Sir David Jason - A Life of Laughter. Stafford Hildred
‘There was no one better for getting you out of a mess than David. He had a mind like lightning for thinking things out whenever we went wrong. There was this scene when we were together in The Glass Menagerie. We had this dreadful old wind-up gramophone and at one point I had to wind it up and put the needle down to play a record.
‘But something went wrong and instead of lovely music we just got this horrible scratching sound. David came to the centre of the stage and just took control. He picked up the needle and made a remark that fitted in and cut out the need for the music and we carried on as though nothing had happened.
‘But it meant through David’s guidance we started in the middle of the scene and we went to the end and then back to the beginning. We were all terribly muddled but David was so brilliant that nobody even knew we had gone wrong. Apart, that is, from the prompter that night. She was so flustered at the end that she rushed on and said, “I’ve had four pingers in five fages. What’s happening?” She was in such a state she didn’t know where we were. David was never flustered. He just used to say, “Pick it up and keep carrying on.”
‘His brother Arthur was acting professionally by then and I always got the feeling with David that, although I knew he would love to become an actor, there was always this feeling of caution and reticence about him, especially at the beginning because, deep down, he did not really know whether he would be good enough. We all knew he would, but he didn’t.
‘He was so good and it all came so naturally to him. The technicalities of the stage never bothered him. Offstage he was just a very nice boy, always cracking jokes, always cheerful. But I think he was concerned about not having his share of serious roles. It was Brian Babb who first cast him in a leading, non-comedy role in Next Time I’ll Sing To You and, of course, he did it beautifully. People realised from then on that he could be a serious actor. The trouble was that all of the four or five leading ladies at that time were taller than David, so it was always difficult with us.’
David’s 21st birthday party was an occasion for the White family to really push the boat out. In order to cram in as many guests as possible on David’s big day, they took off all the downstairs doors to make more space. David prepared much of the sumptuous spread himself and the music of Johnny Tillotson, Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers rang out down Lodge Lane.
‘It was a wonderful party,’ remembers Julie Pressland. ‘We all thought it was great having an open-plan house.
‘I went to David’s house a lot at that time. Me and David and his partner Bob Bevil and my friend Carol Haddock used to go to our local dance hall, the Atheneum in Muswell Hill, or up to Alexandra Palace for a drink and then come back to David’s.
‘We’d sit in his front room and talk and talk for hours on end. He had such plans and ambitions for the future, he just loved everything about acting and drama, he was so very determined to be good at every part he had. We were a foursome for a time but David and I never had a romance. I did have a crush on David but that was when I was five or six. He was literally the boy next door, a great pal.
‘That was when I began to notice a more serious side. He was still great fun and often he would be larking about of course, just like before. But also he would sometimes recite long bits of poetry or quotations from Shakespeare. He was becoming very well read and getting more and more into his acting. It seemed to dominate his whole life. He loved Richard Burton and his recording of Under Milk Wood in that wonderful voice. David could copy that voice brilliantly and the Welsh in him really seemed to come out. We all knew then that he had an amazing, God-given talent.
‘David had all the typical motorbike leather gear, but when he went out in the evening in his suit and tie he always looked impeccable. He had this gorgeous thick wavy hair and that cheeky grin. But even more, he had this remarkable personality where he could walk into a pub and just make everyone laugh.
‘It seemed so effortless. He could instantly have people eating out of his hand. It was obvious to me that he was going to do much more with his life than mend fuses. He always made jokes about not being very tall. I remember once he couldn’t get served in our local, The Torrington at the end of Lodge Lane, so he stood on the bar rail and just held his money out for a giggle. He didn’t mind everyone laughing at him being small, he stood up there to make us all laugh.’
Not quite everyone was captivated by the David White charisma. When the Lodge Lane off licence, just one door away from the White household, was modernised, young David was in his early 20s and less than impressed by the sudden wind of change. He walked in to find that the old beer pumps had been swept away in a major refurbishment. The elegant, polished wood serving counters had been replaced by gleaming new plastic affairs. The old-fashioned off licence had been turned into a modern mini-market.
Julie and David called in for an inspection. Julie recalls, ‘I asked David what he thought of the new look and he took one look round and said, “I think it’s awful.”He hated it and the way that all the tradition of the place had been swept away and walked straight out. The man who had done all the revamping looked crestfallen and said to me, “He’s a bit of an upstart, isn’t he?”’
Julie herself got a shock the night David came home rather late from another hugely successful night with the Incognitos. She recalls, ‘I was 22 at the time and he gave me the fright of my life. I used to sleep in our front bedroom and I was woken up about three o’clock one morning by what I thought was the sound of someone trying to break into one of the houses. I looked out and it was David standing all forlorn with his toolbag. I opened the window as quietly as I could and he said that he was very late home from doing a play and his mum had locked him out.
‘I went downstairs and brought him through our house so he could climb over the fence and get in the back way. I was frightened because I was in my nightie and my mum and dad were asleep. I kept telling him to be quiet and he kept giggling and larking about. Then, when I got him outside he got on top of the fence and of all things he started reciting the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. I was really panicking by then because I knew if my mum came downstairs and found David there with me in my nightclothes she would never believe that I was just helping him to get home. I said, “For God’s sake, shut up. If my mum and dad hear you, we’ll both be dead.” But that was so typical of his humour, he always had a tremendous amount of fun in him.
‘We got on very well together and we were always amazed that our mothers also got on really well. Because while David’s mum was very broad Welsh my mum was just as broad Irish. They both had really strong accents and they used to have these incredible conversations. David used to say that the only reason they never rowed with each other was because they each did not have a clue what the other one was saying.
‘In our growing up years, everybody liked David. He was always very funny with a natural gentle humour that was never directed at anyone but himself. I know they say most people who are very funny are usually manic depressives, but David never was. You never saw him depressed or down. He just had a natural sunny good nature.
‘David was always very generous. He was one of the first of his contemporaries in Lodge Lane to get a car, a little Mini van that he and Bob used for their business. He was always ready to use it to help people out. When Ernie Pressland’s baby daughter Sarah was suddenly taken ill with a racing heart, David rushed her and Ernie’s wife Claire to hospital.
Ernie is still grateful. ‘Even in those days, they were homing in on potential cot deaths. My mother knew there was something wrong with Sarah because she had had two youngsters die herself. I was at work at the time and David took the wife and the baby up to The Whittington Hospital. They wanted to get her there as fast as possible and it was just as well David was around to help.
‘It turned out Sarah was born with two little pacemakers in her heart instead of one. Every so often, something will trigger off the second one and her heart would go ten to the dozen and she got a loss of blood pressure. She is fine now and has a young son of her own called Daniel. We will always be grateful to David.’
David was in action again with his makeshift ambulance when Ernie’s and Julie’s sister Maureen