Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
entail:
Please tell him he is to do nothing until I come home. I’ll brain him if he does!! Because I know just what will happen. He will join some branch or other and then be sorry he did. Naturally I can help him no end and can advise what to try for. As for a full time job on the entertaining side, this is of course out of the question. I have not received his letter yet, so expect he will mention it. Anyhow please tell him not to do anything until I have seen him. I can’t write about it very well. I shall never finish.
There is no evidence that the brothers met again, nor any reason why no more letters appear to have come through after being sent at three-weekly intervals until then. Tony had to find his own way of dealing with the tragedy, and his immediate enlistment on 7 September 1942, within days of the announcement, provided bittersweet distraction. He also volunteered for air crew, but was failed on his eyesight. Tony liked to joke his way around the fact by claiming that his arms were too short to reach the controls. From the beginning he had a friend by his side, Slim Miller, another comedy hopeful who had been with him in Fairweather’s concert party. Their shared ambition eased the journey from Bournemouth Central Station. ‘By the time we reached Romsey, just beyond Southampton, we’d written half a show,’ Miller recalled later. For the moment, though, they ‘wanted to get a crack at the fun’. The earthbound reality proved otherwise. Initially they were posted to Locking, near Weston-super-Mare, for fourteen weeks’ basic training with the RAF Regiment, the body entrusted with the duty of defending air bases against ground attack. Hancock did not take kindly to the new disciplines. One night, as he burned the midnight oil writing letters home, he was disturbed by a caped figure that put its head round the door and bawled, ‘Put out those lights.’ ‘All right, cock – just a minute,’ replied Hancock engagingly, at which the NCO tore off his cape and angrily shoved three stripes under his nose. From that point on he saluted everybody. When the flight sergeant on parade told him to stick his chest out, he answered, ‘What chest?’ The officer, unaware of his earlier struggle with rickets, failed to appreciate the joke. When he was confronted with bayonet practice and the need to shout like a savage during the exercise, he protested, ‘I’m not doing this. It’s bloody barbaric.’ According to George Fairweather, he was put on a charge for that one.
Having persuaded the entertainments officer that he would be of greatest use to the unit by reprising his skills as an entertainer, he was let off the weekly route march to rehearse for the show that evening and given a signed chit to that effect. ‘By a happy coincidence,’ Tony recalled, ‘he forgot to date it, so while the others were struggling on their marches I would produce this thing and hop off to Bournemouth to collect props or make excuses about needing make-up.’ The marches were of an escalating nature, the ground covered being increased by a mile each week. By the time the regiment was up to fourteen miles Tony was told the shows had been cancelled: ‘So on went the kicking strap, the canister, the kitchen sink, the lot, and off I set … I really don’t remember the last few miles. It was agonising. My feet were practically aflame and I had to be helped in by a couple of mates.’ From that point Aircraftman Second Class (General Duty) Hancock was rumbled, marked down as an individualist and a rebel. One senses he revelled in the reputation.
Before long the RAF Regiment decided that both he and Miller were surplus to requirements and soon after Christmas reassigned them both to a Canadian unit that fortuitously happened to be stationed at Bournemouth, where their duties included guarding the offices and laboratories of a small photographic intelligence unit. He never forgot the first roll call:
‘Sikersky.’
‘Check, Lootenant.’
‘McLaren.’
‘Yeah, Red.’
‘Anderson.’
‘Here, Buster.’
‘Hancock.’
‘Present and correct, sir.’
‘So we’ve got a damn limey who’s trying to be funny, eh?’ spluttered the officer. It seems that only Hancock could get one step nearer to a court martial by calling an officer ‘sir’. ‘It was fatigues again,’ he admitted, although the opportunity the posting gave him to swan around his old haunts in uniform and to socialise with old buddies including Fairweather, now back in the resort and flourishing even more as an entertainer in professional shows at the Pavilion, was more than compensation. He and Miller were billeted at the swish Metropole Hotel. After less than two months they were redirected to a transit office in Blackpool, where they parted company. Hancock was given the opportunity to train as a wireless operator. He failed on four words a minute – ‘which takes some doing,’ he said – and was posted to Stranraer in Scotland. A week later a bomb fell on the Metropole.
At RAF Wig Bay, five miles north of Stranraer on the west shore of Loch Ryan, Hancock was assigned to the Marine Craft Section. His principal duties appear to have been the custody of a heap of coal and a boiler house. In a cunning echo of his earlier designation as a ‘domestic manager’ he made the decision to endow himself with the title of ‘fuel controller’ and hung a sign stencilled by himself to that effect on the door of his hut. He explained, ‘It gave my mother something to be proud of when I wrote home and told her my title. It also boosted my own morale and took some of the ache out of the job to read those words every time I trudged back to bed.’ In addition he was responsible for the lighting of fires in the Nissen huts, a process he soon had down to a fine, if dangerous, art. Not for Hancock the fuss and bother with wood and paper and getting the right draught. All he needed was a bit of rag, well soaked in paraffin. Having left the door of the hut well open behind him, he tossed this among the coal, followed quickly by a lighted match, and departed like lightning: ‘They used to go like a bomb. The only thing was the black stains on the ceilings. That seemed to bother them a bit.’ Throughout this time he must have looked like a refugee from a minstrel show, his face and hands begrimed with coal dust and soot. The image of Hancock slogging around with his wheelbarrow of coal is one of drudgery personified. In time he would stamp his own comic seal on such situations; for the moment one notes the gradual emergence of a sardonic sense of humour he would make his own.
He was characteristically disparaging about life on the desolate edge of the west Scottish coast. He dubbed Stranraer ‘the Paris of the North – you can’t see a sign of life after five o’clock in the afternoon’ and would joke of a typical Scottish evening out: ‘Chuck a caber about, have a quick dance over the swords, cut your feet to rhythms, and away you go.’ When he felt so disposed he would make amusement for himself by sending up his Commanding Officer without mercy. On one occasion he was attempting to resurface a path when the officer approached: ‘No, no, no. That’s not the way to do it at all.’ As Hancock tugged away at his cap in apology, he continued, ‘No. Look. This is how it should be done.’ Hancock explained that without so much as a by-your-leave he then took his shovel and started throwing stones and pebbles around like a man who had lived in a glass house all his life. When the officer triumphantly asked, ‘Now do you see what I mean, Hancock?’ the latter seized his opportunity: ‘Well I think so, sir, but I wonder whether you would mind just showing me that bit where you flick your wrist again.’ This was the cue for the jacket to come off, the tie to be loosened. The gravel flew like fury, but Hancock continued to act dumb: ‘I still don’t quite see it, sir. Sorry if I seem a bit dim.’ Inspired by those last few words the officer became even more possessed, but as Hancock later said, ‘I must say that to this day I have not seen a path better resurfaced than by that CO.’
Al Tunis, a Canadian radar technician based at RAF North Cairn, the nearby radar station, retained a vivid memory from those times. Shaving one morning in the washroom, he heard splashing and shuffling followed by the gush of a flushing toilet: ‘Through the mirror I could see the figure of an airman emerge, carrying a bucket, only to disappear into the next stall. He was clad in fatigues with a wedge cap on his head at a careless angle. When he came into view again I inspected a thin, stoop-shouldered figure, topped off by a sallow, sad face with heavy-lidded eyes. He grunted a greeting and carried on with his work.’ In time a friendship developed and out of a mutual enthusiasm for all things theatrical the idea of a concert party servicing the local camps emerged. In