Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
1946, although any immediate exhilaration must have drained away when the dreariness of the life ahead of him sank in. In retrospect the influx of new comedians onto the British show-business scene after the war appears like a tidal wave, but the process was far more gradual. At the beginning the whole glorious parade of them – Hancock, Howerd, Wisdom, Secombe, Sellers, Milligan, Bentine, Cooper and many more – had yet to be prised from an indiscriminate blur of desperate hopefuls, from which the fittest – or funniest – would survive in an eerie parallel to the struggle from which they had just emerged. Gang Show veterans like Hancock were also at a disadvantage; not released from the service until after more established ENSA members, they consequently found themselves in an already overcrowded market for entertainers.
Tony recalled that he flew through the demob centre at Wembley ‘like a typhoon’, making a grab for his £60 gratuity and the first clothes he could put his hands on whether they fitted or not. Hancock admitted, ‘I thought the battle was over when they sent me out into the world in one of those stiff, hairy suits and hard pale blue trilbies that no one would have dared to wear in public except for the sheer joy of getting out of uniform. But it had only just begun.’ For two weeks he installed himself in a room at the British Lion Club in Ebury Street, before moving to the Union Jack Club for veterans just across the way from Waterloo Station. His room resembled a cell, but provided a paradise: ‘It meant that for the first time for four years you didn’t have to be with other people if you didn’t want to. It was luxury unimagined.’ The downside was provided by the regular visits from the police, ‘who came from time to time to see if there were any deserters’. Like customs officers, they must have cast the shadow of ersatz guilt upon him. The threat of the redcaps became a recurring comic motif in the radio version of Hancock’s Half Hour almost ten years later, as Hancock the poseur made spectacular claims to a derring-do war career he never had.
At Ebury Street he was reunited with his old chum, Graham Stark. Graham recalls that they survived on a diet of coffee and doughnuts – Hancock used to joke that he ended up with a hole in his stomach – and spent much of their time together in the Nuffield Centre, the club for service personnel then situated in Coventry Street, where it embraced the restructured remains of the bombed-out Café de Paris next door. They spent their time wondering when someone was going to offer one of them a ‘walk-on’ part at the very least. Stark remembers, ‘It was almost a relief when the weekends came, the agents’ offices were closed, and nobody could give us the brush-off.’ They whiled away the time with the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle, turning the solving of it into an exhibitionist ritual designed to command attention. As Graham wielded the pencil, Tony would extemporise: ‘Oh, here’s one, right – let’s think now – C – blank – T – four-legged animal – feline – it’s not easy, is it?’ Sitting there in their demob suits, they received free coffee and sandwiches and nobody asked any questions. Crosswords never lost their allure for Hancock, and his fascination with words – the magic of holding them up to the light and teasing out their innermost meaning – was brilliantly caught by Galton and Simpson in the bedsitter episode, as he stared into the mirror and pondered his teeth: ‘I wonder which one’s the bicuspid. It’s a funny word that, isn’t it? Bicuspid. Bicuspid. Bicuspid … yes, that’s probably from the Latin. Bi meaning two, one on each side. Cus, cus meaning to swear. Pid meaning pid. Greek probably, pid. Yes, Greek for teeth. So bicuspid – two swearing teeth.’
