Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic

He also sang the song, in his own inimitable style, for which he would later be infamous – ‘Three Little Fishes’:

Down in the meadow in a little bitty pool

Lived three little fishes and their mommy fishy too. ‘Swim!’ said the mommy fishy, ‘Swim if you can!’ So they swam and they swam right over the dam.

Each subsequent verse was disrupted with comic interjections, and each chorus became an excuse for a quite extraordinary array of high-decibel shrieks and yelps:

There was Tom: ‘Boop-boop-dittem-datten-wattem, choo!’

And there was Dick: ‘Boop-boop-dittem-datten-wattem, chooo!’ And there was Cecil: ‘Baa-oop-boop-dit-tem-dat-ten-wat-tem, choooo!’ (Oh, he was a snob! He was dying to get into an aquarium!) And they swam and they swam right over the dam …12

Snobbish Cecil, needless to say, met with a particularly grisly end.

It was the same routine that he had performed so many times before, but, on this particular occasion, it really seemed to work. There were relatively few noticeable stammers or stumbles, and plenty of well-rehearsed cues for laughs; compared to most of the others taking part, Howard looked as if he knew what he was doing – even when he was pretending not to know what he was supposed to do. His audience, though captive, was genuinely appreciative. He left them calling for more.

More was just what they were going to get. Buoyed by this initial success (‘for me the smell of greasepaint had the same effect as a whiff of cocaine on a junkie’13), Howard threw himself back into his old routine, and, within a matter of a few short weeks, he had practically taken over the running of these Sunday night productions. He pestered his ostensible superiors until they agreed to let him improve the quality of the programmes; demanded – and received – a bigger say in the title, running order, writing and staging of each production; and he not only bossed about all of the officer-performers during rehearsals but also – much to the amusement of his many new friends among the audience – reduced them to mere stooges during the concerts themselves (‘I treated them as bad performers and not as men with pips on their shoulders’14).

He also worked hard at improving his own act. Always a perceptive student of other performers, he was now able to stand back and think remarkably dispassionately about how best to shape and display his own peculiar talents. His stammer, for example – which had for so long been considered nothing other than a troublesome impediment – was now quite consciously transformed into a positive technique. Instead of struggling vainly against it, as he had done to such distressing effect in front of those grim-faced RADA examiners, he started using it, and sometimes even exaggerating it, along with all of the other obvious aspects of his general nervousness, to help accentuate his originality.

First, he thought of how much more distinctive and real and funny it would sound if, instead of just parroting the polished patter of a well-known professional, he actually appeared to relate the story to his audience as if it had really happened to him. Second, he realised how much easier it would be to fill up his allotted time on stage, and disguise the paucity of his original material, if he mastered the art of, as he put it, ‘spinning it out’.15 Max Miller, for example, would deliver the following joke, word perfect, at his normal rat-a-tat-tat pace:

’Ere’s a funny thing happened to me this afternoon. A girl said to me: ‘Hello, Max!’ I said: ‘I don’t know you.’ She said: ‘It’s my birthday. I’m twenty-one today.’ She said: ‘Will you come up to my fiat for coffee and games?’ I said: ‘Don’t bother with the coffee – but I will come up.’ Well, it was raining outside, and there are only two things to do when it’s raining. And I don’t play cards. ’Ere!16

Howard, however, would take this basic joke and, through hesitation, deviation and repetition, make it seem entirely his own:

Oh, no, don’t, n-n-no, please, don’t. No. liss-en! Um. Ah! You’d have screamed! Oh, you would! Yes. I have to laugh meself when I think about it! Yes. I do. No, er, the thing was, th-th-there was this girl, you see. Yes. This girl. And, oh, she was pretty! What? Pretty? Oh! I should say so! Pret-tee! Yes. This girl. Oh! Ever so pretty. And, er – where was I?17

On and on he would go, moving forward, pulling back, stepping sideways, moving forward again, drawing his audience deeper and deeper into his distinctive comic world, until, when he sensed that they were ready, he finally hit them with the punchline.

