: he proceeded to drive a large lorry full of soldiers through a hedge and into a tree. A certain loss of nerve was suffered as a consequence – not just on Howard’s part, but also on that of his superiors – and he was shunted discreetly sideways to a role in which he could be trusted to do less damage.
There was little time, however, for further mishaps – at least on English soil. On 6 June 1944, Howard and his comrades boarded a merchant ship and set sail for Normandy as part of the D-Day dawn invasion force. Heavy seas prevented the vessel from disembarking its troops, and so it was left to wallow in its swell for no fewer than eleven days while the first wave of the invasion pressed on ahead. Howard – who was meant to be up on a conning tower manning a Bren gun – spent much of this frustrating and unnerving period coiled up on the floor, suffering from a combination of suspected influenza, undeniable seasickness and a mild form of malnutrition.
When, at last, he was back on dry ground, he was informed that he was being posted to Lille in northern France. ‘Anyone speak French?’ enquired an officer. Howard, somewhat impetuously, replied that, as he had been to a half-decent grammar school, he could manage the odd word. ‘We’re a bit short, Sergeant,’ the officer said, ‘so you’re an interpreter.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Before Howard had a chance to splutter any kind of protest, he was transferred to Brussels as part of the Military Establishment.
‘Who are we governing?’ he asked an officer when he arrived. ‘The Germans soon,’ came the confident reply, ‘because we’re winning the war.’ ‘Well,’ said Howard, looking only a little less anxious than before, ‘that’s one blessing, anyway.’
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There were plenty of scrapes and narrow escapes. On one ostensibly straightforward assignment, for example, Howard accompanied a Major to a nearby village in order to ascertain how many women there were pregnant (and thus qualified as a priority for the soon-to-be-distributed food). The snag was that Howard the interpreter had absolutely no idea what word was French for ‘pregnant’, and so, in haste, he assumed a heavy Charles Boyer-style accent, improvised a phrase that he believed mistakenly to mean more or less the same sort of thing – ‘Nous voulons savoir si une femme voulons avoir un enfant?’
(#litres_trial_promo) – and ended up asking a succession of women not if they were having a baby, but, rather, did they want to have a baby. Unsurprisingly, he and the Major were chased out of the village by a group of angry husbands brandishing cudgels, pitchforks and shotguns, and then, on their way back to camp, they almost got themselves lost hopelessly in a dense sea of fog.
The next thing that Howard did was to appear to liberate the Netherlands. As usual, it happened by accident.
The Germans were in the process of capitulation, and, on 5 May 1945, a convoy of Allied vehicles was due to set off from Brussels to enter the Dutch legislative centre. When the dawdling Howard was urged to hurry up and get into one of the cars, he chose, without the slightest hesitation, the one right at the front: ‘It seemed logical.’
(#litres_trial_promo) At some point en route, however, all of the vehicles lining up behind fell foul of navigational errors and disappeared from sight, leaving Sergeant Frankie Howard to enter The Hague alone in a chauffeur-driven staff car and be mobbed by a mass of grateful citizens (‘the most appreciative audience I’ve ever had!’
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As this surreal little period continued, Howard was sent with a young Army Captain to Stade, near Hamburg, to form a two-man Military Government. The Captain, facing one taxing challenge too many, promptly suffered a nervous breakdown, leaving a panicky Howard to tap out a signal for help. Reinforcements duly arrived, swelling the risibly under-manned Government of two to a risibly over-manned Government of 200. Howard, relieved to find that his services were no longer urgently needed, redirected his efforts towards the far happier task of entertaining.
He organised yet another concert party. He tried, unsuccessfully, to inveigle a fleeting appearance in a movie – Basil Dearden’s The Captive Heart – that he heard was being shot further ‘up the road’ in the British Occupation Zone. He performed the occasional one-man show. He did all of the things that he most enjoyed being able to do.
As far as Howard’s Commanding Officer was concerned, he was pushing at an open door. During the summer of 1946, the War Office began a process whereby all of the old individual service entertainment bodies – including ENSA, Stars in Battledress, Ralph Reader’s RAF Gang Shows and the many and various concert parties – were gradually merged to form a new, all-embracing, post-war organisation called the Combined Services Entertainment unit (or ‘CSE’ for short). With more than thirty separate shows to stage, the need for new talent was acute, and Howard’s CO, hearing that the next audition was about to be held in nearby Nienburg, urged the obsessive performer to travel there and try his luck. ‘With my record,’ groaned Howard, ‘I’ll be back tomorrow.’ His CO was more sanguine: ‘Maybe you’ll be lucky this time.’
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Howard drove there in a lorry. Although he had not applied for an audition, he managed to get his name added to the list, and just after lunch, before there had been any time for the customary build-up of nerves, he was instructed to take his turn in front of the judges.
There were two people in particular whom he had to impress. One was the officer in charge of CSE productions in Germany and Austria, Major Richard Stone: a former actor who would go on to become one of Britain’s leading theatrical agents.
(#litres_trial_promo) The other was Stone’s assistant, Captain Ian Carmichael: a RADA graduate with a long and illustrious performing career ahead of him.
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Howard’s routine revolved, somewhat idiosyncratically, around an old Ella Fitzgerald number called ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’. Holding a slightly bent, smouldering Woodbine between the first two fingers of his shaky right hand, he interspersed the verses –
A-tisket, a-tasket
A brown-and-yellow basket I sent a letter to my mummy
On the way I dropped it.
I dropped it, I dropped it Yes on the way I dropped it A little girlie picked it up And put it in her pocket.
– with his usual brand of rambling interjections, before bringing the song screeching to a close:
Tisket, tasket, I lost my yellow basket
Oh someone help me find my basket
Make me happy again, again.
(Was it red?) No, no, no, no!
(Was it brown?) No, no, no, no!
(Was it blue?) No, no, no, no!
No, just a little yellow basket
A little yellow basket!
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‘Thank you very much,’ Major Stone said with the standard politely inscrutable smile, and then, once Howard had departed from the hall, he turned to solicit the views of his number two. ‘Oh no, no,’ sighed Captain Carmichael, ‘he’s too raw, with no timing, and I don’t think he’s particularly funny.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Stone, sensing a negative, invited his colleague to clarify his position. ‘I thought,’ Carmichael replied with a grimace, ‘that he was death-defyingly unfunny.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Stone, however, disagreed: ‘I think you’ve got it wrong. I’m going to book him for one of our shows.’
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Howard was duly installed as the compère of a concert party – The Waggoners – that was touting north-west Germany. For the next three months or so, from the end of 1945 to a short time after the start of 1946, he was in his element. Moving rapidly from place to place, he acquired a clearer sense of what it took to win over any audience, and he adapted his act accordingly. He improved the best of his old routines; dropped the rest; wrote, tried and tested several new jokes, sketches and monologues; and generally grew in confidence as a performer.
Those who watched him were impressed. One such admirer was a 21-year-old soldier and budding comedian named Benny Hill. Serving in Germany at the time with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, Hill was struck immediately by Howard’s edgy originality, and made a point of seeking him out in the canteen shortly after the show had finished.
It was a brief but revealing meeting between two of British comedy’s most significant stars of the future: Hill, the self-assured optimist, and Howard, the insecure pessimist. ‘You’ve got a jolly good way with you,’ gushed Hill, believing Howard (who was seven years his senior) to be a relatively seasoned professional. When it became clear that he was actually lavishing praise on a surprisingly shy and modest amateur, Hill urged him to consider pursuing comedy as a career: ‘You ought to take it up,’ he insisted. ‘I think you would do very well.’
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Howard, blushing a little and fidgeting with his curly hair, mumbled a clumsily non-committal response – ‘I don’t know, really, you know’ – but he was genuinely touched by the encouragement.
(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, having endured so many curt rejections up to this point in his life, he treasured every single one of the kind words that he now received.
Richard Stone, for one, would discover just how true this was some thirty-five years later, when the star Frankie Howerd, upon hearing a specious rumour that Stone had only grudgingly found a place for him in CSE, asked his former boss to meet him as soon as possible for lunch. ‘It turned out,’ recalled Stone (who had secretly been hoping that the reason for the meeting was to sound him out about acquiring Howerd as a client), ‘that in all the years, through his many ups and downs, he had consoled himself with the thought that there was at least one man in show-business who believed in him. He then produced from his pocket a tired piece of Army notepaper which he had cherished. It informed those whom it might concern that Sergeant Howard was a very funny man, and was signed Richard Stone, Major!’
(#litres_trial_promo) The insecurity would never go away.
Throughout that short tour during the winter of 1945/46, however, Howard was a relatively happy young man. The fears of wartime were finally over, and the anxieties of peacetime had not yet begun. All that he was required to do – and all that he needed to do – was perform, and he relished every minute. Then, with the arrival of April 1946, the brief but blessed interlude was brought abruptly to a close. Frankie Howard, after spending six years in uniform, was demobbed, and he returned to civilian life.
Finding himself back in Eltham, ‘with less than £100, a chalk-striped suit, pork-pie hat’,
(#litres_trial_promo) and that precious one-page reference from Richard Stone tucked safely away inside his jacket pocket, he felt some of the old nerves start to stir. Now aged twenty-nine, he stood for a moment alone, took in all of the familiar sights, and then thought to himself: ‘What now?’
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ACT II: FRANKIE (#ulink_73d0f621-91f7-5a4d-accb-e05d3e7f6551)
They’re mocking Francis!

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_902f7ad4-a81c-5e31-bcd2-b9552e357d1e)
Meet Scruffy Dale (#ulink_902f7ad4-a81c-5e31-bcd2-b9552e357d1e)
My agent. He’s a very peculiar man, my agent. He’s got what they call a dual personality. People hate both of them.
