Ginger Geezer: The Life of Vivian Stanshall

Art was another burgeoning talent in Anthony, one for which he had a much stronger instinct. One reason the family made their move from London to Southend was to enable Anthony to attend the local art school. He was always keen on art: at the age of two he was ‘mixing boxes of paint trying to make blue sky’, says his mother. ‘He could draw anything you asked him, even when he was little. He’d drag me into art shops and I’d buy him artists’ materials.’ Eileen encouraged her son’s self-expression through his interests while agreeing with her husband on matters of family discipline. ‘Anthony was well brought up and did as he was told. He had to. My mother brought us up rather strictly and if she said, “Go out and get me something” you went. There were no arguments. Nowadays you see kids of seven arguing with their parents. My mother wouldn’t put up with that.’ Eileen ensured the boys were brought up as Catholics, just as she had been. Between primary school and Southend High School, Anthony attended convent school, ‘being taught a lot of perverted, one-sided rubbish by nuns who were otherwise quite OK, and I got by as the clever boy who built match-book galleons they could display on open days’.12

In church, Anthony could barely contain himself at Communion as the other church-goers, eyes closed and tongues hanging out, waited to receive the Host. The bishop, a firebrand Irishman, caught him giggling and sent him back to his pew with a slap round the face. He lost interest once Mass was translated into English. ‘I didn’t understand it any more. Really, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘It had no cadences, there was no longer any chime in me. It had been demystified to a point where it had been made base and ordinary – and, certainly, spiritual life is not ordinary.’

His mother, with ‘quite a deal of perspicacity’, thought he should have been a priest. Later he said himself that artists and priests were similar, ‘because – this is going to sound awfully pompous and silly – you are communicating to share a spiritual enjoyment of life…I mean priests in an ideal sense, what I understand is a shamanic priest, a guru, a spiritual leader, not necessarily someone who dishes out three Hail Marys and ten how’s-your-fathers.’13 His son Rupert says that he even flirted with the idea of converting to Judaism. Faith was always important to him, despite his reputation for irreverence. ‘He had a picture of Christ on the wall,’ says Rupert. ‘It was conditioning from when he was a kid. Somewhere in him there was some respect for religion, without question.’

Anthony passed the 11-plus examination and attended Southend High School. He became friends with a boy named Pete Wiltshire, who impressed him through knowing how long it took to dissolve mice in nitric, hydrochloric and sulphuric acids: ‘Of course, I warmed to him.’ Pete also met with Eileen’s approval. Like her son, Pete was tall and both boys felt uncomfortable with the old-fashioned short trousers. The school strictly enforced a uniform of grey trousers, black shoes, white shirt, a house tie and green blazer. Pete’s dislike of the uniform was shared by Anthony, who came in one morning wearing black-and-white check trousers, black-and-white shoes, a white coat and a bow tie. He was sent home. The school did not have him down as a real troublemaker; he was simply an intelligent, rather cherubic boy who did not fit in, and there was no room for individualism in the classroom.

‘Even when I was at school I never looked normal,’ he recalled. ‘To avoid being beaten up I would have to devise gags and strokes and pranks, or behave in an outlandish manner, in order to be taken under the aegis of bullies. Perhaps I was therefore purchasing by my behaviour self-protection, so I suppose after a while that becomes natural.’14 There was not the flexibility in teaching to cope with him. As one of his teachers said, ‘We didn’t have many eccentrics at school. The system wouldn’t allow it.’15 The boy thought of the system as constraining, reductive and empty. It produced ‘Normals’, he later explained to Melody Maker. ‘Normals are all about you. They leave signs on the streets that give you clues. They are just people entirely formed by their environment. They are not necessarily middle-aged, middle-classed people. It’s the clothes they choose to wear and the way they choose to speak. They imagine they are ordinary, yet they are really dreadful freaks – terrifying. They are people bound by convention, “Normal” is a paradoxical term.’

