Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
down at the shore, against the backdrop of the beehive-shaped Ailsa Craig looming to the north, shouting his lines over the turbulent waves.’ He need not have worried. For all his nerves during the day, come the night all went well: ‘The spotlight was clearly intended for a slight, stooped young man with sad eyes who stepped on stage to assume the identity and the manner of the born comedian … he delivered a performance with the deadpan expression of a Keaton.’ The era of ‘The Confidential Comic’ was over. Encouraged by his reception, by the end of 1943 he had applied and been accepted for an ENSA audition. When he stepped onto the stage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, he could have been back at school playing the leading nobleman in The Gondoliers. His whole body quivering with nerves, he could barely utter ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ before the words froze in his mouth. Angry and depressed, he made the long train journey back to Scotland. There was little consolation to receive from ENSA a few days later a formal card that read: ‘Dear Sir/Madam, we have much pleasure in informing you that we liked your act at audition, and will let you know in due course if we require your services …’ So much, Hancock must have thought, for the personal touch.
While cross with himself on the one hand, he also knew that show business could provide the only escape from the icy hell of RAF Wig Bay in wintertime, where it was so cold the men literally slept in their uniforms. ‘Everyone shaved fully dressed,’ he remembered. ‘You stood in the ablutions at seven thirty in the morning singing “The Whiffenpoof Song” in the boots you had been wearing in bed.’ By January he was attending a second ENSA audition, having this time applied under the name of Fred Brown, ‘just so the officials wouldn’t be prejudiced’. He recalled, ‘When they saw me on the stage they said, “Haven’t we seen you somewhere before?” but I pretended not to hear and just went on with the audition. At least I tried to, but the same thing happened as before. A complete dry-up!’ However, the big break was not far away. Ralph Reader, who had successfully translated his pre-war Gang Show success with the Boy Scout Movement into entertainment for the RAF – initially as a ploy to cover his work as an intelligence officer – did show an interest, after Tony had won an amateur talent competition in Dundee. Later Reader reminisced, ‘I asked him if he had any comedy material and he rolled off about a dozen jokes. Apart from one, I hadn’t heard any of them before. They were not real jokes but mostly service situations. This was fine because we wanted people who could play in sketches.’ He was speedily assigned to the No. 9 Gang Show unit posted at Abingdon and in the summer of 1944 discovered himself aboard the Edinburgh Castle, a troopship converted from a Royal Mail steamer, bound for Algiers at the start of a twelve-month tour of duty that would travel throughout North Africa, Italy, Yugoslavia, Sicily, Malta, Crete, Greece, Gibraltar and the Azores.
His fellow Gang Show trouper John Beaver has shared his memories of being on tour with Tony at that time: ‘He was completely unable to look after himself. He had tropical shorts – known later as Bermuda shorts – and his came down to the ankle. We were in Athens on VE Day and I remember him going out that night and coming back with an “Out of Bounds” sign.’ One token concession to comfort for each Gang Show member was the regulation issue of a collapsible bed. Hancock never forgot his: ‘We used to call it the pterodactyl. The thing was it had got bent and lying on it was rather like being stretched out on a rack … your feet and head were on one level and the middle of you was about a foot higher, which can be very painful.’ Beaver remembered the time they spent on an empty rail cattle truck somewhere in central Italy. By now the ‘pterodactyl’ was in an even greater state of disrepair: ‘The back part supporting his head was tied together with a piece of string. As we trundled through the countryside the string broke, but I was next to him and he slept all through the night. All the time his head was going bump, bump, bump, but he didn’t wake up at all, except with a thick head in the morning!’ Years later Galton and Simpson portrayed a restless Hancock attempting to get some sleep on a train journey. He nods off with his head against the window, but the jolting of the train causes him to keep banging against it. Eventually he rubs his head and gives up the effort. Perhaps he recalled the earlier journey.
Ralph Reader was a slick and appealing performer of rise-and-shine ebullience with a background in musical theatre both on Broadway – where he had worked with Al Jolson – and in the West End. A prolific producer and choreographer, he continued to be active at all levels of the entertainment business long after scouting took his career in an additional direction. Thanks to George Fairweather, Hancock was already familiar with the standards he set. Although the shows played exclusively to service personnel, dubious material was verboten and woe betide anyone who caused the pace and spirit of the show to flag. As Graham Stark remembered, no one was ever allowed to take a bow: ‘You finished and got off – the standard of entertainment in the services was pretty low and we were dynamite.’ Every single performance on every single battle front opened and closed with the song of Reader’s own composition that remains his abiding trademark, ‘Riding Along on the Crest of a Wave’, the accompanying hand movements to which were as obligatory as the words. Hancock could not possibly have relished the waving-pointing-wriggling-clapping ritual, but Reader only remembered the obliging professional. ‘In those days he didn’t worry. He was a joy to be with and was one of the favourites of the unit. He used to take everything in his stride … sometimes when we called very early rehearsals [and] had to work three shows a day and probably travel forty miles afterwards in an open lorry, he was one of the gay sparks of the crowd … I was very fond of Tony and I watched his career. When one gets successful obviously one is going to be crowded and I don’t think Tony ever liked crowds. What he did like was friends.’
When he began to compile notes for a possible autobiography, Hancock was anxious to pay his tribute to Reader and those days. His words reveal that they somehow understood each other:
We were an extraordinarily mixed bunch – an impossible assortment, you would have thought, of professionals and ‘boy scouts’. Yet somehow Reader’s organising flair managed to weld us together into a smooth running team. He used to infuriate me by telling me what to do when I didn’t want to be told, but I had to admire his gift for controlling crowds. I have seen him walk in that breezy, boyish way of his into a draughty great hangar, take command of about seven hundred bored, belligerent fellows and in no time have them working like one man. I often thought then and still think now what a wonderful film director he would make, if he would only apply to directing individuals his skill for directing masses. Brilliantly though he did it, I always felt that he underestimated his ability and had no idea of his own talent for close individual direction.
Throughout his lifetime few friends were closer to Hancock than Graham Stark. When No. 9 unit was amalgamated with No. 4, Stark’s old outfit, in July 1945 Graham was despatched to Abingdon to supervise. Hancock immediately impressed him: ‘this strange little shuffling airman with extraordinary feet and bizarre sort of hair stuck apparently at random on the top of his head – a bit portly – but Christ, he was funny!’ Graham recalls that when it was time for him to allocate the sketches, Robert Moreton, ‘a very nice man, but a bit waspish,’ looked at him in a sort of twisted way and asked, ‘Have you two met before?’ ‘I’ve never set eyes on him,’ said Stark. ‘Then why is he getting all the material?’ Even today Graham takes great delight in reliving the moment: ‘I always remember I leaned forward quite calmly and simply said, “Because he’s funny.” Tony always reminded me of that down the years.’ There was another moment that ricocheted back from the past when they were high-flying on radio together in the early 1950s. As the Garrick Theatre resounded with laughter during a recording of Star Bill, all Tony had to whisper to his friend was, ‘Remember Gibraltar?’
The highlight of the European tour for the new amalgamated unit under Stark’s control was the performance presented in a 2,000-seat theatre converted from a cave in the colony. All the services were represented in the audience as Hancock and Stark performed a sketch in which they played two old officers looking back over their lives, with so many medals between them they trailed all the way down their backs. The routine must have been reminiscent of the act Morris and Cowley did as two Chelsea Pensioners on the music halls for many years. On the night in question the laughter was such as they had never heard before. ‘This wall of noise came and was so phenomenal,’ says Stark, ‘we got the scent of victory half way through that sketch and we looked at each