It was an extraordinary coincidence. Shortly after Frankie Howard departed from the Army, he met not only the man who would soon prove to be one of the best things to have happened to his early career, but also the man who would end up seeming like one of the worst. These two men were one and the same: Stanley ‘Scruffy’ Dale.
Of all the innumerable managers, promoters and sundry ‘ten-percenters’ who struggled to make a living out of post-war British theatre, none was quite as mysterious, unorthodox and downright odd as Stanley Dale. Invalided out of the RAF after sitting on an incendiary shell that had penetrated his aeroplane (an act of valour for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross
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A whippet-thin man of average height with a sharp-featured face and short, curly hair that swept back over his head in shiny little ripples, Dale was notorious for his unpredictable office hours, his somewhat insalubrious personal habits and, most of all, for his chronically unkempt appearance. ‘Scruffy was scruffy,’ confirmed the scriptwriter Alan Simpson. ‘I mean, nearly every time I saw Scruffy [he] was in bed! He used to conduct all of his office meetings in bed, with a fag hanging out of his mouth – he never seemed to puff it, it always seemed just to burn away until there was nothing there but a sort of grey stick – and he had all of this ash dripping down on to his pyjama jacket.’
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When, however, Dale managed to summon up the effort to rise from his bed and dress (which happened – if it happened at all – only very rarely earlier than noon), he was capable of giving off a certain ‘loveable roguish’ kind of charm, particularly when telling some of his extraordinary tales (many of them tall, a few of them positively colossal) about the remarkable things he had done, the astonishing sights he had seen and the impressive people he had known over the course of his improbably eventful life. Tony Hancock, for one, fell deeply under his spell for a while during the immediate post-war period, sitting around with him night after night, sharing cigarettes and drinks and listening wide-eyed and open-mouthed to his anecdotes about the countless narrow escapes he claimed to have experienced while serving in the RAF.
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A budding young stand-up comic by the name of Jim Smith was another performer who would find himself drawn into Dale’s orbit. After seeing the teenaged Smith on stage at the start of the 1950s and quickly sensing his potential, Dale put him under contract, continued paying him a regular salary during his two years away on National Service, and, when he returned, gave Smith the ‘gift’ of his own surname – so Jim Smith became Jim Dale, and the comedy performer was promptly re-packaged as a pop star.
One of the qualities that friends and clients alike admired in Stanley Dale (at the beginning at least) was the extent of his apparent devotion to their cause. Behind the risibly indolent image lurked a lively and surprisingly imaginative champion of whomever he found worthwhile. If a performer needed someone to transport a cumbersome trunk, set up a prop or simply flick a particular switch, Scruffy, invariably, would agree to do it. If a friend fell into financial trouble, Scruffy would often be the first to volunteer to fix it. If a client required a change of style, Scruffy would go straight ahead and dream another one up. Nothing, it seemed, was too much trouble for Scruffy Dale – just as long, of course, as it did not need doing before noon.
What tended to dazzle people most of all about Dale was his claim to possess a special range of entrepreneurial powers. At a time when many of London’s theatrical agents still seemed mired in the methods and manners of the pre-war Edwardian era, Stanley Dale appeared strikingly and excitingly progressive, buying and selling stocks and shares at both a speed and a level of complexity that rendered the average Variety artiste breathless and dizzy but also deeply impressed. He was regarded, recalled his former colleague Bill Lyon-Shaw, as ‘a whizz-kid of his time’. Any up-and-coming performer would obviously have craved such lucrative expertise, but with Stanley Dale, Lyon-Shaw noted, there was a catch to the whizz-kid’s promise of a boundless supply of cash: ‘He whizzed quite a lot of it into his own pocket.’
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The full extent of Dale’s many deceptions would only be discovered a decade or so later. Back in 1946, he struck most people as merely an eccentric but slyly effective wheeler-dealer, and there was one thing about this unconventional man of which no one was in any doubt: he had a genuinely sharp eye for new talent. It was this sharp eye that would soon spot Frankie Howard.
Howard first encountered Stanley Dale at the Stage Door Canteen in Piccadilly – a bustling little venue (based on the site occupied nowadays by Boots the Chemist) where Service men and women with a passion for performing could ‘meet and see’. Howard, having recently been demobbed, should not, by rights, have been there, but he was already feeling desperate. During the brief time he had been out of uniform, Howard had failed yet another audition – this time at Butlin’s holiday camp at Filey in Yorkshire – and then tramped his lonely way around most of Soho’s well-known (and quite a few of the more obscure) agents’ offices without eliciting more than the faintest hint of sincere encouragement. The problem was always the same: ‘Where can I see you perform?’ each cigar-chomping agent would ask. ‘You can’t,’ came Howard’s stock reply. ‘I’m not working.’
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It was every young performer’s Catch-22: in order to work, one needed an agent, but in order to get an agent, one needed to work. There was no hope to be found in logic; the only hope to be had was in luck.
Just before Howard met Dale, he sat up in his old bedroom in Eltham and hatched an audacious plan to actively make his own luck instead of continuing to wait passively for its possible arrival. Remembering that one of the most sympathetic (or least unsympathetic) agents he had so far encountered – Harry Lowe – was known to be a regular in the audience at the Stage Door Canteen, he resolved to try to sneak his way in.
Late one morning in the middle of the week, he put his old Army uniform back on, retrieved Richard Stone’s short letter of recommendation, passed politely on his mother’s kind offer of another brown paper bag full of cheese sandwiches, and set off ‘with nervous impatience’ to catch the bus bound for Piccadilly.
(#litres_trial_promo) Marching into the secretary’s office in what he hoped resembled a suitably soldier-like manner, he introduced himself as Sergeant Frank Howard and handed over the positive reference from Major Stone. The ruse worked: he was told that he would be on stage next Friday night at seven o’clock sharp. Racing off to the nearest public telephone, he notified Lowe of the news, and Lowe assured him that he would make every effort to attend.
When Friday arrived, Howard – buoyed by the familiar sight of a boisterous military audience – gave what he felt at the time to be the performance of his life.
(#litres_trial_promo) Immediately afterwards, however, he was crushed to discover that Harry Lowe had not been present to see it. Fearing that he would probably fail in the future to be as good as that again, he felt that his big chance had already come and gone.
Slumped in a chair back at his home in Eltham, Howard spent the next few days in a ‘state of indescribable melancholy’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Then, out of the blue, came a request from the Stage Door Canteen: as there was a shortage of performers for the following Friday night, the message said, would Sergeant Howard mind filling in? At first, he was disinclined to take up the offer, feeling that there would no longer be any real point to further exposure, but eventually, after being encouraged and cajoled by his mother, he relented: he would go, he mumbled miserably, but only in order to give ‘a valedictory performance before abandoning all hopes of a show-business career’.
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Harry Lowe, once again, was not there, but this time Howard could hardly have cared any less. Expecting nothing of any consequence to come from the performance, he went on stage at his most relaxed, and he proceeded to have some fun. The act went even better than it had the last time: every gag, every routine and every semi-improvised comic exchange with certain individuals among the audience seemed to trigger another crescendo of laughter. Howard could do no wrong, and he knew it – and he loved it.
In an office elsewhere in the building, a visiting booker – there doing business on behalf of a major London agency – grew curious as to what, and more importantly who, was causing so much noise in the auditorium. Setting off along the corridor and down the stairs, he managed to slip inside the door at the back of the theatre and stood there to watch the remainder of Howard’s act.
When it ended, the booker, who had been greatly impressed, raced backstage. ‘Who represents you?’ he panted. ‘Nobody,’ replied Howard, trying hard not to sound bitter. ‘I’m with the Jack Payne office,’ the man announced. ‘Would you like us to represent you?’
Howard, who could still recall with a shudder that awful night at the Lewisham Hippodrome when he had shared the stage but none of the applause with the hugely popular Jack Payne and his band, was incredulous. Looking this stranger up and down for a few seconds – taking in the scuffs on the toes of the old shoes, the deep creases all over the trousers, the stains on the front of the open-necked shirt and the beads of sweat that were now sliding down the brow – he came perilously close to concluding out loud that the whole thing must be some sort of sick joke.
It soon became apparent, however, that the stranger was being serious. ‘You’ll have to see Frank Barnard,’ he added matter-of-factly. ‘He’ll want to see your act.’ Howard, now blushing beetroot-red and starting to lose control over his stutter, managed to reply: ‘Of course … Yes … Um … Yes … Who’s he?’
Informed that Frank Barnard was Jack Payne’s general manager, Howard then asked where he could expect the great man to go to see him perform. ‘In his office,’ he was told. ‘His office!’ a patently horrified Howard shrieked. ‘I c-can’t perform in an office! I need an audience.’ After being told, somewhat tetchily (‘Look, sonny …’), that Mr Barnard – a hugely experienced and no-nonsense old Geordie – already had more than enough people to see, he was handed his final chance: ‘Are you interested, or aren’t you?’ This time there was no hesitation: ‘You bet I am!’ The stranger shook his hand and smiled: ‘Then you will perform in his office.’
Howard was left in a daze. Even the daunting prospect of another audience-free audition failed to dampen down the tremendous feelings of elation: his talent had at last been spotted, and, on the very day that he had contemplated abandoning his long-cherished ambitions, he was finally getting his chance. Just before the unexpected meeting had ended, Howard suddenly realised that, throughout all of the heightened confusion, anxiety and excitement, he had not yet asked the visitor his name. ‘It’s Stanley,’ the stranger revealed. ‘Stanley Dale.’
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Howard would always claim, on the basis of this encounter, that Dale was the man who discovered him, but this was not strictly true. Dale may have been the first person from the agency to knock on the performer’s dressing-room door, but it was one of his superiors within the Jack Payne Organisation, the production manager Bill Lyon-Shaw, who had made the actual discovery.