He was no longer trying to hide his own inadequacies. He was no longer trying – and failing – to be like the other stand-up comics. He was now trying – and, increasingly, succeeding – to be more like himself. He started using everything – his arching eyebrows, his skewer-shaped mouth, his swooping vocal inflexions, his risible sartorial awkwardness, his occasional lapses of memory – to make a strength of his imperfection.

Most important of all, he began performing with, rather than to, his audience. They now became ‘a vital part of the act’:

I told these stories of misadventure in the form of a cosy ‘just between you and me’ gossip, as though leaning over an invisible garden fence or chatting to cronies in the local pub. And just as Mrs Jones can evoke laughter and sympathy by telling her neighbours about her troubles, so I found I could create laughter and sympathy by making the audience share the preposterousness of the improbable (but not impossible) situations in which I put myself as the innocent and misunderstood victim of Them (i.e. authority).18

It worked. It made ‘Frankie Howard’ work.

From now on, he would appear irrepressible. The Sunday concert parties grew to seem far more like ‘The Frankie Howard Show’ than any orthodox form of ensemble entertainment event. He appeared four or five times during each evening before, inevitably, returning yet again as top of the bill. Not content with his multiple solo spots, he also persuaded his sister, Betty, to take the train from Fenchurch Street to Shoeburyness every Sunday morning in order to join him on stage in an all-singing, dancing, joking double-act (she ‘could have been a pro’, he later reflected, ‘but her energies were always to be channelled towards furthering my career’19). He was everywhere, he was always involved, and it was only a matter of time before he was completely, and officially, in charge.

It was the padre who did it. Howard was still a sincerely religious, churchgoing individual, and, from the moment he arrived at Shoeburyness, he had instinctively gravitated towards, and confided in, the garrison’s resident chaplain, the Reverend Mackenzie. Mackenzie, in turn, followed Howard’s progress with interest, and, after watching him blossom as an entertainer, helped facilitate a transfer to the Quartermaster’s Office – a move that promised not only a promotion to the rank of Bombardier, but also, more importantly, the prospect of slightly more time for planning performances.

That was by no means the end, however, of the padre’s well-meaning interventions. Keen (for the sake of camp morale in general as well as that of his protégé in particular) to encourage Howard’s countless passionate plans to improve the standard of the garrison’s in-house entertainment, Mackenzie arranged for him to write a letter to the Commander-in-Chief at Shoeburyness, setting out precisely what was wrong, what needed to be changed, and who should be charged with the power and responsibility to change it. It proved, recalled Howerd, to be ‘an absolute stinker of a letter’:20

In no uncertain terms I said that it was outrageous that officers should dictate to the men the way they should entertain and be entertained … That there was too much censorship … Too much patronising paternalism by the Entertainments Officer … That an entertainments committee should be set up on which the men should be represented – instead of this vital matter being left in the hands of an Entertainments Officer completely lacking in any semblance of qualifications for the job.21

The note went on, he would recall, ‘florid with such adjectives as disgraceful, stupid, appalling [and] ridiculous’.22 Naivety, rather than any conscious desire to cause offence, had prompted such a diatribe: ‘Had I been more discreet in my wording, and wrapped the modified result in such phrases as “It seems to me, sir” and “May I respectfully suggest, sir” it might have been all right – but I was far too ignorant for such circumspect subtleties.’23

The result, unsurprisingly, was that Bombardier Howard was dispatched to the guardhouse and charged with gross insubordination. Luckily for him, the Reverend Mackenzie stepped in and saved the day: he sought out the furious Commander-in-Chief and sowed a few seeds of dubiety into his fevered mind, assuring him that the offending letter had, after all, been solicited by his good self, and, though its style and tone had obviously fallen far short of Sandhurst standards, its author had clearly only been trying to be honest. The General relented, and Howard was reprieved.

In fact, he was more than merely reprieved. He was actually given his head. As his letter had suggested, an entertainments committee was established, censorship was relaxed and a higher level of commitment was demanded. Bombardier Howard became the de facto controller of the Shoeburyness concert parties. His superior officers, having reasoned that it was better to have a character such as him operating on the inside instead of on the outside, then sat back and waited to see if he would sink or he would swim.

