Now This is a Very True Story. Jimmy Jones
show, Max sat and chatted to me in his dressing room and he told me he’d run away from home at 14 to join the circus. My father came back round to collect me, Max poured him a drink and he thanked my father very much for looking after him while he was on the ship, ’cos Max had done a cruise. And then – I’ll always remember it – he turned and said, ‘Do you know what, Albert? The establishment hate me, but they have to work me because I put bums on seats.’ And it was true, wherever he went there was always a ‘House Full’ sign outside, and it was an encounter that I will always, always remember and cherish.
Father went back to sea shortly afterwards, and my other dad Charlie Cutbush continued to be a huge influence. Between the ages of 12 and 16 I went out singing. I’d get up early to go to Covent Garden, kip in the afternoon and then go out and sing in the evening. Often this would be at Broadstreet Working Men’s Club in Dagenham where in those days the compère, believe it or not, was the great London entertainer Max Bygraves. He used to have a wonderful Cockney song called ‘Chip-Chopper Charlie’ about a fish shop boss who fell into the batter and got served up instead of the fish.
I would also sing at Millhouse Social Club, also in Dagenham, and there were some villains in there I can assure you, some very big villains. The joke at the time was that if they liked you at the Millhouse they let you live. The club was bang opposite the big Ford plant in the days when Ford was in full swing. Do you know how many people worked there at this time? About half of them.
I started to go further afield, performing at places like the Civic Theatre in Poplar, and wherever there was a talent competition going on I would enter it.
I was very lucky in those days and won my share of contests; I used to sing and whistle. I did bird impressions; no, not like Lily Savage, proper birds. And I became known as ‘Albert Simmonds the Whistling Wonder’. Well that’s what someone in the audience called me, and it sounded like wonder.
That same year I won my first talent show under that billing. That was called Carroll Levis Discoveries, which was the X Factor of its day, only it was on the radio and you didn’t have to have a family member at death’s door before you could do it…
I went on tour with Carroll Levis at the age of 12. We played the Moss Empires music halls and I would do two songs a show. I used to sing ‘If I Were A Blackbird’ and whistle ‘In The Monastery Garden’. Not a safe thing to do for a young boy these days if the papers can be believed.
Charlie Cutbush was with me at the time and he was asked if I’d like to do a radio show advertising Star Razor Blades. This was on Radio Luxemburg, Star Razor Blades were the show’s sponsors, and I sang and whistled there. And I sang and whistled ‘The Whiffenpoof Song’, a Bing Crosby hit; people knew it then as ‘Three Little Lambs’: ‘We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way, baa, baa, baa…’
The show went out on the Friday night, and the next night when we got to the Finsbury Park Empire, Carroll Levis was not in the best of moods. He told me he’d heard me on the radio the day before and that he thought I was good, but then he turned and said ‘Why?’ I explained that Mr Cutbush was offered the opportunity for me to do the radio show and advised me to do it. Carroll Levis explained that the Luxemburg show’s host, Hughie Green, was his opposition. ‘I hate the man,’ he said, with real conviction. ‘And so after tonight you no longer will be on my show.’ And that was how I lost the Carroll Levis Discoveries tour. That I suppose was the consequence of not having a manager who knew about the entertainment business. Charlie was doing his best but he was a florist. He didn’t have any idea about showbiz rivalries and the etiquette of it all and, as a young boy of 12, neither did I.
Years later I also went in for Opportunity Knocks and won that, too.
That was while I was working at the Royal Standard in Walthamstow. I was 23 and I’d become a full time professional by this time, and I’d started to have some trouble with my throat because I was working too much. I was advised that drinking port and brandy would clear my throat for me but all it really meant was that I was getting as pissed as a rat every night. In the end, I went to my doctor and he told me I needed to have my tonsils out. So I had the op and was told to rest my voice, and couldn’t work for three whole weeks. Luckily the publican, Lil Wheatley, was very kind to me because by then I had five children and she kept me afloat. In the middle of this recuperation period I had a letter from Hughie Green to appear on Op Knocks. In those days I was still singing and whistling, and Hughie wanted me to perform ‘Edelweiss’ from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music, a big hit for Vince Hill at the time.
Lil Wheatley took me into London and bought me a beautiful blazer and matching pair of trousers for the show. She did me up from my shoes to my head, I really looked the business, and we went up on the train together to Didsbury in Manchester, but when we got there the producer said, ‘No, we don’t like the suit it looks horrible.’ I said ‘What do you mean it’s horrible? This is a lovely whistle.’
But the producer was most insistent that the suit didn’t go with the song. And so he got wardrobe to provide me with a rotten old carpenter’s woolly and I had to stand on a bridge that they’d built with all these white flowers dotted around.
When we got back to the Royal Standard that night, the place went mad. People loved seeing one of their own on TV and they were wishing me luck for the next week, but I already knew I wouldn’t win again because Hughie had told me there was a kid coming on from Wales who played the violin: Hughie said the Welsh would write letters backing him by the lorry-load.
The deal back then that the public didn’t know about was that if you won the show two weeks in a row you had to sign up to Hughie Green’s management company and give him 25 per cent of your earnings. I let it be known that I wouldn’t be up for that and so the second week I lost to that little kid from Wales who played the violin. He wasn’t the only one on the fiddle.
I WAS STILL a teenager when I found out firsthand about the fringe benefits of a life in showbusiness. At the age of 16, like most kids at the time, I bought myself a motorbike. It was the next door neighbour’s 125 Excelsior, and I bought it off him for £25 which I raised by working for good old Charlie Cutbush.
I’d passed my driving test by then. I still used to see Charlie but not as much as before, because I’d got myself a job on a building site as a plasterer’s labourer. I used to hang out at the Four Oaks, a bikers’ cafe on the A13. It was owned by a fella called Tommy Asquith, who used to have his own puppet show. He’d heard me singing one night in the Silver Lion Social Club which was at the back of the café and he invited me to do a show with him at the Guisborough Social Club in North Yorkshire – four nights, Thursday to Sunday, for eight quid. He said you can follow me up, do the show and I’ll pay for your digs as well, which sounded to me like a result.
When we got up there on the Thursday he introduced me to the club secretary whose house I was staying at, and told me he’d put me on not before the interval, but the act before that. I couldn’t figure out why he’d done it until that night. The act who followed me was a magician, I’ll never forget it. Right in the middle of his major trick with all the doves, the club chairman banged on the table and said, ‘T’pies have arrived,’ in an accent that could have been scrapped off the walls of ’kin’ Kinsley colliery. He was so Northern he made Colin Compton sound posh. Immediately the audience got up and left him right in the middle of the bloody trick; they didn’t give him a chance, they all wanted a pie. Even the doves were queuing up. And Tommy said, ‘Now you know why I put you in second on the bill in the first half.’ This kind of thing was par for the course in the Northern clubs. Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights could have been a documentary.
Tommy was the big act, and he used to close the show. That night, the club secretary took me home, gave me a bit of supper and