When Stark was offered a spell in repertory in Kidderminster, Hancock took the first step in the direction of some form of self-sufficiency by moving into a one-room flat with two beds at the end of a bombed terrace at Edith Road, Barons Court, with another Gang Show pal, John Beaver. Here they shared a washbasin with no running water and a bucket underneath to catch the water when you pulled out the plug. Hancock was always forgetting to empty the water, and this played havoc with the landlady’s ceiling underneath. Here also Hancock endured the freezing winter of 1947, keeping warm by clinging to the bed covers – ‘I just gave up looking for work and took to my bed’ – and subsisting on a distinctive brand of sausage: ‘It tasted like hell, but you ate it and if you had a couple of glasses of water each day for about three days following, you felt full.’ Beaver recalled a slightly more varied menu: ‘Tony was afraid of getting scurvy and insisted on a diet of green stuffs.’ They used to go shopping for Brussels sprouts, potatoes and the infamous sausage, but because his pride did not allow him to be seen carrying a shopping bag, Hancock insisted on using an old cardboard attaché case. In those days, when it was not easy to come by new kitchen utensils, they were restricted to a single knife, fork and spoon each, a frying pan and a saucepan. Everything was cooked over a gas ring. The spirit that pervaded the ménage is shown by a mock-diploma that some friends, the actor David Lodge among them, presented to Beaver: ‘Know by all men by these presents [sic] that this Golden Spoon, to be known hereafter as the “Culinary Trophy” was presented to Johnathon Beaver, Esq., of the Beaver-Hancock household as a token of esteem and regard of the Gastronomical Triumphs over the Sausage.’ Beaver was keen to emphasise that it was all in good fun, describing his roommate as ‘somebody who was always in a good mood, in a good temper – you could always get on with him – no big-time attitude about him – he would always give and take’.
As poverty competed with the rationing culture of the day, the exigencies of the kitchen were matched by those of the wardrobe. In addition to ‘the railings’, the name Hancock gave to his pinstripe grey demob suit, he admitted to two shirts and a change of underwear. Celluloid collars came in useful. Uncomfortable as hell, they could at least be washed clean under a running tap. The Fleet Street veteran Derek Jameson recalls meeting Tony by chance at the old Lyons Corner House in Leicester Square some time around this period. As the young journalist sat there with a cup of tea and his pile of newspapers, an easy target for anyone wanting a chat, he was approached by the aspirant young comedian: ‘He wanted a gander at my Daily Mirror. What he said made little impression on me at the time. What he wore stayed in my mind forever. It was his tie. A perfectly normal, rather dull neckpiece. Only he had no shirt under it. Just a crumpled sports jacket.’ The memory would have come as no surprise to Tony’s close friend, the comedian Dick Emery, who bumped into him in a similar state of half-dress in nearby Lisle Street soon after. Tony was carrying a parcel wrapped in newspaper. When Dick asked where he was going, he confessed that he was trying to find someone to lend him the money for his laundry, namely the shirt tied up with string under his arm!
When Beaver went into pantomime at the end of 1946, John Herod, another Gang Show chum who later became prominent in Australian show business as Johnny Ladd, moved in. Elsa Page was a mutual friend with an RAF background who remembers them as a typical ‘Odd Couple’: ‘They were not compatible as roommates. John was very precise with everything very clean, in its place, and well organised. Hank (as he was still affectionately known during these times) was untidy and left pans about, so John was cross and Hank would go home to Mum.’ Hancock could not have survived thus far without the support of his mother. When she came up to town, tea at the Regent Palace Hotel was de rigueur. Often Graham Stark saw her slide a ten bob note to her son under the table to save him the embarrassment of not being able to pay. The ritual was one that family friend Mary Hobley also observed. Tony always acknowledged the encouragement his mother gave at this time: ‘For years she had every right to tell me to turn it in, but she never did.’ In another interview he went further: ‘She thought that everything I did was great. It was only when I was settling down that she started to become critical. She was clearly very successful at hiding her doubts.’
According to Elsa, it was Herod who bullied Hancock into pursuing work. Each day he would take the tube from Barons Court to Charing Cross Road, where the variety agents had their offices en masse. Tony had a special mantra that helped him on his way. ‘You will call on every agent in London,’ he would recite to himself over and over as the train rattled on its way. When he emerged into the daylight his resolution disintegrated and, seduced by the smell of coffee beans roasting, he would allow himself to be drawn into the womb of the Express Dairy or a rival establishment for the newspapers, then lunch, followed by the decision-making process of what film to see that afternoon. One day hunger conquered fear and he forced himself up a dingy staircase into an agent’s office: ‘Heart thumping, eyes fixed and rather glazed, I burst in and announced, “I’m Anthony