Lyon-Shaw – responding to a tip from a talent scout – had gone down to the Stage Door Canteen on that particular day alongside Jack Payne to take a look at a promising young comedian and impressionist by the name of Max Bygraves. When they arrived, Lyon-Shaw noticed that Frankie Howard was also on the list of artists who were due to appear:
I said to Jack, ‘Oh, God, I know that chap, I’ve seen him before.’ I’d actually seen him a few years before, during wartime, in a little concert party in Rochford. I used to live in Southend, you see, and a lady whom I knew there called Blanche Moore – who never gets the credit she deserves for finding Frank – had written to me and said, ‘If you ever get a chance to come back again to Southend, you must come down and see my concert party. We have a very funny man called Frankie Howard.’ So, one leave weekend, I went down, and saw this grotesque, in Army uniform, come on to the stage, do a whole lot of ‘ooh-aahs’ and the odd ‘oh, no, missus’, tell mostly Army-style jokes and then he ended up with the song ‘Three Little Fishes’ – which, of course, was unusual and very good. So at the Stage Door Canteen, after we’d seen and liked – and decided we’d book – Max Bygraves, I said to Jack Payne, ‘Look, this Frankie Howard: he’s quite funny. Let’s just stay a bit and see what you think of him.’ And so we stayed and saw Frank, and Jack liked him. He said, ‘Yes, he’s a funny man, he’s different, not at all like the typical slick comic – let’s have him, too.’ And that’s how we got Max Bygraves and Frankie Howard at the same time.
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Whether it was Payne, then and there, who dispatched Dale backstage to make the first official contact with the two new potential clients, or just Dale (in all of the noisy chaos of the moment) acting entirely on his own initiative, remains unclear, but it certainly seems that, during his time inside Howard’s dressing-room, he made no attempt to undersell his own importance within the agency. The fact was that the comedian, who was struggling to believe his luck, was in no state to question anything his visitor said.
Howard was just delighted to have made the acquaintance of Stanley Dale. Admittedly, Dale did not fit the image of the conventional show-business intermediary, but then neither did Howard fit the image of the conventional stand-up comedian. What boded rather well, he reflected, was the fact that their relationship had been founded on such an encouraging convergence of opinion: namely, they both had faith in the star potential of Frankie Howard.
What brought Howard straight back down to earth with an abrupt and painful bump was the thought that this faith would still prove fruitless unless he now went on to win a similar vote of confidence from the notoriously gruff and bluff Frank Barnard. Having failed so many auditions in the past that had been held under similarly cold and unwelcoming conditions, he found it hard now to hold out much hope. Barnard was based in an elegantly capacious set of rooms two floors above Hanover Square in Mayfair. Howard had not even climbed the stairs before his big day started going ominously awry.
Vera Roper, his old friend and stooge, had agreed to accompany him there to provide some much-needed moral support, but, in an unwelcome imitation of her on-stage unreliability, she failed to turn up. The reality was that she had fallen ill, but, as neither she nor Howard owned a telephone, he was left to pace anxiously up and down on the pavement outside, waiting in vain until he very nearly made himself late.
Things went from bad to worse when, reluctantly, he entered the building alone and made his way up to Barnard’s office. ‘Got your band parts?’ barked Barnard from behind a fat and angry Havana cigar. Howard (failing to grasp the full seriousness of the faux pas) confessed that he had not thought to bring any sheet music, but added that he would definitely have arrived with a pianist if only his accompanist had not reneged on her promise to accompany him. This provoked plenty of smoke from the scowling Barnard, whose face had just grown redder than the glowing end of his cigar.
Howard, still somehow oblivious to the obvious danger signs, then pointed a thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of the gleaming new office piano and enquired if there was ‘anyone around who could play “Three Little Fishes”’ for him. This provoked plenty of fire: Barnard, according to Howard’s subsequent embarrassed account, leapt up from behind his desk and promptly ‘went berserk’.
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Launching into a screaming tirade that rocked Howard back in his seat, Barnard told him that he was an unprofessional and impertinent timewaster, unworthy of begging the attention of a bored gallery queue in Wigan – let alone a top-notch metropolitan agent. ‘He went on and on,’ the traumatised performer would recall, ‘whipping himself into a frenzy of near-apoplexy – while I sat literally shivering with terror.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Eventually, having shouted himself into exhaustion, Barnard slumped back down into his chair, reached for another cigar, and, waving a hand dismissively in the direction of Howard, snarled: ‘Wait outside.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Howard did what he was told.
He ended up waiting outside for four solid hours. During that time spent sitting in silence on his own, he went all the way from quivering terror through meek contrition to angry resentment (‘Who the hell does he think he is?’). When, at last, the call came that ‘Mr Barnard will see you now’, Howard was firmly in the mood for retaliation: ‘The worm not only turned, but grew teeth.’
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‘I wouldn’t go near that man for all the tea in China,’ he screamed at Barnard’s startled secretary. ‘I’ve never been so insulted in all my life, and I’m not so desperate that I’ll go on my hands and knees to that ignorant pig. I’d rather not be in show-business at all – and that’s that.’
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The secretary had obviously been screamed at before, because, once her ears had stopped ringing, she simply patted Howard on the shoulder and advised him to calm down: ‘Swallow your pride. You may never get this sort of chance again.’ Howard, however, was having none of it. With widened eyes and scarlet cheeks, he raged at all the rudeness, injustice and contempt he had suffered, not only that day but on so many, many days before, and then, folding his hands over the top of his head, moaned that he was in no mood now to put right what had gone so horribly, utterly wrong. ‘Have a go,’ said the secretary with a sympathetic smile, and guided him by the arm back to outside the door of the manager’s office.
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So many thoughts, so many options, bounced around in Howard’s head during the handful of seconds that he hovered outside that door: turning the other cheek; punching the other cheek; begging forgiveness; offering forgiveness; speaking his mind; biting his lip – countless ticks and an equal number of crosses. In the end, as he moved to open the door, he settled on speaking his mind.
Crashing into the office and racing straight up to the desk, Howard fixed his tormentor with his very best baleful glare and, stabbing the smoky air with his finger for emphasis, he screeched: ‘I am now going to make you laugh, you clot. You’re going to fall about with laughter, you idiot. Because I’m a very funny man, you oaf!’
(#litres_trial_promo) Then he noticed that Barnard was shaking.
He was shaking neither with fear nor rage, but rather with laughter. ‘That’s a great act. Great. It’s a hoot,’ he cried, shaking his head, wiping his eyes and smiling broadly. ‘Can you do any more?’
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Howard, having purged himself of all fury, did a quick double-take and then proceeded to do his proper act. He was more disorientated than genuinely relaxed, but what he did went down so well that Barnard now thought nothing of summoning a pianist to support his rendition of ‘Three Little Fishes’. When it was all over, Barnard shook Howard warmly by the hand and assured the exhausted performer that it had been the best ‘cold’ audition he had ever seen. He hired Howard on the spot, and then arranged for Jack Payne, the self-styled capo di tutti capi of the post-war Variety world, to see his newest client perform in front of an enthusiastic military audience at Arborfield in Berkshire. Payne (who had no recollection of his pre-war encounter with Howard) arrived in time to watch him steal the show.
Barnard’s initial idea had been for Howard to make his debut as a professional in a relatively run-of-the-mill touring show in Germany. Payne, however, preferred to entrust the monitoring of his early career to Bill Lyon-Shaw, and so he was drafted instead into a far more prestigious new domestic revue by the name of For the Fun of It. Produced by Lyon-Shaw, it boasted such well-established names as the veteran stand-up Nosmo King, the comedy double-act of Jean Adrienne and Eddie Leslie and, topping the bill, the hugely popular singer Donald Peers. Howard joined two other fresh professionals – his fellow-comic Max Bygraves and a contortionist called Pam Denton – at the bottom of the bill in a special showcase for ex-Service performers entitled ‘They’re Out!’
Before the tour began, Howard sat down and invested an extraordinary amount of careful thought into how best to shape his on-stage persona. Desperate to get his professional career off to a strong and certain start, he analysed every aspect of his act – from what he should say (and how he should say it) to what he should wear (and how he should wear it) – and gradually built up an idea, and an image, of the kind of distinctive performer he wanted, in time, to become.
First of all, he reflected on what he most admired about his own comedy heroes – and what he could take from them and then adapt for himself. When he thought, for example, about two of his favourite American performers, Jack Benny and W.C. Fields, he drew inspiration from the prickliness of their respective images (Benny the hopelessly vain and miserly old ham, Fields the drunken and cynical old fraud) and the unusually sharp, self-aware and defiantly pathos-free nature of their material.
What he found especially refreshing was the fact that neither of these fine comedians (in stark contrast to the vast majority of their peers) was enslaved by any obvious need to be loved. It did not matter to Benny if anyone actually believed that he was waited on day and night by an African-American servant (whom he rarely, if ever, bothered to pay), or wore the cheapest toupee in Hollywood, or refused to acknowledge that he had long since passed the age of thirty-nine, or, when asked by a mugger to choose between his money and his life, resented being hurried – ‘I’m thinking it over!’
Similarly, it did not matter to Fields if the odd person took offence when he knocked back one too many treble measures of bourbon, mumbled something insulting about his wife or aimed a large boot at little Baby LeRoy’s backside. Like Benny, Fields was more than happy to use all of his various foibles, failures and flaws – whether they were real and exaggerated or imaginary and stylised – rather than try, like the more typical kind of comedian, to hide and deny them. The only thing that mattered to this exceptional pair of performers was the number of laughs they were able to generate. It was this attitude – a subtly smart, self-mocking and grown-up attitude – that Howard (the hypocritical ‘friend’ of elderly deaf pianists) was ready to emulate.
Turning his attention to the delivery of his material, Howard not only recognised the debt he already owed to George Robey, but also anticipated the impact to be had from studying the style of a more recent favourite, Sid Field. What both of these performers did was to dominate an audience through indirection, preferring to coax the laughs out rather than waiting for them to be handed over on a plate.