The poor relationship with the school brought out the prankster in Anthony. ‘He was always in trouble,’ says Mark. ‘He was the one who always had a mouse in his pocket or organized some form of anarchy.’ Eileen went to the school in the end and convinced them to let him go to the art college instead. Anthony remembers he was just about to be expelled when she intervened. The constraints of the education system were too much for the inventive youngster. It left him with a ‘hatred of the system which did its best to put me off Shakespeare and any poetry, painting…stuffed down my throat things that were obviously unsuitable and made things that were exciting to me unpalatable by making reverent, dead things out of them’.16 Vic Stanshall went along with his wife’s plans for Anthony to attend the art college. For all his insistence on speaking properly and behaving well, he did not have that much influence. ‘Oh, Vic did as I’d tell him,’ laughs Eileen. ‘He wasn’t daft, though. If he thought something wasn’t right, he wouldn’t have done it. I knew as soon as Anthony was born that he was going to be different. I didn’t want him to have a job he wouldn’t like or enjoy. If he didn’t get his own way, people would dislike him, because I knew he’d play them up.’

Both Stanshall boys indulged a lifelong passion for accumulating rubbish and junk from sales. ‘I collected glass and bits of silver and pictures,’ says Mark. ‘We were always bringing stuff back home.’ By the age of fourteen, Anthony was amassing a collection of 78 r.p.m. records. He had bought a gramophone with the old-fashioned horn amplifier for 17s/6d on which he played a selection of numbers which formed the basis for the Bonzos’ act. ‘I remember he bought a record by the Alberts called “Sleepy Valley”, which was played on the Phono-fiddle,’ recalls Mark. Bonzo member Neil Innes also nurtured an affection for this ghastly instrument: ‘The solitary string was raised by something that resembled a violin bridge and only vigorous pressure from a violin bow could entice sounds that ranged from a low, thin, melancholic wail to an utterly unattractive high-pitched shriek.’17 Needless to say, young Anthony loved it.

During the school holidays, Anthony was a part-time bingo caller in Southend, where he learned all the patter. The focus for carefree childhood memories was the beloved Kursaal funhouse. It had, he later said, an ‘antique fin de siècle charm about it, with a grey-and-pig’s-kidney-coloured colonnade. Then there’s quite a lofty dome atop that, with a kind of mosque-ish top. A pleasure dome.’18 He started his fairground career collecting pennies from the slot machines. Inside the building he worked on the dodgems and eventually got to guard the celebrated water chute. It was an absorbing, year-round occupation. Out of season, Stanshall helped to maintain the attractions, painting the carousel horses and the ghost train.

Southend-on-Sea was an adventure playground outside work and school hours. It was where a youngster could roam the streets as a teddy boy. In the mid-1950s, British boys and girls thrilled to the new sounds from the States, together with the paraphernalia of being a teenager: B-movies, horror comics, pop records and trendy fashions. Where once they had jived to Ted Heath and his Orchestra, they now learned to rock’n’roll to Bill Haley and the Comets, Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent and Little Richard. Aged just eleven when rock’n’roll first broke, Anthony was too young to be in with the gangs. He bought his first pop records instead: ‘Rock with the Caveman’ by Tommy Steele and ‘Giannina Mia’ by Gracie Fields.

English kids adopted the clothes, slang and violent habits of teddy boys, taking their name from the Edwardian styles that became fashionable at the start of the decade: drape jackets with velvet collars and thick-soled shoes nick-named brothel creepers. On the back cover of Stanshall’s 1981 album Teddy Boys Don’t Knit, there is a black-and-white snapshot of him as a youngster, sitting sprawled with his mates on a bench in the street. They loaf in the maliciously indolent way that only teenage boys can, under a Southend police noticeboard. A ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ poster depicts a huge finger pointing directly at Stanshall’s head. Clad in blue suede shoes and drainpipe jeans and sporting a Tony Curtis hairstyle, he sits and grins, sporting the kind of expression that members of the officer class might have interpreted as dumb insolence.

Being a ted ‘meant wearing second-hand clothes with collarless shirts and corduroy suits’, remembers Mark Stanshall. ‘Vivian always took it to the max and wore a complete frock coat and top hat. He always loved to be looked at and liked to be the centre of attention.’ Twenty of them on motorbikes would tear around, waking up the neighbourhood. ‘My father, being ultra-conservative, couldn’t cope with a son who was always wandering about looking like a Victorian doctor with all these musical instruments piling up.’

