Now This is a Very True Story. Jimmy Jones
bankrupt three or four times, but he was a very generous man. He got Bernard Manning his first agent, but then no one’s perfect.
The show ran for about two months, maybe more, before the Lord Chancellor closed it. Because in the West End in those days, if you did anything even slightly naughty, if there was any bad language or risqué suggestions, then bang, the show would be closed. I remember the intense disappointment when I got there one Saturday night and the old boy on the stage door told me: ‘Not tonight, Albert.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘The Lord Chancellor was in at lunchtime, Mrs Shufflewick went over the top and they’ve closed the show.’
And that was it, Shuff had gone blue in the matinee and we all lost out. Some people in the cast said that was just an excuse and speculated that the real reason for closure was that Daniel Farson had run out of money. I don’t know if that was true, because we always played to packed houses, and besides, it didn’t make any difference to me because I didn’t really get paid anyway. But A Night At The Comedy ended for good that day. It would be a night with no comedy from now on.
I was never close to Jimmy Tarbuck but we were always friendly, and even now if I go into a theatre where he has appeared the night before he’ll leave me a little note, along the lines of, ‘Follow me around like this Jonesy and you’ll soon be a star’.
As for Mrs Shufflewick, the problem was Rex was a pisshead. When Shuff was on at the Hackney Empire the production manager locked her in the dressing room to keep her off the pop but she was still getting legless and no one could work out how. Shuff was actually bribing a stage hand to buy half a bottle of whisky and stand outside the dressing room door while she drunk through the keyhole with a couple of joined-up straws. Her act got bluer the more she had to drink, so it was easy to see how she could have gone OTT at the matinee. I loved the act, it was all filth. She’d say things like: ‘Do you like this fur, girls? It cost £200. I didn’t pay for it meself; I met 200 fellas with a pound each… This is very rare, this fur. This is known in the trade as “untouched pussy” – which as you know is unobtainable in the West End of London at the moment. And I don’t think there’s much knocking around here tonight.’
She had a story about a shoemaker who made a pair of boots for Queen Victoria and stuck a sign in the window that read ‘Cobblers To The Queen’. The Palace made him take it down, so he replaced it with another one: ‘Bollocks To The King.’
* * * *
I was 18 when I met my first wife in the most romantic of locations, the Four Oaks café. All the herberts and ton-up boys used to get in there, the air was full of exotic aromas: frying bacon, the smell of coffee and petrol fumes. Gracie Lock was a good-looking girl. She caught my eye and we hit it off immediately. I laughed her into bed and the next thing I knew Gracie was pregnant. It was my fault, I should have taken precautions; I should have given her a false name.
Being a boy of 18 years of age I wasn’t ready to settle down but my girlfriend was expecting and in those days it meant you got married. You were brought up to do the right thing. So I did. We tied the knot on 5 January 1957. And three months later, on St George’s Day, 23 April, she gave birth to my lovely son Paul.
Not an ideal start to married life, but I’m immensely proud of my family: four boys and two girls, who have given me 17 grandchildren aged between ten and 31, and nine great grandchildren – ten by the time this book is published.
I couldn’t keep a wife and my son afloat on the money I was making from my act, which was still singing, whistling and bird impressions, so I was working in the building trade as a plasterer until the guy I was working for very inconveniently went and died on me.
I got myself another job as a tiler’s labourer which entailed exactly the same kind of thing – knocking off muck and hard work. I learnt to lay tiles, just as I’d learnt to become a plasterer, by picking the job up as I went along and helping out whenever I could.
At the time, Grace and I were living separately, her with her mum and me with mine, and then she went to live with a friend over in Dagenham. But I must have been making plenty of journeys over to see her because pretty soon she became pregnant again, this time with Helen.
To sort out our living arrangements, I finally met a lady councillor, turned on the charm and persuaded her that the council should give us a house. It was a right dump because the people living in it before had let it go to rack and ruin, but the council said we could have it providing I agreed to clear it up. I jumped at the chance. And that our first home together, 34 Sunnings Lane, Upminster.
To show what a family man I was, I traded my motorbike in for one with a side car. We had some fun and games on that. One night in particular we’d been visiting our parents in Rainham and were driving home, with my son on the back of the bike with me and my wife in the side car with the baby. It was near Christmas and this Old Bill stopped us on a country lane and demanded to know if I had any chickens in the side car. I said, ‘You’re having a laugh aren’t you mate?’
Apparently a crowd of herberts had raided a local poultry farm and half-inched all the chickens. And this cop only made Grace and the baby get out of the side car so he could search it for chickens. The dozy bastard. We had plenty of stuffing back then, but no stolen chickens.
It was just as well I never volunteered to show him my prize cock.
A chicken walks up to a duck at the side of road. He says, ‘Whatever you do don’t cross, mate, you’ll never hear the ’kin’ end of it.’
A bloke visiting Dagenham docks sees a docker on the floor writhing in agony.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ he asks.
His union rep says, ‘He needs a shit.’
‘OK,’ says the stranger. ‘Why doesn’t he just go the toilet?’
‘What?’ says the union rep. ‘On his ’kin’ dinner break?’
MY FATHER WAS back on the scene by now working up at the Ford Motor Company’s Dagenham plant and so I got a job up there as an arc welder. But I was still only 19 and you weren’t supposed to work there until you were 21. After a few weeks a guy came up to me with a sob story saying that his wife had had a heart attack and he needed to do day work would I mind doing a spell of nights for him? I said I didn’t mind swapping for a while but after a month of it I’d had enough: working nights I couldn’t go out and sing and this bastard wouldn’t swap back. It was driving me nuts.
Well, Dagenham docks was just down at the bottom of my lane so I thought I’d pop down and see if they had any work going there. As I turned the corner I see a bloke standing at the bus stop and I offered him a lift. It turned out he was going to Samuel Williams, which was the lorry firm at Dagenham docks, so I said ‘Well jump on.’
After I dropped him off, I parked up the bike and asked at the gate if there were any jobs going. The fella told me to go and see the personnel officer, who just happened to be the bloke I’d given a lift to, and he said, ‘What are you after?’
It turned out the only job vacancy was in the oil farm, loading tankers and so forth. I knew nothing about it but I said I’d have a go. I gave in my notice at Ford and a week later I started at Samuel Williams.
The docks were good to me. The unions were strong and you could get up to all sorts. The boats used to arrive and you could buy bottles of gin for a pound and stuff like that, and of course being the enterprising guy that I was, I started a little trade in alcohol and everything else I could get my hands on.
Also in Dagenham docks they used to have what they called the coal fields, where they would