Robey had shown how much funnier a clown could be when he acted as if he was labouring under the illusion that he was not actually a clown. Once the first ripple of laughter had rolled towards him from over the stalls, he would stick his hands stiffly on his hips, hoist his nose high up in the air and then snort censoriously: ‘Kindly temper your hilarity with a modicum of reserve.’ When this act of pomposity summoned up an even louder and deeper splash of derision, he would, with an air of mounting desperation, urge the audience to ‘Desist!’ – which in turn, of course, would succeed only in prompting an even bigger and more gloriously anarchic burst of playful mockery.
More recently, Howard had been deeply impressed by the classy comic artistry of Sid Field. Like Howard, Field was a peculiar mixture, on stage, of lumbering masculinity and camp effeminacy, of working-class toughness and middle-class gentility – the critic Kenneth Tynan summed it up rather nicely when he likened it to a strangely effective blend ‘of nectar and beer’.
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Besides having the knack of being able to act with his entire body – with his nimble hands and knees as well as his brightly expressive face – Field also had a wonderfully playful way with words and sounds and idioms. Ranging freely from coarse, back-throated cockney, through the nasal, drooping rhythms of his native Brummie, to the tight-necked, tongue-tip precision of a metropolitan toff, he turned common words and simple phrases into a special repertory of colourful comedy characters.
Howard adored the way that Field (a master parodist of effete behaviour) needed only to cry a single ‘Be-ooo-tiful!’ or cluck a quick ‘Don’t be so fool-haar-day!’ to trigger yet another gush of giggles. He warmed to the performer even more when Field paused to interact with the members of the pit orchestra (‘And how are yooo today? R-r-r-reasonably well, I hoop?’), boast to an unseen acquaintance in the wings (‘Did you heah me, Whittaker?’) and bridle at an imagined insult aimed at him from the audience (‘Oh! How very, very, dare you!’). Watching him, Howard felt that he had found a kindred spirit, and drew encouragement to follow suit.
When it came to deciding on how he would look, however, Howard had already arrived at some firm and subversive ideas all of his own. Aside from adopting the old Max Miller trick of applying plenty of blue to the lids ‘to help the eyes sparkle’,
(#litres_trial_promo) he eschewed the custom of caking the face in layers of make-up. He also elected to do without any of the formal, garish or gimmicky styles of dress.
He chose instead to wear an ordinary, off-the-peg lounge suit and plain tie. The colour of both, he decided, would always be a medium shade of brown, because he thought that this could be relied on to be ‘a colour that didn’t intrude’: ‘It’s warm and neutral and man-in-the-street anonymous,’ he reasoned. ‘If people did notice my suit or tie I thought it would mean that they were not concentrating on my face.’
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He also resolved to dispense with the way that other comedians ‘framed’ each performance by making a formal entrance and exit. There would be no opening announcements or closing bows from him: he would simply walk straight up to the footlights and start talking – ‘No. Ah. Ooh, I’ve had such a funny day, today, have you?’ – and then, when he had finished, walk off again in a similar fashion, without ever signalling the presence of quotation marks.
The key thing, he believed, was to create the impression ‘that I wasn’t one of the cast, but had just wandered in from the street – as though into a pub, or just home from work. And I’d emphasise the calculated amateurishness of my presence and dress with a reference to the rest of the acts on the bill: “I’m not with this lot … Ooh no, I’m on me own!”’
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With all of this, he was almost ready: an unusually informal, ordinary-looking, everyday kind of clown with a plausibly flawed personality, a deceptively artful style of delivery and a rare gift for engaging an audience. There was just one further thing, he felt, that still needed to be done: he needed to change his name. He knew that he was stuck with ‘Frankie’, but he decided, none the less, to alter the spelling of’Howard’. There were, he was convinced, simply too many other, far more famous, Howards about.
It was, in fact, an erroneous belief: in the absence of both Leslie (the London-bom Hollywood actor who had perished during the war) and Sydney (the portly Yorkshire comedian who had just died in June 1946), there was arguably only one notable Howard present in British show business at this time whose name had truly impinged on the public consciousness – and that was the actor Trevor Howard, who had only recently shot to stardom after playing the romantic lead in the 1945 movie, Brief Encounter.
Even one solitary Trevor, however, appeared to be one too many for Frankie, who proceeded to change the spelling of his surname from ‘Howard’ to ‘Howerd’. Showing himself to be a surprisingly shrewd (if somewhat over-analytical) self-promoter, he reasoned that the minor alteration, aside from helping to distinguish him from the odd stem-feced matinée idol, would have ‘the added advantage of making people look twice because they assumed it to be a misprint’.
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Along with the name change came the invention of what in those days was called ‘bill matter’ (the slogan that accompanied the name displayed on the poster). There were plenty of examples to study: Max Miller was ‘The Cheeky Chappie’; Albert Modley ‘Lancashire’s Favourite Yorkshireman’: Vera Lynn ‘The Forces’ Sweetheart’; Donald Peers ‘Radio’s Cavalier of Song’; Robb Wilton ‘The Confidential Comedian’; and Sid Field ‘The Destroyer of Gloom’. Frankie Howerd, after much careful thought, came up with an epithet all of his own: ‘The Borderline Case’.
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Now, at last, everything really was well and truly in place. The professional career could commence.
It began in his native Yorkshire, at the massive and Moorish Empire Theatre in Sheffield, on the night of Wednesday, 31 July 1946. Even though he was placed right down at the base of the bill, the act that was ‘Frankie Howerd: The Borderline Case’ proved impossible to miss. It was not just that he was different. It was also that he broke every rule in the book – literally.
In How to Become a Comedian (a compact little manual that had been published in 1945), the veteran music-hall star Lupino Lane had spelled out the conventional code of conduct to be followed by any fledgling stand-up comic. Typical of his schoolmasterly instructions were the following sober decrees: ‘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”, etc. These things are most annoying to the listener.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Even if some people, at the time, might have resented the intolerant tone, no one really questioned the general advice. No one, that is, except Frankie Howerd.
For all of his myriad insecurities, powerful bouts of crippling self-doubt and near-paralysing second thoughts, when it came to the true heart of his art, Howerd always knew exactly what he was doing – and what he was doing, on that first and on subsequent nights, was walking out in front of as many as 3,000 people and redefining the very nature of what being a stand-up was all about. He made it seem real. He made it into an act that no longer appeared to be an act. He pumped some blood through its veins.
What made the newly professional Frankie Howerd so impressively sui generis as a performer was the very thing that made him seem, as a character, so very much like ‘one of us’. He stood out as a stand-up by refusing to stand out from the crowd. For all of his many influences, the thing that really made him special was his willingness to be himself.
‘In those days,’ he would recall, ‘comics were very precise: they were word-perfect, as though reading their jokes from a script, and to fluff a line was something of a major disaster.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Howerd, in contrast, told these same jokes just like the average member of the audience would have told these jokes: badly. He shook up the old patter from within, via a carefully rehearsed sequence of increasingly well-timed stutters, sidetracks and slip-ups, until, eventually, the whole polished package was scratched and then shattered – leaving people to laugh not so much at the jokes as at the person who was trying to tell the jokes.
No audience, back in 1946, had anticipated such an approach, but, when it was witnessed, it worked. It worked, explained Howerd, because, unlike the conventional comedy style, the approach invited identification rather than mere admiration. By daring to appear imprecise, he brought his art to life:
[The approach] worked, because the ordinary chap whom I was portraying is imprecise. You’ve only to listen to the answer when a TV interviewer asks what someone thinks of the Government: ‘Well … You know … Yes … Well, the Government … Yes, well … What more can I say? …’ People in real life don’t talk precisely as though from scripts, and neither did I attempt to on stage. My act sounded almost like a stream of consciousness, which is why I often didn’t finish sentences. ‘Of course, mind you …’ trailed away into silence – as again happens in real life.
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It was the perfect post-war comedy persona: a ‘proper’ person, with no airs or graces but plenty of fears and frailties – just like the vast majority of the people he was entertaining.
Right from the start of his nine-month run in For the Fun of It, he was rated a performer of rare potential. Semi-hidden in the small print at the bottom of the bill, he soon became many theatregoers’ special discovery, the unknown performer who inspired them to exclaim at work the next day: ‘You should have seen this act!’ He soon started winning even more admirers once Bill Lyon-Shaw had coached him in the craft of commanding, as a professional, an ever-changing audience:
He was actually a very poor timer in the earliest days of the tour, and this was simply because he’d previously spent about two years playing in camp concerts to soldiers, who’d laughed the moment he went on. The reason they’d laughed was that they knew him, and they knew that he was going to take the mickey out of the Major, and the General, and send-up the Sergeant-Major. So they were a dead-cert audience to start with. Whereas once he went into Civvy Street, it was a different matter. When he got up North, for example, and into Yorkshire – where they’re a bloody hard lot anyway – they’d be saying, ‘What’s this bugger doin’ ’ere, ey? Does he not know what he’s about yet?’ He had all of that carry on. And so he had to learn timing, and learn to adjust his pace to the audience he was playing – you’ve got to be much faster in the South and much slower in the North, and you’ve got to be impossible in Scotland – and learn to pay far more attention to that kind of detail.
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Grateful for the expert advice, Howerd proceeded to do just that, and, as a consequence, gathered an even greater quantity of praise as the tour progressed. The other two novice professionals on the bill, Max Bygraves and Pam Denton, were also attracting an increasingly positive audience reaction. Both of them, as the tour evolved, would grow increasingly close to Howerd.
The friendship with Bygraves was probably one of the firmest Howerd would ever have. Sharing both a dressing-room and digs throughout the duration of the tour, the two young comedians became each other’s primary advisor, sounding-board, supporter and all-purpose ‘cheerer-upper’.
