Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
Hancock dismisses it – give way to the final explosion. The ticklish anticipation of the moment takes full possession of his face and provided television with some of its funniest close-ups.
More enduring, not least because it planted the seed of a comic attitude that would stay with Hancock for life, was the ‘Pick a card’ routine. George would play the magician to Tony’s hapless stooge coaxed out of the audience to participate, his gormlessness accentuated by flat cap, inseparable carrier bag and shabby umbrella. A catalogue of misunderstanding and ineptitude as the stooge fails to keep pace with the conjuror’s instructions, the skit culminated in the total disgruntlement of the put-upon prestidigitator, his self-esteem in shreds: ‘If you don’t look at it, how are you going to know what the card is? There’s not much point in me being here is there? … Five hundred people in the audience and I’ve got to pick you. Listen, mush. Take a card, for God’s sake … Isn’t it marvellous!’ Years later when asked by a guest in a Southampton dressing room where his character came from, Hancock had only to point to the man at his side: ‘Go on, George; tell them about the card trick sketch.’ Fairweather’s natural courtesy always conceded a modest ‘I can’t see it myself,’ but he knew perfectly well the part he had played in influencing the Hancock persona and in sharpening his friend’s understanding of comic timing.
In time Fairweather, with an eye on Hancock’s aspiration to become involved in services entertainment when he entered the forces, gave him carte blanche to access his regular act. His forte was impressions. In the days before tape recorders George used to spend every available moment in the cinema listening to the voices, watching the mannerisms of the stars of the moment. His repertoire included Maurice Chevalier, Jimmy Durante, the radio comedian Robb Wilton, Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh of the Bounty, the flat-profiled George Arliss as Disraeli. Tony had started to develop his own flair for impressions at Bradfield College. His friend Michael Turner recalled, ‘He was a great admirer of W.C. Fields and James Cagney and could give a very fair impersonation of both. He was also fascinated by Damon Runyon and the New York Brooklyn accent, remarking after one divinity class taken by the headmaster, “I like dis guy Whitworth wit da neon dome.”’ So far this enthusiasm had yet to find a place in Tony’s act. Whereas Fairweather was a straight impressionist, his advice to Hancock was to approach things from an original angle: ‘You have a flair for burlesque – do my act as an amateur would do it and burlesque it.’ Hancock must have thought this a good idea. He continued to do so in his stage act until the end of his life. Laughton’s Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame was always a tour de force: ‘You’re so beautiful and I’m so ugly. I’m deaf, you know. It’s the bells. It’s the bells. Sanctuary! Sanctuary!’ Then suddenly, dropping the histrionics, he would announce ‘Sanctuary much!’ and lurch off stage. The last bit was Hancock’s, the rest Fairweather’s, in spite of claims Tony made later in life that the impression had been inspired by Peter Sellers’s spine-tingling version of Jekyll and Hyde, with which he would terrify impressionable young WAAFs when they were in charge of the RAF Light Entertainment wardrobe department together at the end of the war. Most probably Sellers’s influence enhanced the grotesquery.