He swam. He swam length after length. He was practically amphibian. Glorying in the greater stature, power and security that came (at least in his eyes) with his crowning as the unopposed ‘Mr Sunday Night’ of Shoeburyness, Frankie Howard pushed on with all of his brightly ambitious plans. The concerts grew bigger and bolder. The material became considerably more irreverent (a deliberate change of policy by such a playful anti-authoritarian) as well as a little ‘bluer’ (a trend whose start had far more to do with naivety than any conscious desire for greater vulgarity: ‘Nobody realised that I was genuinely innocent,’ he protested. ‘Such is the way reputations are made!’24). There was also a change in sensibility: it gradually became more ‘camp’.

‘Camp’ is one of those terms that has since been stretched to encompass everything from a marked preference for matching genitalia to a chronic weakness for placing words within quotation marks,25 but, in the early 1940s, it meant little more than men mocking the supposed rigidity of their own masculinity – sometimes, but by no means always, in drag. It was a safe and playful form of release: a chance for homosexual men to behave less like heterosexual men, as well as a chance for heterosexual men, tired of going through the motions of military machismo, to behave less like heterosexual men.

It was a release for Frankie Howard, primarily, because it suited his overall comic style and sensibility. He had not been drawn to, and influenced by, other comedians because of their actual or supposed sexuality; he had been drawn to them because of their allegiances – always us against them, workers against bosses, women against bullying men, men against bullying women, the powerless against the powerful – and their devious methods of attack – such as George Robey’s tactic of provoking anarchy by demanding order (‘Desist!’), or Robb Wilton’s use of characterisation as a means of critique (‘The wife said, “You’ll have to go back to work.” Oooh, she’s got a cruel tongue, that woman!’), or Jimmy James’ subversive air of disingenuousness (STOOGE: ‘Are you puttin’ it around that I’m barmy?’ JAMES: ‘Why, are you tryin’ to keep it a secret?’).26

Howard was especially inspired, at this stage in his career, by the drag act of Norman Evans. As ‘Fanny Fairbottom’ – a mob-capped, bulbous-bosomed, voraciously nosey Lancastrian harridan – Evans would lean over a back-street wall and exchange gossip with an unseen neighbour:

What did you say? Who ’as? Her? That woman at number seven? ’As she? Is she? Oooooh, gerraway! Oh, no, I won’t say a word, no, I never talk. But, well: fancy! Mind you, I’m not surprised. Not really. I told her. She would go to those illuminations! It was the same with her next door to her. Oh yes, and that wasn’t the first time. I knew what she was as soon as I saw ’er! Oh yes. That coalman was never away, you know! I mean, don’t tell me it takes thirty-five minutes to deliver two bags of nuts! He’s a bad lot! Oh yes. I knew what was goin’ on when I saw him shout ‘Whoa!’ to his horse from her bedroom window …27

Off-stage, there was nothing remotely effeminate about Evans – and no one was in any doubt that he was a happily-married heterosexual28 – but, on stage, he relished the role of this gossipy old woman. Howard was impressed by his acting skills: ‘Even though [he] was talking to an imaginary person you could always hear the replies he was getting from his phrasing. He produced a personality on the other side of that garden wall without you ever seeing that person.’29 Howard was also fascinated by the fact that Evans, when dressed as – and behaving like – a woman, could get away with the kind of material that, if it had been delivered by (or, in his case, as) a man, would have sounded far too ‘blue’.

It was this sense of serving up an audience sauce through indirection, of sending out an encrypted signal of naughtiness, that drove Howard himself deeper and deeper into the camp sensibility, and often into drag. He wrote a new musical comedy routine, entitled ‘Miss Twillow, Miss True and Miss Twit’, and, alongside two of his male colleagues, performed it dressed up as ATS girls. The trio (with Howard centre-stage as Miss Twit) began the act as follows:

Here we come, here we come,

The girls of the ATS –

Miss Twillow, Miss True and Miss Twit.

(Repeat)

The huge amount of work we do,

You know, you’ll never guess.

But in Army life we fit …

To bend we never ought,

Because our skirts are short.

But they really do reveal

That we’ve got sex appeal.