The first time that Bygraves (a much more traditional type of comedian) saw Howerd in action, he thought him ‘the most nervous performer I’d ever met’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The act, however, impressed him – as, indeed, did the high degree of courage it took to do it – and he became very protective of his very talented but horribly anxious new friend. At the end of the tour’s first week, for example, Bygraves discovered that an over-cautious Frank Barnard was attempting to pressure Howerd into cutting out the most audacious aspects of his act. ‘Why don’t you stop bullying him?’ he shouted at the boss. ‘You can see the boy’s a nervous wreck, so why don’t you leave him alone until he gets settled?’
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His intervention was only partially successful – Howerd did have to squeeze into his routine a few things that were more immediately recognisable as jokes – but the gesture, none the less, could hardly have touched the co-performer more deeply. ‘I’ve always been grateful to Max for speaking up for me,’ Howerd later said, ‘and I’ve always admired his guts: after all, like me he’d been in the business just a week, yet there he was arguing the toss with the management and risked being tossed out of the show on his ear.’
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The pair went on to evolve together as performers. ‘We were about the same age, same weight and height,’ Bygraves reflected, ‘and both had the same dreams of making our way in show business.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Both certainly benefited from being taken under the wing of the senior pro on the tour, Nosmo King.
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An asthmatic, cigar-puffing stand-up comic in his sixtieth year (whose somewhat ironic stage name had been inspired by a ‘NO SMOKING’ sign he once spied in a railway carriage), King used to stand and watch his two young protégés every night from the wings, and then afterwards, over a cup or two of hot tea in his dressing-room, he would advise them on what they had done well and what he believed they could learn to do better.
One of his most useful tips of the trade concerned the art of voice projection. Sensing that both Howerd and Bygraves, as they began to work the large and noisy halls, were sometimes struggling to make themselves heard (and were therefore vulnerable to heckles of the ‘Oi! We’ve paid out money – don’t keep it a secret!’ variety), King took each of them to the centre of the stage, made them look at the EXIT sign in the middle of the circle, and then said: ‘Now pretend that sign is somebody’s head. Don’t talk like we are talking now. Don’t shout, but throw your voice at that sign.’ The increase in power, clarity and authority was evident, to both, immediately: ‘It worked,’ exclaimed Bygraves gratetfully, ‘it really worked!’
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While all of this comic bonding was going on, it appears that Howerd was also forming a far less predictable romantic attachment to the female third of the tour’s troupe of youngsters: Pam Denton. How real (and how intimate) this relationship actually was remains unclear – he would make no mention of it in his memoirs, and she would subsequently disappear without a trace from public life – but, according to Max Bygraves, Denton was one woman with whom Howerd became ‘totally enamoured’.
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He certainly liked her, and liked spending time with her, and she, in turn, appears to have enjoyed being with him. He had always been fascinated by speciality acts (he would be joined on a subsequent tour by strongwoman Joan ‘The Mighty Mannequin’ Rhodes), and had been drawn right from the start of the tour to Denton’s carefully choreographed on-stage contortions. He also warmed to her calm, down-to-earth and friendly personality – and, like any other comedian, he loved the fact that she laughed so long and so loudly at so many of his jokes.
Tall and thin with an engagingly open face and a bright, gap-toothed grin, he had, in those days, a far from unpleasant physical presence, and, when his spirits were high, he was quite capable of exuding a considerable amount of charm. His problem, however, was that while it took something extraordinary to lift his spirits up, it only took something trivial to drag them down to the floor. As Bill Lyon-Shaw recalled:
Poor Frank was very shy, very introverted, and terrified of everybody – especially women. I think the main reason for this was that he’d been turned down by a lot of the girls of the ATS – let’s face it, he was no oil painting! – and I gather that they’d been rather cruel to him. So that was the thing that had made him so frightened of women.
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Denton, however, was different. She admired his talent, and was touched by his vulnerability; whether she wanted ultimately to make love to him or merely to mother him, she certainly wanted to share many of her spare hours with him. He was gentle, attentive and very, very funny, and, in her eyes, he made even the toughest times of the tour seem tolerable.
He dubbed it ‘Our Tour of the Empire – The Empire Sheffield, Wigan, Huddersfield, Glasgow …’
(#litres_trial_promo) When things had gone well for both of them, he would relax, sit back, and entertain her with a selection of dialogue and one-liners he had memorised from the movies of W.C. Fields. When things had gone badly for her, he would put an arm around her shoulder, mock her critics and make her laugh. When things had gone badly for him, he would slump down, hold his head in his hands, and explain, in his inimitable gabbling manner, what he believed had actually happened – which often made her laugh even more.
Neither Denton nor Bygraves, for all of their deep affinity for their friend and fellow-performer, could ever quite fathom the full reason why a man so marked by self-contradictions soldiered on with such faith and fortitude. One day it was all about carpe diem: he would lecture all and sundry on the importance of making one’s own luck, staying true to one’s ambitions and never, ever, giving up. The next day it was all about embracing one’s fate: fancying himself as a serious reader of palms, he would often grab Bygraves’ hand, gaze at it for a moment and then assure him solemnly that he could look forward to one day becoming a millionaire (‘Frank,’ Bygraves would always say with a world-weary sigh, ‘I think you’ve got your wires crossed’).
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There seemed to be something equally contradictory about his attitude to his audience. He dreaded rejection, but, whenever he sensed that it might be about to happen, he appeared to actively invite it. If ever a routine or a gag threatened to fall flat, the heart would duly pound, the sweat would seep and the clothes would stick to his flesh, but there was never a wave of a white flag. ‘What are you,’ he would snarl into the darkness, ‘deaf or something?’
(#litres_trial_promo) He was a vulnerable man who dared to live dangerously.
‘Frank would go out and bait his audience,’ Max Bygraves recalled with a mixture of admiration and incredulity. ‘He was living on a knife-edge on that stage. Don’t forget we were all unknown. He’d insult them, pretend to forget his lines – then miraculously remember them just before it got embarrassing. When it worked it was great. I’ve seen him tear the place up, and it was wonderful to watch. Other times …’
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There were quite a few of those ‘other times’. One of them came at Sunderland.
It happened at the start of the week’s run, right in the middle of Howerd’s act. Just after his last ‘um’, and just before his next ‘er’, a loud cracking sound – like an axe cutting into a steel pipe – came up suddenly from the stage. It shook him and stalled the routine, and, even though Howerd soon recovered, he could barely wait to finish and leave. Once the curtain came down, someone found the cause of the noise: a ship’s rivet, thrown down from the ‘gods’ by a distinctly unimpressed docker, had missed the top of the comedian’s head by a whisker and left a large dent in the stage floor. ‘Obviously they can’t afford tomatoes up ’ere!’ Howerd remarked once he was safely backstage, trying hard to laugh the incident off, but Max Bygraves could see that, beneath the show of defiance, the reaction had rendered him ‘a nervous wreck’: ‘He was terrified of an audience like that.’
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Another one of those ‘other times’ occurred at the Glasgow Empire – the deservedly legendary ‘graveyard of English comics’ – where any performer not bedecked from top to toe in tartan could expect to be sent rushing back to the wings with the cry of ‘Away hame and bile yer heid!’ ringing in their ears. Howerd knew all about the venue’s terrifying reputation – indeed, as soon as he arrived at Sauchiehall Street, he felt an urgent need to find and make use of the nearest backstage lavatory – but he was determined to see all of the next six nights through.
He managed it, but only just. A combination of him stammering rather more speedily than usual, and the Glasgow crowd (bemused by the unconventionality of his act) summoning up its antiquated anti-English bile a little more slowly than usual, contrived to buy him some time, but, by the arrival of the dreaded second-house on the climactic Friday night, the customised ‘screwtaps’ (the sharpened metal tops from the bottles of beer) were being hurled at the stage with all of their customary velocity and venom. The conductor – hairless and blameless – was hit on the head, and was carried, bleeding profusely, from the orchestra pit, but Howerd survived, more or less, unscathed.
It was quite the opposite of the proverbial ‘water off a duck’s back’: Howerd absorbed every single drop of negativity. It was just that he kept on going regardless of how much it hurt. Even when he seemed to lose faith in himself, he never lost faith in his act.
He also took comfort from the knowledge that, beyond the confines of the tour, there were people working hard on the advancement of his career. Apart from his sister, Betty, who (fresh out of the ATS) was now acting as his unofficial manager, script advisor and cheerleader, there was also Stanley Dale. Dale, in his own inscrutable, uniquely post-prandial way, was up to all kinds of schemes and tricks to enhance his client’s profile. Contacts were nurtured, sympathetic critics were cultivated and – even though Howerd was only earning a paltry £l3 10s per week – investments started being made in his (and Dale’s) name. Whenever the comedian’s spirits started to sag, Dale would invariably intervene, either in person or via the telephone, to reassure him that all was still going to plan.
To be fair to Dale, he did, through one means or another, get results. While Howerd was on tour, Dale called him with some extraordinarily exciting news: he had been sent an invitation, via the Jack Payne Organisation, from the producer Joy Russell-Smith (one of the most knowledgeable and perceptive judges of comic potential to be found in those days in British broadcasting) to audition for variety Bandbox, the top entertainment radio show on the BBC.
There has been, in the past, some confusion as to the timing of this call. Howerd would remember it arriving a mere ‘six weeks’ into his professional career, which would have placed the date in mid-September.
(#litres_trial_promo) It really happened, in fact, about three weeks after that.
