Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic

Penclawdd was hardly the most congenial of locations for an aspiring entertainer. The village itself consisted of a tiny, quiet and close-knit community of cockle-gatherers, while, on its outskirts, the Experimental Station amounted to nothing more than a cluster of Nissen huts. There was a small local amateur dramatic society of sorts (which a grateful Howard joined ‘to keep my hand in, as it were’41), but precious little else to stir a performer’s spirits.

Fearing that his ambitions would soon start to atrophy in such sleepily prosaic surroundings, he persuaded his Commanding Officer to allow him to apply to join the cast of Stars in Battledress – the big new Army Welfare concert party (a sort of entertainment ‘flying squad’) that had been formed to tour all of the major fighting zones along the Allied Front.42 He expected, bearing in mind all of the recent success he had enjoyed in front of audiences at Southend and Shoeburyness, that his act was now sound enough to assure him of a swift and easy admission. He was in, however, for a shock.

Auditions for Stars in Battledress were usually held in the nearest available cookhouse in front of an interviewing officer (and, invariably, it was only one) who had some kind of experience of show business. When, one dark and rainy morning, Frankie Howard arrived for his, he found himself at one end of a vast hall (still reeking of yesterday’s soggy vegetables and watery gravy), and, far away at the other end, a stem-faced officer who had worked before the war as a part-time conjuror. Instantly, the old RADA feeling returned.

He suddenly realised just how helpless he was without a proper audience with which to interact. Alone in front of this single distant figure, in a room where every ‘ooh’, ‘aah’, and ‘er’ was left to die a lingering death of lonely echoes, Howard was beaten before he started. The left knee trembled, the stammer took over, the mouth dried up, the wide eyes glazed over: he conveyed nothing to the interviewing officer apart from the unbearable intensity of his frustration and fear.

He failed. Worse still, he went on to fail no fewer than four auditions in all. When the last of them was over, Howard went back reluctantly to the cockles and corrugated iron of Penclawdd, nursing an ego that had been badly bruised by the realisation that the very men who had been detailed to ferret out fresh talent ‘didn’t think I was worth ferreting’.43

He began to feel desperate. After having made so much progress as a performer, here he was, stranded in a rusty little Nissen hut in South Wales, shuffling papers and filling in forms. He had grown up coping stoically with just the lows, but now, after experiencing his first real high, the lows felt worse than ever. At the start of March 1944, following one too many dull and drizzly days, he cracked, and marched off to see his CO: ‘[C]an I please do something positive for the war effort,’ he pleaded, ‘even if it [is] my destiny only to get my name in the papers as one of yesterday’s casualties?’44

The Commanding Officer smiled indulgently – he had grown used to this sort of thing by now – and assured Howard that the problem had already been solved. Earlier that very morning, he revealed, a new batch of orders had arrived on his desk – and one of them (relating to preparations for the imminent Allied invasion of France) entailed, among other things, a new posting for Bombardier F.A. Howard. He was off, without delay, to Plymouth: ‘For the big show,’ the CO added with the suspicion of a smirk, ‘and I don’t mean telling jokes, what?’45

A Commando course in Devon was not what Howard, in a cool hour, would have requested by way of a radical change, but, like everyone else in the services, he had to accept what he was assigned. It was just a relief to be doing something, anything, other than sitting around an office. Always fitter than he looked, he coped rather well with all of the shinnying up and down ropes and scrambling over assault courses. With neither the time nor the energy for the usual pursuit of stage-based activities, he got on with the job in hand, and the general opinion was that he did it ‘jolly well’.46 Indeed, such was his burst of enthusiasm (and temporary physical felicity) that he won a promotion to the rank of Sergeant, and was then sent off on a driving course.

That move precipitated a dramatic reversion to type: he proceeded to drive a large lorry full of soldiers through a hedge and into a tree. A certain loss of nerve was suffered as a consequence – not just on Howard’s part, but also on that of his superiors – and he was shunted discreetly sideways to a role in which he could be trusted to do less damage.

There was little time, however, for further mishaps – at least on English soil. On 6 June 1944, Howard and his comrades boarded a merchant ship and set sail for Normandy as part of the D-Day dawn invasion force. Heavy seas prevented the vessel from disembarking its troops, and so it was left to wallow in its swell for no fewer than eleven days while the first wave of the invasion pressed on ahead. Howard – who was meant to be up on a conning tower manning a Bren gun – spent much of this frustrating and unnerving period coiled up on the floor, suffering from a combination of suspected influenza, undeniable seasickness and a mild form of malnutrition.

When, at last, he was back on dry ground, he was informed that he was being posted to Lille in northern France. ‘Anyone speak French?’ enquired an officer. Howard, somewhat impetuously, replied that, as he had been to a half-decent grammar school, he could manage the odd word. ‘We’re a bit short, Sergeant,’ the officer said, ‘so you’re an interpreter.’47 Before Howard had a chance to splutter any kind of protest, he was transferred to Brussels as part of the Military Establishment.

