Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography. John Fisher
act was through. Tucked away in a corner of the room as he was, he felt he needn’t have bothered. It was a Tory function and he always claimed that at that point he became a committed socialist. The summer of 1950 saw him spend three months at Clacton as principal comedian for impresario Richard Stone – later to mastermind the career of Benny Hill – in the Ocean Revue, initially at the Jolly Roger Theatre on the Pier, and then at the Ocean Theatre at the pier entrance. He neither forgot nor forgave the fierce competition he encountered from the scenic railway known as ‘Steel Stella’: ‘It always seemed as though she reserved her loudest clang and her passengers’ loudest screams for the moment I came to the end of a joke. Every performance it was always a running fight between her, them and me.’ He then added, ‘While I was playing at Clacton I got married.’
He had supposedly been engaged before. While he was appearing in Cinderella at Brighton for the 1948 Christmas season, the local press carried a news story heralding the forthcoming marriage between the Ugly Sister and Prince Charming, played by the actress Joan Allum. The article announced that they had met at rehearsals only a fortnight before and had become engaged on Christmas Eve. It went on to give a boost for Tony’s début on Variety Bandbox the following Sunday, and added bizarrely that at midnight, during the New Year’s Eve Ball attended by the Duke of Edinburgh at Earl’s Court, Allum had been chosen as ‘Miss 1949’. It would be flippant to dismiss the whirlwind fairytale romance as a publicist’s ploy, since the pantomime had only days to run. But although the wedding was mooted for March, Miss Allum does not appear to have featured again in Hancock’s life. There had been an earlier pantomime romance with another actress, Celia Helder, in Oxford the previous year. She had played the unexplained part of Lady Llanfachlfechlfychl. On Hancock’s death she looked back on their liaison: ‘Tony had great, big haunted eyes, but he was as slender as a reed and an extremely attractive person. He was very sweet and gentle, the kind of boy of whom any girl would say, “He’s a dependable chap.”’
He had been introduced to Cicely Romanis by Larry Stephens, whose girlfriend, Diana Forster, worked with her as a model. The occasion was a skating party held by Cicely to celebrate her twentieth birthday at the Bayswater ice rink on 3 April 1950. According to Phyllis Rounce, on the day after the party he wandered into her office and announced, ‘I’ve just met the woman I want to marry.’ The Hancock–Stephens ménage had relocated to Covent Garden by now. Forster had become inured to the shabby, Spartan conditions in which they lived just around the corner from the noisy fruit and vegetable market, a fact that may have eased the way for Cicely’s own acceptance. It was long before My Fair Lady would romanticise the environment; Pygmalion never quite had. For a long period of their courtship his fiancée found herself commuting between Clacton, where Tony had moved out of digs and into a one-bedroom flat to set up home with her, and wherever the fashion world demanded her presence. In the more strait-laced moral climate of the day, the arrangement would have caused some consternation with her parents.
Cicely was born Cicely Janet Elizabeth to William Hugh Cowie and Dorothy Romanis at home at 120 Harley Street on 3 April 1930. Her father was a senior surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital, who in the late 1920s had written with Philip H. Mitchener The Science and Practice of Surgery, a book that remains one of the definitive handbooks on surgical procedure. With her Dinah Sheridan looks, she was already successful in her profession as a mannequin, being one of the first British models to tread the catwalk for Lanvin in Paris. She had stunning auburn hair and a zest for life to match. With an athletic background and nothing if not strong-willed, by the time she met Hancock she had taken a course in judo to protect herself from unwelcome suitors, an occupational hazard of her profession, and revealed an aptitude for motoring at the wheel of a sports car of which her future husband would become envious. Both activities would affect their life together in what – in those early, innocent days – were unexpected ways. They presented an incongruous couple, the elegant fashion plate and the slumped shaggy figure of a man enveloped in the duffel coat he wore for all seasons. His secretary Lyn Took, however, takes pains to insist that she was never ostentatious: ‘She always looked groomed, always wore lipstick, and had a penchant for straight, close-fitting trousers and simple tops when they were the fashion.’ It is said that Fred gave Ginger class, while Ginger gave Fred sex appeal. Cicely had the class already. Whatever frisson connected Tony and Cicely, the attraction between them was not diminished by the fact that she laughed at most of what he said.