And if you want a date,

Enquire at the gate

For Miss Twillow, Miss True and Miss Twit …30

It went down well inside the boisterous barracks, and it also proved popular on those occasions when they were given permission to perform outside as part of a touring concert party called the Co-Odments.31 It ran into trouble, however, when, right in the middle of one lunchtime performance in the Mess, the air-raid siren started up. As the audience stampeded for the exit, Howard had just enough time to remove his wig, the two balloons that passed for breasts and the painfully tight woman’s shoes, and wriggle out of the borrowed ATS outfit and slip back into his own uniform – but, in the rush, the thick layer of make-up and the strip of ruby-red lipstick were forgotten. Out on parade, he stood stock still with his rifle, pack and painted face, looked straight ahead, and hoped for the best.

A young subaltern arrived to inspect the ranks. He approached Howard, gave him a cursory glance, moved on, stopped, shook his head, and then turned back for another, closer look. For a moment, neither man spoke: Howard stared blankly into the distance, trying his hardest not to twitch or tremble, and the officer, head cocked slightly to one side like a quizzical cocker spaniel, stared fixedly at his face. Finally, the officer managed a cough, which Howard took as the cue for him to offer some kind of explanation. ‘C-concert party,’ he stammered, the panic strangling his voice into a squeaky falsetto. ‘The alert went,’ he struggled on, ‘in the m-middle of the c-concert party.’ The officer seemed dazed: ‘Concert party … Er, yes … Mmmm … Concert party … Jolly good.’ He moved on along the line, stopping every now and again for a nervous glance back and a quick shake of the head, before departing hurriedly off into the distance. It had been a narrow escape, but it would not be the last time an officer would stare at Howard, in or out of drag, and shake his head and think: ‘Er, yes … Mmmm …’32

The fact was that Frankie Howard was a homosexual. It seems that he had not always been entirely sure, in his own mind, about the true nature of his sexuality, but military life, with its all-male community, had started to draw out his deepest desires. He formed his first relatively intimate adult friendship with a fellow-soldier at Shoeburyness, a young man whom some of his contemporaries (reflecting the casual homophobia so common at that time) freely described as ‘sissified’.33

There appears to have been little doubt, among the other soldiers in the garrison, as to what kind of relationship it was (or at least had the potential to become), but, fortunately, few seemed inclined either to report or condemn it. Although, in those days, homosexuality was illegal, it has since been estimated that at least 250,000 homosexuals served in the British armed forces during the Second World War, and, ironically, most of them were accorded a far greater measure of tolerance, compassion and respect, informally, than many of their successors would receive in peacetime. ‘All the gays and straights worked together as a team,’ recalled one who was there, explaining: ‘We had to because our lives might have depended on it.’34

Howard and ‘his right-hand man’ (as some teases took to calling him) knew and understood the unwritten rule: so long as they were discreet, the relationship would probably remain safe. According to one of their old Army colleagues, Tom Dwyer, the couple never dared to attempt anything more demonstrative, in the presence of others, than the odd furtive touch of hands in the darkness between their beds. One night, Dwyer recalled, he noticed, as he drifted off to sleep, that each man was lying on his own bunk, but was still linked to the other by a shadowy outstretched arm: ‘They were, like, holding each other’s little finger.’35 Such was often the sum of stolen intimacies to be treasured by those soldiers who sheltered ‘secret’ loves.

For Howard and his partner, however, there was always the unique freedom afforded them by the stage, with its licence for ‘larger than life’ personalities and playful poses, and, for a while, the relationship had room to thrive. ‘They got on like a house on fire,’ remembered Dwyer.36

Then came an enforced separation. Howard was posted to a new Ministry of Defence ‘Experimental Station’ over on Foulness – the largest of the six islands forming an archipelago in south-east Essex. He still returned each night to sleep in the barracks at Shoeburyness, but, with less time to spend with his partner and more time to spend on planning his concert parties, some of the original passion began to dissipate.

The camp attitude, however, did not. It was now part of him, as well as part of his act. It was the means by which he protected himself, preserved his sanity and made palatable his own occasionally prickly personality. A mixture of candour, sarcasm and self-parody, it could almost always be relied on to elicit a laugh, or at least an indulgent or confused ‘Er, yes … Mmmm’, when a blast of invective might otherwise have been expected.