Whatever the vicissitudes that beset Tony’s early working life, he had so far enjoyed a not uncomfortable war. Although the lights had gone out over Bournemouth and the tourist industry was in recession, his mother and stepfather persisted with Durlston Court Hotel, ensuring their son a strong, albeit erratic, domestic base, until it was requisitioned and they set out on a round of pub and hotel management that took them, according to Roger Hancock, all over the country to no fewer than thirty-two different establishments during the hostilities. Both the industry and the illusory calm of their various lives were shattered at the beginning of September 1942 when the news came through that Colin William Hancock, Pilot Officer 132998, 269 Squadron, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, was ‘missing presumed dead’. Married in November 1939, he had joined the service on 22 April 1940; the following day he was recommended for training as ‘Wireless Operator/Air Gunner’. He was eventually stationed at the RAF airbase at Kaldadarnes, thirty miles south east of Reykjavik in Iceland. He went missing on 1 September 1942 somewhere over the North Atlantic. The squadron annals record the incident as follows: ‘Hudson of No. 269 Squadron sighted U-boat. Attacked when submerged. Some oil seen. At 18.53 hours strike aircraft Hudson M despatched (Pilot Officer Prescott, Sergeants Smith, Hancock and Harris) but failed to return.’ The following day three further Hudson aircraft searched for the missing plane. Again one of the three failed to return. On board was Eric Ravilious, the Official War Artist, today regarded as an artist and illustrator of considerable standing, who had arrived at the airfield only the day before. Today Colin’s name, one of over 20,000 Allied airmen with no known grave who were lost in the conflict during operations from bases in Britain and Europe, is commemorated on Panel 69 of the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede in Surrey. Records reveal that he had been awarded his commission as Pilot Officer as recently as 4 August 1942, information that does not appear to have been known within No. 269 Squadron at the time he went missing and which became known to his family only after his death.
In recent years Colin’s business skills in helping to run Durlston Court had reassured his parents that the venture would continue to succeed for another generation in his hands. According to Roger, that is why his mother refused to return at the war’s end, ‘selling the property for a terribly low price in the region of £26,000, when two years later she could well have achieved close to £100,000 for it’. The family was looking after the hostel in Staffordshire the day the news arrived. Even today Roger, disoriented by the thirteen-year gap between his elder brother and himself, wrestles with the poignancy of the moment and the absence of any great surge of personal grief: ‘I remember being in that corridor and she came down and told me. It didn’t mean anything to me. That was the terrible thing. It was somebody removed. But the awful thing is I didn’t even think for her. I remember saying, “You know there’s a letter in from him this morning.” I mean, how long had that taken to come? It was later that I realised what she’d gone through. She was absolutely torn apart, and that turned her into a spiritualist. And she got a lot of comfort from it, she really did. But unfortunately she started to believe it all too much, over-compensating. But you can totally understand why.’
In the years to come on tour Hancock would sit up into the early hours with his agent Stanley Dale, affectionately known as ‘Scruffy’, and beg him to recount his own wartime experiences as a navigator in bombing raids on Germany. Dale recalled, ‘He would get out my flying log and go through it with a fine-tooth comb, making me give all the gory details – how my companions were killed, how I got shot up, how I won the DFC. He worshipped that log book. One of his favourite subjects was war and how futile it was.’ It is impossible not to suppose that he was somehow projecting his brother’s memory onto Dale’s achievements. That memory worked in other ways too. In the late 1950s Cyril Fletcher approached Hancock with the request that he appear in one of the fund-raising concerts he and his wife, Betty Astell, organised for the ‘Guinea Pig’ Club formed by patients of Sir Archibald McIndoe, the pioneering plastic surgeon, who during and since the war had worked for the Royal Air Force on the treatment and rehabilitation of badly burned air crews. Jimmy Edwards, shot down at Arnhem, was arguably their most famous member. While major stars dropped everything to support the cause, Hancock could not be persuaded. Fletcher never forgave the younger comedian for his refusal, but maybe Hancock had personal reasons for not wishing to meet and perform before the badly scarred and disfigured victims in McIndoe’s care. Fletcher certainly had no idea of how close Hancock had come to the brutal reality of war. Even today some of Tony’s closest friends like Graham Stark, Damaris Hayman, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson react with surprise at the news of Colin’s very existence. However, at the end of his life in Australia Hancock did share his deep affection for his brother with Eddie Joffe, the producer of his last uncompleted television series. To Eddie he came over as ‘a tall, slim, charming and charismatic young man … Tony claimed that Colin’s spectre regularly appeared to him in dreams, swathed in seaweed.’ Our most painful memories are those compounded by our worst imaginings. There is no way Hancock could have said ‘Yes’ to Fletcher without seeing in the faces, the eyes and the minds of those damaged heroes the elemental horror his brother had failed to survive.
That last letter Colin addressed to