The teds were the toughest of all working-class lads, notorious for gang fights with bicycle chains, particularly at such south London flashpoints as the Elephant and Castle. The craze spread all over the country and was established in Southend just as a teenaged Stanshall headed for the streets in search of freedom. There he found a gang culture that appealed to a growing love of ritual, folklore and strange languages. There would be battles on the pier that was supposedly the preserve of pleasure-seeking families, between the Leigh gang, the Benfleet boys and the Southend mob. By the time he was sixteen, Anthony ran with the local Leigh boys. Inconveniently for his street cred, Eileen had taught him to crochet as a young child. This was anathema to his fellow-gang members, as he attested in the aforementioned album title, Teddy Boys Don’t Knit. His posh accent surfaced occasionally, but this meant he was tolerated as an ‘amusing mascot’ by the gang. A rival team of interlopers might come down from Dagenham and from the pier entrance right up to the High Street there would be a reception committee.

It was a testosterone-fuelled time for Anthony and he later worked it into his music. ‘When I feel particularly aggressive…I use the most aggressive part of my life which I suppose was the 1950s when I was a teddy boy.’19 He was arrested with his gang, instilling in him a healthy disrespect for the law – or at least the law as practised in Southend.

‘The police were notorious, and I was falsely accused of assaulting a policeman,’ he later said. ‘I was said to have hit a policeman with such force he had to be picked off the pavement. It was absolute rubbish, but I was found guilty. I had to spend a night in a cell with the light on all the time, and I wasn’t allowed to use the lavatory. It was hateful. I think there should be more education for the police.’20 Back home, he hid the drape jacket and drainpipe trousers behind the coal bunker to become well-behaved Narnie indoors.

Street culture met his artistic influences and laid the foundations for a serious drink problem. According to his second wife, Ki Longfellow: ‘He believed all this shit about what a real artist goes through,’ she says. ‘A real artist drinks red wine and smokes and lives in a garret. A really great artist dies young. So he began drinking when he was thirteen years old, but this was normal, hanging out with the guys he met on the streets.’ He was beginning to find out who he was – and that was different: ‘I didn’t enjoy it,’ he later told an interviewer. ‘It’s just that when I was thirteen and growing my first beard, I just went up to the top of my road in Leigh-on-Sea. I was pointed out by a little boy and his mother said, “Shh…He’s a crank.” So I thought, “That’s it, that’s what I am.” I mean, it’s very handy to know what you are.’21

The other important teenage business was love. His first love was a girl named Mary. They met when he was fifteen and he was ‘insanely in love’ with her for many years. She thought he looked like nothing on earth, with his colourful clothes and his newly acquired artist’s beret. He rode to her school on his bone-shaker bicycle, waiting for her near the tennis courts. She too was taught by nuns, who instinctively disapproved of this strange young man and banned her from going out at lunchtime. Waving at Mary from the side of the tennis courts, Stanshall attracted the attention of the PE teacher, who became convinced there was a pervert near the grounds. The teacher strode over and told him to make himself scarce. Mary’s attempts to explain that it was all right because she knew this particular ‘pervert’ fell on deaf ears.

Neither of the two young people had much money and were rarely on their own together. They went for long walks along the seafront by Old Leigh and out on the sands. Mary was invited to the Stanshall house where, to her astonishment, her boyfriend was called Anthony – by now he was Vivian to everyone outside the familial home. The atmosphere chilled when the boy’s father returned, Eileen’s personality changed and the house became quieter. After that, Mary did not visit when Stanshall Senior was at home.

Anthony was now Vivian, much to his mother’s chagrin. He later made the change of name permanent. ‘He did it properly by deed poll,’ says Eileen. ‘He did that because he wanted to be in show business and he thought it sounded better.’ Vivian wanted another name change too: he asked Mary to marry him. Eileen did not approve. She was certain the girl was too young to understand her true feelings. She also knew that she wanted her son to finish art school and so she took Mary into the kitchen one day to tell her that the wedding would not have her blessing or that of her husband.

‘If you love him, you’ll wait,’ she told Mary. They might have waited until Vivian was twenty-two, but it was never to be. This was not because of Eileen: she was adamant that her Narnie would never go behind her back and Vivian was just as certain that he could have done so. It did not come to that. Crushingly, Mary turned him down. Vivian cried for a week and always believed that Mary came to her decision because she lacked faith in him. While he might have been colourful and great fun to be with, underneath it all he thought that in her eyes he would never amount to anything. Yet his career prospects were the last thing on her mind.

‘I just didn’t believe you, that’s the bottom line,’ Mary admitted to Vivian when they met years later. ‘I just didn’t take you seriously, ever, because you used to disappear out of my life and then suddenly turn up again.’22 The relationship ended, but the couple would never forget the vivid memories of their first love. Vivian was even more determined to get his degree.

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