It came in particularly handy when Howard, during one of his fleeting visits back to Southend to appear with the Co-Odments concert party, found himself on stage with a piano accompanist called Mrs Vera Roper (he had worked first, and often still did during this period, with another member of the party by the name of Mrs Blanche Moore, but on this particular night it was Mrs Roper who was seated at the piano). Although Roper had performed with Howard before without experiencing the slightest form of a mishap, on this particular occasion her mind seemed to be elsewhere – much to her young colleague’s evident irritation. Cue after cue was missed, as she stared off into space and he stammered and struggled to cover up the mistakes. Howard’s patience finally snapped after she twice failed to hear – or at least respond sufficiently promptly to – a carefully rehearsed question he had asked her. ‘That’s all I need,’ he growled, ‘a deaf accompanist!’ and the audience, assuming it to be part of the act, laughed uproariously.37

That was all that was needed to spark another bright idea into life. What the conventional, sober sensibility responds to merely as an embarrassing error or unnecessary imperfection – something to be corrected or edited out and smartly erased from memory – the camp sensibility seizes on with relish, tweaks up a notch or two and then celebrates with a nudge and a wink. This was precisely what Howard did: he took the immensely frustrating experience of being ignored by a pianist who ‘was pondering how many meat coupons she had left in her ration-book’, and used it as the basis of a brand-new comedy routine: the ‘daft situation’ of him being saddled with an accompanist – ‘Madame Vere-Roper, known to me as Ada’, or ‘Madame Blanchie Moore’ – who appears incapable of providing any accompaniment.38

It would always progress (or, more accurately, fail to progress) along the following uneven lines: switching back and forth between a piercing shriek to make himself heard by his accompanist and the sotto voce tones required to confide two-facedly in his audience, Howard struggled in vain to get started:

I thought tonight, ladies and gentlemen, er, I’d give you a bit of music, yes, which, er, if my pianist has sobered up, we’ll do now. It’s called ‘A Night in Old Vienna’. Yes. It’s an operatic aaaria. Yes. It’s lovely, this. Lovely. Here we go. [Madame Vere-Roper, sealed at the piano some distance back, prepares herself to play] N-n-no, no, don’t clap – she’ll want money. I’ve told her this is an audition. Yes. No, the thing is, she can’t hear very well. No, she can’t hear much. And she’s very bitter with it. Yes, she’s a real misery guts. She really is. [Turns, with a forced smile on his face, to acknowledge her] Evening. We’ll do the song now. Yes, chilly. ’Tis, yes. The song. We’ll do the song. I SAID WE’LL DO THE SONG NOW! [Turns back to audience] No. Don’t laugh. No. Don’t, please. You’ll make trouble. I beg of you. Don’t laugh. No, she can’t hear, and, oh, she’s a funny woman, you know! Mind you, she’s had a terrible life. Oooh, shocking life! Oh, yes, terrible! [Shouts in her direction] I’M TELLING THEM YOU’VE HAD A TERRIBLE LIFE. Yes, it is very chilly tonight! Yes! I know! Chilly! Yes! There’s a wind blowing up the passage tonight! Yes! Very chilly tonight! ’Tis, yes! Think winter’s back! I SAID WINTER’S BACK! Yehss! [Talking to the audience again] Poor old soul! Well, she’s past it, y’know – that is, if she ever had it! No, really, no, she should be in bed …39

It was what Howard did best: appearing to fail dismally at doing his best.

Over the course of the next half-century, he would use no fewer than eight of these ‘deaf’ pianists,40 but the nature of the routine never changed. The attempt to produce ‘a bit of culture’ produced nothing better than a bit of chaos, and more or less everyone in every British audience, from the nervous young soldiers of the early 1940s to the not-so-nervous young university graduates of the early 1990s, could find something to identify with, and laugh at, in that.

Before Howard could expand and develop his promising act any further, however, he was uprooted once again. Early in 1942, he was posted to a new Army Experimental Station at Penclawdd – a small fishing village on the Gower peninsula near Swansea in South Wales – and assigned an uninspiring but time-consuming office job in Requisitions.