Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
‘Tony literally climbed up the wall if he was hysterical, and we were hysterical a lot of the time.’ It extended into young adulthood when the brothers would send their impromptu parody of the popular panel game Twenty Questions spiralling into Rabelaisian heights – or depths. ‘What is mineral with an animal connection?’ ‘Could it be the spade up the dromedary’s arse?’ responded Tony with Isobel Barnett primness. According to his brother, he would become literally helpless with laughter at such sessions. A photograph survives from an earlier time showing Tony in the company of his mother, stepfather and two brothers. He is mugging self-assuredly at the camera without a care in the world.
In time he came to translate his conventional boyhood fantasies into his first comic material. As a very young boy he nursed an ambition to become the Wyatt Earp of a make-believe town he referred to as Toenail City. The upper precincts of the Railway Hotel rattled to the ricochet of toy-town gunfire. One Christmas he received the gift of a sheriff’s outfit from his parents. Later he complained about the pains in his legs. His mother admitted that only then did they discover that he had strained the muscles from walking around all day bow-legged. Roger recalls that with time he gave the fantasy the comic treatment in an early recitation entitled ‘The Sheriff of Toenail City’.
I’ve come here to give you a story
Of the rip-roaring wild woolly west,
Where the Indians chew nails and drink liquor
While the men grow sweet peas on their chest.
In the township of Toenail City
Lived the Sheriff, a man of good class,
But he drank like a fish did the Sheriff,
Till his breath burned a hole through the glass.
But the pride of his life was his moustache –
It was famous as Niagara Falls
And his missus when washing on Fridays
Used the moustache to hang out the smalls.
His moustache was so long and whippy
People spoke of it under their breath
And the old-timers said that the Sheriff once sneezed
And it practically flogged him to death.
But whenever the Sheriff was shaving,
You could see him all covered in gore.
His whiskers just blunted the razor,
So he hammered them back in his jaw.
’Twas with Hortense, the bartender’s daughter
That he finally found his romance
Till one day she sat down beside him
She got one of his spurs in the pants.
She walloped him hard in the pants,
Her temper was starting to foment,
But the Sheriff’s false teeth just flew out with a pop
And bit her on the spur of the moment.
Then Hortense turned round on the Sheriff
And kicked him real hard on the jaw
And hearing the cowboys applauding
Pulled the hair off his chest for encore.
But the Sheriff at last found his false teeth
And shoved them in reverse in his head,
So that when he attempted to talk to Hortense,
He chewed lumps off his back stud instead.
Then up rode Hortense’s fiancé,
It was all he could do to keep standing.
He was so thin his landlady had to take care,
Lest the cat got him out on the landing.
The gorgeous beast jumped from his mustang,
And said to the Sheriff, ‘Desist!
‘Unhand this poor innocent maiden,
‘Or I’ll come and slap you on the wrist.’
The Sheriff just drove him so deep in the ground,
His face turned quite yellow with terror.
He went so deep that coalminers lunching below
Chewed the soles of his gumboots in error.
’Twas a shame for Hortense’s fiancé,
He was only just out of his teens.
He was too full of holes to be buried,
So they used him to strain out the greens.
The first reality to confront him upon leaving Bradfield was far removed from the 1930s’ variety stage, although it had everything to do with the comedy he would make his own in later years. He soon became involved in life at the hotel and brought all his powers of observation to bear upon a different world: ‘It was the kind of place which attracted little old ladies. They used to set out for the dining room at 11.30 and get there just in time for the gong at one.’ The intake seemed to be dominated by ‘several dowagers who used to sweep in like galleons under full sail, with their frigates of female companions, bouncing along nervously in their wake. What those companions put up with for the sake of a winter at Bournemouth!’ Christmas provided an exceptional opportunity to observe the idiosyncrasies of the British at play. Lily poured her heart into making sure all had a good time, but not all went to plan. As her son remembered, they had to drop a game dubbed ‘Woolworth’s Tea’: ‘The idea was that everybody came to tea wearing something they had got from Woolworth’s which, in those days, meant it had cost not more than sixpence. Then your partner had to find out what it was. Fine, until somebody nominated a lady’s priceless family heirloom. End of Woolworth’s teas!’ The Christmas fancy head-dress party proved more popular: ‘There was the man who came as a Christmas pudding … he wore the plate round his neck and on his shoulders like a ruff and encased his head in a papier-mâché pudding complete with sprigs of holly on the top. And he refused to take it off. He sat throughout dinner feeding himself through a visorish trap door in the front. We tapped on the side between courses to make sure he was all right. It must have been very hot in there … pity, because he didn’t even win a prize.’ One of his jobs was to write out the daily menus: ‘The soup was the same every day – it sort of accumulated over the years. We used to do it geographically. I used to call it Potage Strasbourg, Potage Cherbourg. Then we got into the West Country and called it Potage Budleigh Salterton and Potage Shepton Mallet. It all tasted exactly the same and was repulsive.’
The hotel business gave him the opportunity of learning all he needed to know about petit-bourgeois gentility: how fierce, precarious and destructive it could be, while always open to comic interpretation. Nothing escaped Hancock as he turned