Early on the morning of Wednesday 9 October 1946, Frankie Howerd travelled down to London and went straight to the BBC’s Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street. It was grey and damp outside, and it was grey and damp inside as well. He found himself in a large empty room with a battered microphone in one corner, a pile of sandbags strewn around all four of the walls, and a dull plate of glass that passed for an audience. He struggled to suppress a squeal of horror: it was, after all, yet another audition without anyone with whom to play, and the atmosphere could not have felt more flat. This, however, was an audition for the BBC, and the show it was for was Variety Bandbox, and so he took a deep breath and went ahead: ‘Now, Ladies and Gentle-men, I, ah, no …’
The act itself was something of a dog’s dinner: some of the material had been taken straight from For the Fun of It, some had been invented expressly for the occasion and some had been ‘borrowed’ from other comics and tailored to suit his needs. It was rough around the edges, the timing was slightly off, but the impact was still there. At the end of the performance, the studio door opened, Joy Russell-Smith emerged, stretched out a hand and congratulated Howerd with a remark that showed him just how well she understood what he had been up to: ‘A completely new art form’.
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The following day, Russell-Smith submitted her formal internal report:
FRANKIE HOWARD [sic] (Auditioned 9.10.46)
c/o Scruffy Dale.
Very funny, original patter and song.
Eric Spear and John Hooper present and agree. Seeded.
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It was brief but immensely encouraging: this time, without the chance to interact with a ‘proper’ audience, Howerd had managed to win the approval of not only the redoubtable Russell-Smith but also Eric Spear (an experienced producer and composer who would later be responsible for, among other things, the theme tune of Coronation Street) and John Hooper (another broadcaster with a sure sense of what it took to make any form of entertainment truly popular). As a consequence, he could now look forward to playing a part in the next, crucial, stage of the selection process – a recorded, ‘seeded’ audition in the form of a private ‘show’ before a special board of BBC producers.
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Howerd duly returned to Studio 1 at Aeolian Hall on the morning of Friday, 25 October, nursing a bad migraine but otherwise feeling – for him – fairly hopeful. Rehearsals took place at 9 a.m., followed at 3.00 p.m. by the recording itself. He only had five minutes to show what he could do, but he enjoyed being back on a proper stage, playing to what was admittedly a very special, but none the less reassuringly audible, studio audience, and he left believing that he had acquitted himself rather well.
He was soon proven right. Just over a fortnight later, a telegram arrived: ‘YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN’.
(#litres_trial_promo)His career in radio was about to begin.

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_2b90d4a0-256b-5c64-9a2f-0c9ecc97a84c)
Variety Bandbox (#ulink_2b90d4a0-256b-5c64-9a2f-0c9ecc97a84c)
Liss-en!
The average listener, perusing a copy of Radio Times at the end of November 1946, would not have known quite what to expect. It was obvious enough that this new man, Frankie Howerd, was probably going to be something rather special, because the magazine described him as ‘a comedian who is really different in that he doesn’t tell a single gag!’ It was not at all clear, however, what this difference would actually mean or amount to, because the magazine proceeded to reveal nothing more than the fact that Joy Russell-Smith ‘wouldn’t let us into the secret of Frankie Howerd’s humour because it might take some of the surprise from the first show’.
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There was a real sense of anticipation, therefore, when, at 6 p.m. on Sunday 1 December, the latest edition of Variety Bandbox began on the BBC’s Light Programme. Topping the bill that week at the grandly cavernous Camberwell Palace was the very popular singer, dancer and actor Jessie Matthews, supported by novelty comic monologist Harry Hemsley, singers Hella Toros and Edward Reach, jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli, comedy double-act Johnnie Riscoe and Violet Terry, Morton Fraser ‘and his Harmonica Rascals’, and, right down at the bottom of the bill, the mysterious young debutant, Frankie Howerd.
Bottom of the bill he might have been, but Howerd could not have found a more high-profile British programme in which to make his broadcasting debut. Established in 1944, Variety Bandbox had soon become the radio show on which every popular entertainer in the country craved to be heard. ‘Presenting the people of Variety to a variety of people,’ it was the most-listened-to programme of its type – overheard coming out from most of the houses in most of the streets in Britain each Sunday night, and discussed in countless workplaces each Monday morning. If ever there was an audition before the nation, then this, Howerd realised, was it.
As he readied himself in the wings before walking out to perform his first seven-minute spot, he thought of everyone who might be listening, somewhere, out there at home: certainly his devoted mother and his sister, and perhaps even his brother (although Sidney was never a great comedy fan) and innumerable other friends, acquaintances and relations; undoubtedly, from his agency and his touring company, Scruffy Dale, Jack Payne, Frank Barnard, Bill Lyon-Shaw, Nosmo King, Max Bygraves and Pam Denton would all be within hearing distance of the wireless; possibly, if the rumours that he had heard were right, such personal heroes as Jimmy James, Max Miller and Sid Field would also be tuning in; and, in addition to all of them, well, a frighteningly high proportion, it seemed, of the rest of the world and his wife. He felt nauseous – more so than usual – and his legs felt like lead, but, when the cue came, he puffed the air out from his mouth, clenched and unclenched his fists, took one last deep breath and then, with the help of a studio assistant, he pushed himself on to the stage to the sound of his new, aptly-titled signature tune: ‘You Can’t Have Everything’.
‘Ladies and Gentle-men,’ he began. They laughed. ‘No … Ah, no … Now listen.’ They laughed a little louder. ‘No … No, don’t laugh …’ They kept on laughing. ‘Oh, no, um, no, please, liss-en …’ He was off and running.
He did the usual routine, more or less, but this was the first time that it had been heard by the British public at large, and it went down extremely well. He seemed so new, so fresh, so ordinary, and, therefore, so odd. Instead of sounding like the 1,001st comic to come on and rattle off yet more of the same old gags – maybe a little faster, or slower, or louder, or quieter than the last one, but otherwise very much the same – Frankie Howerd lived up to his pre-publicity by coming over as a genuinely unusual comedian. He thought, at the end, that he had been ‘far too twitchy to be good’, but he had been good enough to impress most of those who had been listening both in the theatre and gathered around the radio at home.
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Some of them might have caught the odd comic novelty on the wireless before – such as the old Sheffield-born stand-up Stainless Stephen,
(#litres_trial_promo) who had intrigued a small but loyal audience during the late 1920s and early 1930s with his downright peculiar brand of ‘punctuated patter’ (e.g. ‘Somebody once said inverted commas comedians are born not made semi-colon’) – but never, before now, had any of them encountered the sound of someone so original in the context of a prime-time mainstream show. What people had heard on this particular night had genuinely taken them by surprise.
Howerd could not have sounded less like the regular, rather more established, young stand-up associated with the show, Derek Roy. Later dismissed by an embittered Spike Milligan (who toiled for a spell as one of his many underpaid writers) as ‘the world’s unfunniest comedian’,
(#litres_trial_promo) Roy was a singer (nicknamed ‘The Melody Boy’) who had metamorphosed into a relatively slick but essentially old-fashioned teller of jokes. He was technically not much better than mediocre, but he was certainly full of cheek: if he doubted his ability to deliver a certain punchline, he would not hesitate to resort to donning a silly wig or a wacky hat in order to amuse the studio audience and thus ensure that the radio waves still registered the requisite laugh.
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His material revolved around a predictable cluster of comedy clichés: the shrewish wife; the dragon-like mother-in-law; the attractive but vacuous girlfriend; the bumptious boss; the slow-witted neighbour or acquaintance; and the latest celebrity sex symbol. ‘Anyone here played Jane Russell pontoon?’ went a far livelier than usual Derek Roy joke. ‘It’s the same as ordinary pontoon but you need thirty-eight to bust!’ His style was somewhat Americanised – a kind of ‘Bob Hope Lite’ – and possessed all of the personality of a typed and unsigned letter.
With the memory of Roy’s last stale routine still fresh in the mind, no listener would have failed to have been struck by Howerd’s astonishing originality. It was like suddenly hearing modern jazz after a lifetime of tolerating trad: innovative, unpredictable and supremely individual.
The BBC had only booked Howerd for a three-week probationary period (paying him a paltry £18 per show), but a delighted Joy Russell-Smith wasted no time, after witnessing that truly remarkable debut appearance, in signing him up to the show as a regular. The residency would last for two-and-a-half extraordinarily memorable years.
Bill Lyon-Shaw, who was still responsible for Howerd on tour, was perfectly happy to share his energies with the BBC:
[variety Bandbox] was good for him, good for the tour, and it wasn’t like he was going to tire himself out. Frank was a young man, he’d been trained in the Army, and he was quite tough. It didn’t take that much out of him to do our show [For the Fun of It], because he was only doing his own act – he wasn’t doing any of the sketches or anything extra like that. So, twice nightly, it didn’t take a lot out of him. And he’d just go off on either the Saturday night or the Sunday morning to London, to wherever the theatre was, and do his radio programme, and then he’d come back to us, wherever we were, on the Monday afternoon. So I don’t think combining the two affected him much at all. But, I must say, he did start spending more and more time in the dressing-room preparing for the weekend. He used to sit there for hours on his own, making faces, and going, ‘Ooooh! Aaaah! Yes! No! Missus! Ooooh!’ I mean, he worked very, very hard at it. It wasn’t natural. That was acting. Off-stage, Frank was usually a very quiet and introverted person, and his stage presence was foreign, it really was an act in the true sense of the word.
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Joy Russell-Smith had decided that, from this moment on, Howerd would alternate on a fortnightly basis with Derek Roy as the show’s top comic and co-compère. Inspired by the long-running mock ‘feud’ on American radio between Jack Benny and Fred Allen – a good-natured battle of wits that had been amusing both stars’ audiences (and fuelling the imaginations of both sets of writers) since 1936 – the idea was for Howerd and Roy to cultivate a similar kind of sparring relationship.
(#litres_trial_promo) It worked rather well, not only providing each performer with some welcome additional publicity (plenty of name-checks on the air during those weeks when one or the other of them was off it, as well as the odd mention in the letter pages and the gossip columns), but also furnishing them with an invaluable extra ‘peg’ for new comic material.
