Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher

       Chapter Three

       ‘REMEMBER GIBRALTAR?’

      ‘It took me ten years to go on a stage without a hat on! It was some sort of protection. Like a clown’s mask.’

      The kaleidoscopic skill with which Galton and Simpson rang the changes on the life and times of their radio and television creation was reflected in the diversity of occupations the real-life Hancock held down – sometimes it seems for little longer than a broadcasting half hour – once he decided against continuing his academic career. Any hopes that he might have sauntered straight onto one of Bournemouth’s several stages had been felled in the summer of 1939 when he petitioned the local impresario and entertainer Willie Cave. Cave was not only responsible for the concert party that strutted its stuff on the Bournemouth sands. He had also been one of his father’s closest friends and, at Jack’s suggestion, had given their mutual pal George Fairweather his big break, when they managed to persuade him that he’d be better off on £4 a week than on the 37s. 6d. he was earning as a postman who had to be up by four in the morning to sort his mail. Throughout his childhood Tony had been captivated by the makeshift auditorium on the sands that precariously housed ‘Willie Cave’s Revels’. With a stage constructed from canvas and girders, it could seat a deck-chaired audience of 500: when a strong wind blew, the cast would brave the possibility of collapse and turn their skills from song and dance to tent maintenance. Cave, not prepared to be won over by the sentiment of past friendships, was straightforward with the eager teenager, telling him he was far too young and inexperienced to be treading his boards.

      His formal education over, Tony ventured into his first job as a tailor’s apprentice at the local branch of Hector Powe. Visions of upholding the sartorial elegance of the local gentry were soon dispelled. When he held out his hand for a tape measure, he found a kettle in its place. He lasted four hours: ‘The first chore they gave me when I arrived at nine was to sweep out the cupboards. At ten they set me brushing down the stairs. At ten thirty I had to brew the tea. And at eleven I handed in my notice.’ After a short while he progressed to the equally unlikely post of Temporary (Unestablished) Assistant Clerk, Grade 3, for the Board of Trade. Having purchased an umbrella to look the part, he found himself stamping clothes rationing forms in the incongruous setting of the newly requisitioned but still elegant Carlton Hotel. The work lasted two weeks, but only because he had to give two weeks’ notice. He may have said this jokingly, since at other times he seems to suggest the work continued into 1941. ‘Nothing worse outside a Siberian salt mine,’ was Hancock’s final judgement on this period of his life. But the experience did pay dividends of a kind. Before undertaking the role he had asked of its prospects, only to receive the reply: ‘Surely, Mr Hancock, it is not necessary for me to outline the prospects. This is the Civil Service.’ As he later admitted, anyone who caught his programmes would know that that voice haunted him for years to come. The whole experience left an indelible mark on his psyche, informing his portrayal of bureaucracy’s underdog with depth and precision. One can imagine John Le Mesurier as the resigned administrative officer: ‘Very well. I think you’ll fit our requirements. We can arrange for you to start in about a week.’ One can equally imagine Hancock’s measured pause before responding, ‘I won’t decide right at this moment, if you don’t mind … there are several other irons in the fire … I’ll drop you a line in a day or so.’ As Tony said, ‘Nothing like this had happened to the Civil Service since tea went on the ration.’

      The other irons were, of course, non-existent. For a while he expressed a flurry of interest in journalism, something that in subsequent years reared its head in many interviews, not least to win him the allegiance of yet another painstaking provincial reporter. Heartened by his proficiency in touch-typing and shorthand, he returned to the city of his birth to explore the possibility of a job on the Birmingham Evening Despatch. ‘I had two ambitions,’ explained Hancock. ‘One was to be a newspaperman. The other was to go on the stage. I saw myself first as the Despatch’s chief reporter and then, a fortnight later, as one of the leading lights of Fleet Street.’ The editor could not subscribe to this agenda, and Tony was politely asked to leave. The only other work to come his way not directly connected with show business was through the kindness of his father’s friend Peter Read, now running the Pembroke Bar and Silver Grill in Poole Hill, Bournemouth. He remembered Tony as ‘a quiet boy, but very observant … he always knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to be a comedian, and not only that, he wanted to be a star comedian.’ When Read explained to Lily that he could offer her son the post of potman, she sensed the title might not flatter his more elevated ideas for himself. Read was resourceful. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘we’ll call him something else.’ And so the new dogsbody was installed as the hotel’s ‘domestic manager’. In nostalgic interviews later in life Hancock would cling possessively to the title. Read’s recall of his new employee was vivid: ‘One day I remember giving him a job in the store room, putting empty port bottles back in their crates. I completely forgot about him until, about half an hour later, I heard some weird noise … eventually I found him hidden behind the crates and bottles reciting Shakespeare and completely overcome by the fumes … port can do that to you.’ Hancock claimed he was rehearsing, imagining the rows of crates and barrels to be ‘a wildly applauding audience’. It sounds like a scene from a Sydney Howard movie. On another occasion he was discovered insensible from using primitive siphoning methods to decant the port. He swallowed so much of the stuff he had to be poured helpless into a taxi, never to return. But he did survive for around six weeks and could later admit that for much of that time ‘at least I was happy’. The only other employment he undertook outside of show business came when his mother and stepfather were temporary wardens of a girl’s hostel at Swynnerton, near Stone in Staffordshire, later in the war. For about a month he was employed in an armaments factory as an ‘electrician’s improver’, a title Hancock looked back upon with disbelief: ‘It was great … they said, “Put on your spurs and get up the telegraph pole.” What? Not me, mate!’ ‘Electrician’s mate’ would have been a more apt designation for the task in hand.

      Throughout these diversions Hancock’s show-business ambitions did not lie dormant. One summer afternoon in 1940 in the restaurant at Beales, one of Bournemouth’s fashionable department stores, George Fairweather had just finished his regular teatime stint as a vocalist with the resident Blue Orpheans band, when he was approached by Tony’s mother. He had not seen her since the year of her first husband’s death, the resentment at her remarriage so soon after the demise placing a barrier between her and Jack’s innermost circle of friends. He never forgot her exact words: ‘I don’t want to hold a pistol to your head, but Jack, my husband, was very good to you when you first started, wasn’t he?’ George nodded and Lily continued, ‘I wonder if you would return the compliment, because young Tony’s got his father’s talents and is dying to get started, and since you’re running troop shows, could you do anything for him?’ George committed himself to his protégé’s future progress at that moment. He was by then in charge of the Bournemouth War Services Organisation, which put on two shows a week for the forces at the local Theatre Royal and toured the nearby army camps and ack-ack sites under the sobriquet of the ‘Black Dominoes’ concert party: ‘There was no money in it and everybody worked for nothing, so that is how he got his first break.’ George had last seen Tony when he was a boy, first