They were married at Christ Church, Kensington, on 18 September 1950. Hancock had fun recalling the honeymoon: ‘I had to dash to Clacton for the show. She had a fashion parade. She arrived at Clacton at 6.45. I was onstage at seven. And she had to leave at six the next morning for another engagement.’ It scarcely needs adding that he only just made the church in time and had to rely on his best man for sartorial help: ‘In my rush to catch the train to London I just dived into the wardrobe and snatched together what I mistook for a complete suit. It turned out in the unpacking to be the jacket of one striped suit and the trousers of another. So there I was gaping at myself in the mirror in a ridiculous ensemble of blue above the waist and grey below. Larry lent me a pair of trousers to match the jacket. I felt it would be churlish to complain about the cigarette burn just below the knee and so I covered it up as best I could!’ It appears that at the last moment the Clacton season had been extended by a week, a situation that would explain the raggedness of the arrangements. Cicely’s elder sister, Doreen Harland, recalls the unpredictability that surrounded the occasion, notably the moment ahead of the service when the best man dropped the gold wedding ring down a grating in the church floor. Expediency demanded that he borrow Doreen’s platinum ring ‘temporarily’. No one was more surprised than Cicely when later her betrothed put the differently coloured ring on her finger. It would be six months before Tony brought her another and Doreen had her ring returned. The original was never recovered from the grating.
Two days later the Hancocks were both back in London to officiate as witnesses at Stephens’s marriage to Diana. For a few months they kept on the Clacton flat, an arrangement of greater inconvenience to the bride than the groom, with her frenetic modelling schedule and the metropolitan life style that accompanied it. However, it is significant that while Hancock gave his own profession as ‘actor’ on the marriage certificate, Cicely left that space blank. After the first of his Nottingham pantomimes, heartened by her faith in him – she admitted later, ‘I knew he was going to be a big star’ – she essentially gave up her career to look after her husband. In time, they moved in with Cicely’s parents, now relocated to Cornwall Gardens, Kensington, before acquiring their own apartment at 20 Queen’s Gate Place in Knightsbridge during the summer of 1952. It happened to be on the fifth floor of a Victorian mansion block without a lift. ‘We knew who our friends were in those days,’ Hancock would joke. ‘They had to be friends to climb up all those stairs.’ The climb kept Cicely’s figure in even finer trim, while Hancock was often known to be breathless upon arrival at his own front door.
Meanwhile any pretence at domestic routine would be disrupted by the growing demand for Tony’s services in provincial variety. In February and March 1950 he achieved four weeks at mainly minor syndicate halls; by October he was booked into a four-week run of the mighty Moss Empires. With his increasing radio popularity, 1951 saw fourteen weeks of varied work on the halls between pantomime and the end of the year. Initially he was billed in succession as ‘The Modern Clown’, ‘The New-Style Humorist’, and then with a semi-catchphrase that had been surfacing in his radio work, ‘Isn’t it sickening?’ For Phyllis Rounce a kind of breakthrough came when he was invited to support Nat King Cole for a couple of dates – Birmingham and Liverpool – on his 1950 British tour. Even today Graham Stark relives the excitement: ‘There he was at one of the lowly London halls – first house on the Thursday night – dying like a dog – he always tried to do a clever act, but nothing …! The next day he received the call from his agent to tell him he was going out with Nat King Cole, which was like saying you’d won a million pounds. Cole was a great star and whoever went out with him got to play only the best dates. Tony couldn’t believe it. He said, “What happened?” “Well,” explained Phyl, “Val Parnell – the Moss Empires chief – happened to be in on Thursday first house and saw your work.” But Tony said, “I died the death.” “Ah,” she said, “he realised that and the audience were terrible, but he said to me, ‘I’ve