The need to keep coming up with fresh material, Howerd soon realised, would prove to be a chronic problem now that he was working in radio. The first few weeks were relatively easy – a combination of tried-and-tested routines, smart prevarications and a sharp rush of adrenalin each Sunday night saw to that – but then, all of a sudden, it felt as if he had run into a brick wall. He had used, and then subtly reused, more than a decade’s worth – in fact, an entire life’s worth – of comic material, and still people wanted, and expected, more.
‘In Music Hall,’ he reflected ruefully, ‘you could use much the same script for the duration of the tour – it appeared new to each town played. But on radio the total audience heard it all at once, so I needed a fresh script for each broadcast.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Since (unlike the considerably better-off Derek Roy) he could not yet afford to hire a scriptwriter (or pay, as Roy also did, for regular transcriptions of scripts that had already been used by the stars of top radio shows in the States), he got by, for a while, by studying a pile of joke books, cannibalising their contents and then inserting enough stutters, hesitations and digressions to ensure that every single joke could be relied on to go a long, long way.
Ironically, this craftiness eventually served only to make the problem even worse. So warmly received were his early performances that the BBC decided to reward him with two additional solo spots in each one of his shows – thus stretching his limited resources still further and thinner than ever. He responded by begging and borrowing on what seemed like an ever-increasing scale: Max Bygraves soon became used to his friend’s anxious requests for ‘spare’ material, and never failed to respond with both promptness and generosity; Nosmo King was similarly obliging, even if much of what he offered dated back to shortly before the Great War; mother Edith and sister Betty jotted down dutifully every new joke, anecdote and one-liner they spotted in the papers or heard at the theatres; and Frankie himself spent long afternoons on his own at the movies, trying his best in the darkness to transcribe some of the best of the latest Hollywood bons mots.
The audience remained blissfully ignorant of his routine struggles behind the scenes. After all, they did not tune in each fortnight to listen to his jokes; they tuned in to listen to him.
The content might well have sounded commonplace, but it was the form that fascinated. Howerd’s wonderfully characterful routines, delivered with such an unusual and lively manner, were drawing in as many as twelve million listeners each show, and the critics had started hailing him as ‘the most unusual of all radio discoveries’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was clear that something special was happening. ‘I was considered to be very much the alternative comedian at that time,’ he would recall. ‘I was different to everybody else: my attitude was different.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In an era when radio was still Britain’s pre-eminent mass medium, he was well on the way to establishing himself as one of its most popular, distinctive and talked-about young stars.
Those around him with a vested interest were quick to take notice. Both Scruffy Dale and the Jack Payne Organisation, in particular, were keen to exploit their still rather ‘green’ client’s increasingly propitious situation. Dale began urging Howerd to invest (or rather to allow him to invest on Howerd’s behalf) in various stocks, shares and properties, and Jack Payne persuaded him to sign a dubious new ‘rolling’ contract (if things continued to go well, the star was fine, but if things started going downhill, the agency was free to drop him and walk away). Howerd did what he was told – he possessed at that time neither the head nor the disposition for serious business – and returned to his rehearsals.
He just wanted to be true to his ideals. He just wanted to keep sounding real. He had overcome so much to get where he was, and now he was desperate to ensure that he would stay there.
Preparation for the next show always began straight after the last. There were no boozy parties, no relaxing evenings out at restaurants, no lazy mornings in at home lapping up all of the positive reviews: there was just work. Plagued by doubts, the famously fastidious Howerd would spend hours walking up and down lonely country roads and wandering around local churchyards and cemeteries, mumbling to himself his lines and trying out all of his countless ‘ums’, ‘oohs’, ‘ahs’ and ‘oh nos’, in the manner of a text-book obsessive-compulsive. Each joke, monologue, sketch and supposedly throwaway remark was shaped and then repeatedly reshaped (often as many as seventy times) until every single element – the structure, the rhythm, the pace, the humour, the tone – sounded as good and as true as it could.
‘The great paradox of show-business,’ Howerd observed, ‘is that you have one of the most insecure professions in the world attracting the most insecure people. In my case I was a nervous wreck with tremendous determination.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The accuracy of this candid self-description was never more painfully evident than during these early days in radio. On tour, he said, when there was only one script for him to memorise, ‘I could be relatively relaxed once I’d got over the terror of opening night.’ On radio, however, where the script was always new, ‘every broadcast was an opening night’: ‘I worked so hard on my material, and was so bedevilled by nervous insecurity, that after every Variety Bandbox I’d go home with a dreadful migraine.’
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Howerd was hard on himself, but then he was hard on his colleagues, too. Having worked so diligently on every detail of his act, he expected others to display the same high levels of professionalism, discipline and commitment – and he could be startingly blunt and rude to anyone who (in his opinion) fell short of those exacting standards. Most of his angry outbursts soon blew over, and were followed more or less immediately by a completely sincere expression of remorse, but, none the less, not many of them were very easily forgotten. Working with Frankie Howerd was invariably a fairly tense affair.
What normally made all of the fussing and fretting undeniably worthwhile – both for him and for them – was the finished product. At his best, the production team appreciated, Frankie Howerd really was worth it, and most of the rows, they realised, only came about because he always wanted so badly to be at his best.
By March 1947, however, a degree of fatigue was creeping in. Drained by the strain of having to continue to combine his touring commitments as a member of For the Fun of It with his current radio duties as an employee of the BBC, he began to sound a little stale. While millions of listeners remained happily captivated by the vibrant originality of his style, a slightly more knowledgeable minority had started to hear, just beneath all of those surface ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’, the sound of someone scraping at the bottom of a barrel.
Howerd was running out of ideas. With no reliable supply of first-rate comedy material, he was gradually being forced into a number of bad habits: too many verbal tics, too few strong stories, too much waffle and far too many return visits to the well-trodden boop-boop-dittem-datten-wattem-choo territory of ‘Three Little Fishes’. The whole thing was getting to sound a little bit robotic.
It was not that he had stopped trying so hard. He was trying harder than ever. It was just that he now had less than ever with which to work.
He did what he could. The rehearsals grew longer, the rows louder and the recordings more manic, but the act still seemed to lack some of its old joyful brio.
Things came to a head at Easter. Howerd was performing in For the Fun of It at a theatre in Peterborough, and also preparing for his next trip up to London to record another edition of Variety Bandbox (which by this time was moving its broadcasting base back and forth between the Camberwell Palace, the Kilburn Empire and the People’s Palace in the Mile End Road). While he was resting in his dressing-room, an urgent message came from Jack Payne: the BBC, he was told, had recently conducted another one of its routine audience surveys, and the results contained bad news for Howerd. It seemed that, while Derek Roy’s popularity (rated out of 100) was still, somewhat improbably, hovering just above the 70 mark, Howerd’s had suddenly plummeted all the way down to the 30s.
(#litres_trial_promo) According to Payne’s unidentified contacts within the Corporation, the performer (and, more pertinently, his scripts) would have to improve, and soon, or else he risked being removed from the show for good.
‘The news would have shaken even the most hearty extrovert,’ recalled Howerd, who was patently anything but; ‘I nearly collapsed on the spot.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He had, deep down, been half-expecting the arrival of some sort of negative news like this, but nothing remotely as bad as this, and, now that it was here, he felt lost. Something had to change, he acknowledged, but the big question now was: what?

CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_4f967d1b-c526-584a-bcd9-1489ff7771ac)
The One-Man Situational Comedy (#ulink_4f967d1b-c526-584a-bcd9-1489ff7771ac)
In a way, desperation forced me into some small measure of originality.
If Frankie Howerd had merely been a fighter, he might well have fallen and remained floored on that bleak day at Easter. The bad news that he received could easily have felt like one blow too many. Fortunately, however, he was not merely a doughty fighter; he was also a deep thinker, and he responded, once again, with intelligence as well as grit.
After giving in, for a few hours, to an understandably powerful surge of self-pity – during which he walked aimlessly through the streets of Peterborough feeling dazed and ‘miserable beyond words’
(#litres_trial_promo) – he returned to his dressing-room, tried his best to clear his head, and then did what he always did when faced with such a problem: he thought. He thought about every tiny aspect of his act, every element of his technique, every decision he had either made or failed to make, and every gag, every expression, every gesture, every routine, every show, every review, every hope and every fear – everything. The search would not stop until he had found the true causes of all the flaws.
The decline in the quality of his material, he acknowledged, had been the obvious catalyst for the crisis, but he felt sure that there was more to it than that – even though, much to his frustration, he could still not quite make himself comprehend what, precisely, it was. Then, after agonising over his analysis for countless hours, the answer suddenly came to him: it was sound, not vision.
‘It was ridiculous,’ he later exclaimed, ‘that neither the BBC nor the Jack Payne Organisation had spotted it, and I was singularly stupid not to have been aware of it much earlier on’:
I’d been giving stage, not radio, performances. It was as simple as that. Listeners weren’t able to see my expressions and gestures, and were baffled when the live audience laughed for no apparent reason – bafflement giving way to annoyance at the frustration of not knowing what was going on.
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Having at last diagnosed the cause, he wasted no time in devising a cure. Instead of continuing to stand back and project his voice at the studio audience (as he had learnt to do on tour), he now resolved to step forward and address the microphone. The aim, he explained, was not to ignore the live audience (without whose laughter he knew he would always be lost), but rather to develop a different technique: ‘transferring from visual to vocal clowning’.
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As was so typical of him, Howerd laboured both tirelessly and obsessively to effect the necessary change. ‘I used to do voice exercises, like a singer would do,’ he recalled. ‘I used to go up: “A-B-C-D-E, A-B-C-D-E, A-B-C-D-E”. And then I used to go down: “A-B-C-D-E, A-B-C-D-E, A-B-C-D-E”. So I learned to use my throat muscles as I would my face muscles.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He ended up being able to switch in an instant from a dopey baritone to a goosed falsetto, and then slip straight into stage whisper.
There were also many hours spent studying the recognised masters of radio’s more relaxed and intimate style of delivery – such as America’s Jack Benny (who, through the use of his sublimely timed pauses, had taught listeners to pay attention to what he was thinking as well as saying) and Britain’s Tommy Handley (who had the ability to race through reams of dialogue without ever sounding remotely rushed) – as well as many long and self-absorbed sessions in the studio, going over and over his act while practising standing relatively still and close up to the microphone.
Howerd did not stop there. He also took careful note of the seductive power of the well-spoken catchphrase. Having lived through the era of such hugely popular shows as ITMA – which, through weekly repetition, had coined several distinctive personal signatures out of common words and phrases, including, ‘I don’t mind if I do’; ‘After you, Claude.’ ‘No, after you, Cecil’; ‘Can I do you now, sir?’; and ‘T.T.F.N – ta-ta for now!’
(#litres_trial_promo) – Howerd could see and hear for himself how beneficial the odd verbal ‘gimmick’ could be, and so he started to think up a few all of his own.
His playfully unconventional way of emphasising the opening phrase ‘Ladies and Gentle-men’ had already become something of a trademark, but he now took to mispronouncing on a grander scale, stretching some words close to their limits (e.g. ‘luuud-i-crous’) while stretching the ends of others so far that they would snap off and shoot away like a stray piece of knicker elastic (e.g. ‘I was a-maaaazed!’). He also cultivated quite a few catchphrases all of his own: ‘Not on your Nellie!’; ‘Make meself comfy’; ‘Oooh, no, missus!’; ‘Titter ye not’; ‘Nay, nay and thrice nay!’; ‘I was flabbergasted – never has my flabber been so gasted!’; ‘Shut your face!’; ‘And the best of British luck!’
There were also some changes made (of a more subtle nature) to the ways that he shaped the ‘saucier’ sorts of material. The whole process now became far more devious and conspiratorial.
It had to be, because the code of self-censorship within the BBC was fast becoming even more neurotically draconian in peacetime than it had been during the war. Thanks to the efforts of the Corporation’s Director of Variety at that time, Michael Standing, all of the BBC’s producers, writers and performers who were working in the field of ‘Light Entertainment’ now found themselves saddled with a short but extraordinarily censorious ‘policy guide’ known informally as ‘The Green Book’.
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According to this well-meaning but somewhat snooty little manual, ‘Music-hall, stage, and, to a lesser degree, screen standards, are not suitable to broadcasting’. The BBC, as a servant of the whole nation, was obliged to avoid causing any members of the nation any unnecessary offence: ‘Producers, artists and writers must recognise this fact and the strictest watch must be kept. There can be no compromise with doubtful material. It must be cut.’
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In order to ensure that all of its employees understood what this ‘doubtful material’ might be, the manual proceeded to spell it out in sobering detail. There must, it said, be no vulgarity, no ‘crudities, coarseness and innuendo’, which meant ‘an absolute ban on the following’: –
Jokes about –
Lavatories
Effeminacy in men
Immorality of any kind
Suggestive references to –
Honeymoon couples
Chambermaids
Fig leaves
Prostitution
Ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on
Animal habits, e.g. rabbits
Lodgers
Commercial travellers
Extreme care should be taken in dealing with references to or jokes about –
Pre-natal influences (e.g. ‘His mother was frightened
by a donkey’)
Marital infidelity
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As if that was not enough to completely obliterate the average red-nosed comedian’s act, there was more: no advertising; no American material or ‘Americanisms’; no derogatory remarks about any profession, class, race, region or religion; no jokes about such ‘embarrassing disabilities’ as bow-legs, cross-eyes or (a particular blow this for Howerd) stammering; and, last but by no means least, no expletives (which not only meant no ‘God’, ‘Hell’, ‘Bloody’, ‘Damn’ or ‘Ruddy’, but also not even the odd ‘Gorblimey’). Writers and performers were also urged to keep the jokes about alcohol and its effects to an absolute minimum.
Just in case these commandments had left any dubious comic spirits still standing inside the Corporation, the manual went on to strike one final blow for decency. All performers were warned that on no account must there be any attempt to impersonate Winston Churchill, Vera Lynn or Gracie Fields.
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The response of Frankie Howerd to these potentially suffocating restrictions was ingenious. He simply took whatever the censors had left and then proceeded to corrupt it.
Unlike most other comedians of the time, who remained prisoners of their patter (and whose patter consisted of most if not all of those topics that radio had now declared taboo), Howerd was not dependent on gags, and therefore found it much easier, during the course of his wireless ramblings, to slip in some of his own brand of sauciness just under the radar. Max Miller’s over-reliance on his so-called ‘Blue Book’ had already earned him a five-year ban from the BBC during an earlier, slightly more tolerant, era; now, in the age of ‘The Green Book’, the incorrigible directness of his material – (e.g. ‘I was walking along this narrow mountain pass – so narrow that nobody else could pass you – when I saw a beautiful blonde walking towards me. A beautiful blonde with not a stitch on – yes, not a stitch on, lady! Cor blimey, I didn’t know whether to toss meself off or block her passage!’) – ensured that radio would render him speechless. Frankie Howerd, on the other hand, was able to survive by implying that it was the listeners, and not him, who were the ones with the ditty minds.
What he did was to make the audience – via the use of a remarkably wide range of verbal idiosyncrasies in his delivery – hear the sort of meanings in certain innocent words that no English dictionary would ever confirm. ‘To say “I’m going to do you,”’ he later explained by way of an example, ‘was considered very naughty, yet I got away with the catchphrase: “There are those among us tonight whom I shall do-o-o-o”.’ Howerd would also respond more censoriously than the censors whenever one of his stooges, such as the show’s band leader Billy Ternent, made a supposedly ambiguous remark: ‘He’d say something like: “I’ve just been orchestrated,” and I’d reply: “Dirty old devil!”’
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It all added up to a real mastery of the medium. Howerd’s performances improved, and his popularity began, once again, to increase. The early crisis in his radio career was over.
As if to acknowledge this fact, the next BBC Year Book, in an article that hailed radio comedy’s coming of age, included Howerd in an elite group of young British performers who had now earned the right to be considered ‘true men of broadcasting’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The turnaround was also recognised by the producers of variety Bandbox, who responded to Howerd’s soaring appreciation figures by promptly adding to the amount of airtime they apportioned to his act.
Howerd himself, however, was in no mood to rest on his laurels. He knew that he still needed – and now more urgently than ever – to find a way to start improving the quality of his scripts.
By this stage, he had started buying a few scraps of comic material from a man named Dink Eldridge. Each week, a sheet of about twenty or so one-liners would arrive from Eldridge, and Howerd would study them, pick the one that sounded least like it had been transcribed from short-wave radio, and then proceed to stretch it out into a full-length routine. It was not an arrangement that could be allowed to continue. With more time to fill, and his first summer season coming up in Clacton, it was obvious that he needed to hire a proper, full-time comedy writer.
By now, he could just about afford it. For the Fun of It may recently have finished, but he was now earning a sum (£20 per show) from radio that for the time was a reasonable wage (equivalent to about £500 in 2004), and he was ready to invest some of it in his act. Finding an available writer blessed with both the right type and degree of ability, however, was another matter, and Howerd spent much of the rest of 1947 trying in vain to track him down.
Finally, at the end of November, shortly before he travelled up to the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield to star (as Simple Simon) in the pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk, he came up with a suitable candidate. Casting his mind back to his days touring Germany with The Waggoners shortly after the end of the war, he recalled seeing – and admiring – a young fellow-comedian who was appearing in Schleswig-Holstein at the time in another CSE revue entitled Strictly Off the Record.
The comedian’s name was Eric Sykes. Aged twenty-four, from Oldham in Lancashire, he was now struggling to make a living as a straight actor in repertory at Warminster. He was still, however, hopeful of one day resuming his comedy career (as a performer rather than a writer), and took great delight in tuning in his wireless each fortnight to catch the latest broadcast by one of his great contemporary heroes, a stand-up comic who, coincidentally, happened to be none other than Frankie Howerd.
After making a number of casual enquiries, Howerd found that he and Sykes had a mutual friend: the comedian Vic Gordon. When Gordon called Sykes to tell him how keen Howerd was for the two of them to meet up, Sykes could not have felt more thrilled: ‘It was as if,’ he recalled, ‘the King had contacted me for a game of skittles at Buckingham Palace.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He did not actually know what Howerd looked like – he only knew the sound of his extraordinary voice and the ‘sheer brilliance’ of his special brand of ‘happy nonsense’ – but Gordon provided him with a suitably vivid description and then advised him to arrange to visit the star as soon as possible.
A few days later, an excited Sykes travelled by train to Sheffield, and made his way to the Lyceum Theatre. There, in a dressing-room backstage, he set eyes on Frankie Howerd for the first time. He was more than slightly taken aback when Howerd started to explain how much he had admired the material Sykes had written during the war – because Sykes knew that he had not written any material during the war. The act that Howerd so warmly recalled had in fact been built from second-hand material culled from American shows on short-wave radio – just like Howerd’s had. When Sykes pointed this out, he was rather surprised – and very pleased and relieved – to find that his hero still seemed interested in finding a way to use him on the show: ‘He said, “Do you think that you could write for me?” Well, I’d never written anything for anyone in my life! So I said, “Well, er, no doubt: when do you want it?” And he said, “Eight days from now.” So I said, “All right, hang on a minute, have you got a bit of paper?” And then he went out to do the matinée performance of the pantomime, and by the time he came back at the end I’d written his first script.’
(#litres_trial_promo) A new partnership had begun.
It proved, almost immediately, a near-perfect union. Both men had always gravitated towards the kind of comedy that came from character rather than gags; both of them had lived through the absurdities of war and then come to terms with the uncertainties of peace; both of them had an affinity for the routine experiences of ordinary working people; and both of them seized on any chance to cock a snook at pretension and pomposity.

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