‘Who are we governing?’ he asked an officer when he arrived. ‘The Germans soon,’ came the confident reply, ‘because we’re winning the war.’ ‘Well,’ said Howard, looking only a little less anxious than before, ‘that’s one blessing, anyway.’48

There were plenty of scrapes and narrow escapes. On one ostensibly straightforward assignment, for example, Howard accompanied a Major to a nearby village in order to ascertain how many women there were pregnant (and thus qualified as a priority for the soon-to-be-distributed food). The snag was that Howard the interpreter had absolutely no idea what word was French for ‘pregnant’, and so, in haste, he assumed a heavy Charles Boyer-style accent, improvised a phrase that he believed mistakenly to mean more or less the same sort of thing – ‘Nous voulons savoir si une femme voulons avoir un enfant?’49 – and ended up asking a succession of women not if they were having a baby, but, rather, did they want to have a baby. Unsurprisingly, he and the Major were chased out of the village by a group of angry husbands brandishing cudgels, pitchforks and shotguns, and then, on their way back to camp, they almost got themselves lost hopelessly in a dense sea of fog.

The next thing that Howard did was to appear to liberate the Netherlands. As usual, it happened by accident.

The Germans were in the process of capitulation, and, on 5 May 1945, a convoy of Allied vehicles was due to set off from Brussels to enter the Dutch legislative centre. When the dawdling Howard was urged to hurry up and get into one of the cars, he chose, without the slightest hesitation, the one right at the front: ‘It seemed logical.’50 At some point en route, however, all of the vehicles lining up behind fell foul of navigational errors and disappeared from sight, leaving Sergeant Frankie Howard to enter The Hague alone in a chauffeur-driven staff car and be mobbed by a mass of grateful citizens (‘the most appreciative audience I’ve ever had!’51).

As this surreal little period continued, Howard was sent with a young Army Captain to Stade, near Hamburg, to form a two-man Military Government. The Captain, facing one taxing challenge too many, promptly suffered a nervous breakdown, leaving a panicky Howard to tap out a signal for help. Reinforcements duly arrived, swelling the risibly under-manned Government of two to a risibly over-manned Government of 200. Howard, relieved to find that his services were no longer urgently needed, redirected his efforts towards the far happier task of entertaining.

He organised yet another concert party. He tried, unsuccessfully, to inveigle a fleeting appearance in a movie – Basil Dearden’s The Captive Heart – that he heard was being shot further ‘up the road’ in the British Occupation Zone. He performed the occasional one-man show. He did all of the things that he most enjoyed being able to do.

As far as Howard’s Commanding Officer was concerned, he was pushing at an open door. During the summer of 1946, the War Office began a process whereby all of the old individual service entertainment bodies – including ENSA, Stars in Battledress, Ralph Reader’s RAF Gang Shows and the many and various concert parties – were gradually merged to form a new, all-embracing, post-war organisation called the Combined Services Entertainment unit (or ‘CSE’ for short). With more than thirty separate shows to stage, the need for new talent was acute, and Howard’s CO, hearing that the next audition was about to be held in nearby Nienburg, urged the obsessive performer to travel there and try his luck. ‘With my record,’ groaned Howard, ‘I’ll be back tomorrow.’ His CO was more sanguine: ‘Maybe you’ll be lucky this time.’52

Howard drove there in a lorry. Although he had not applied for an audition, he managed to get his name added to the list, and just after lunch, before there had been any time for the customary build-up of nerves, he was instructed to take his turn in front of the judges.

There were two people in particular whom he had to impress. One was the officer in charge of CSE productions in Germany and Austria, Major Richard Stone: a former actor who would go on to become one of Britain’s leading theatrical agents.53 The other was Stone’s assistant, Captain Ian Carmichael: a RADA graduate with a long and illustrious performing career ahead of him.54

Howard’s routine revolved, somewhat idiosyncratically, around an old Ella Fitzgerald number called ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’. Holding a slightly bent, smouldering Woodbine between the first two fingers of his shaky right hand, he interspersed the verses –

A-tisket, a-tasket

A brown-and-yellow basket I sent a letter to my mummy

On the way I dropped it.

I dropped it, I dropped it Yes on the way I dropped it A little girlie picked it up And put it in her pocket.

– with his usual brand of rambling interjections, before bringing the song screeching to a close:

Tisket, tasket, I lost my yellow basket

Oh someone help me find my basket

Make me happy again, again.

(Was it red?) No, no, no, no!

(Was it brown?) No, no, no, no!

(Was it blue?) No, no, no, no!

No, just a little yellow basket

A little yellow basket!55

‘Thank you very much,’ Major Stone said with the standard politely inscrutable smile, and then, once Howard had departed from the hall, he turned to solicit the views of his number two. ‘Oh no, no,’ sighed Captain Carmichael, ‘he’s too raw, with no timing, and I don’t think he’s particularly funny.’56 Stone, sensing a negative, invited his colleague to clarify his position. ‘I thought,’ Carmichael replied with a grimace, ‘that he was death-defyingly unfunny.’57 Stone, however, disagreed: ‘I think you’ve got it wrong. I’m going to book him for one of our shows.’58

Howard was duly installed as the compère of a concert party – The Waggoners – that was touting north-west Germany. For the next three months or so, from the end of 1945 to a short time after the start of 1946, he was in his element. Moving rapidly from place to place, he acquired a clearer sense of what it took to win over any audience, and he adapted his act accordingly. He improved the best of his old routines; dropped the rest; wrote, tried and tested several new jokes, sketches and monologues; and generally grew in confidence as a performer.

Those who watched him were impressed. One such admirer was a 21-year-old soldier and budding comedian named Benny Hill. Serving in Germany at the time with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, Hill was struck immediately by Howard’s edgy originality, and made a point of seeking him out in the canteen shortly after the show had finished.

It was a brief but revealing meeting between two of British comedy’s most significant stars of the future: Hill, the self-assured optimist, and Howard, the insecure pessimist. ‘You’ve got a jolly good way with you,’ gushed Hill, believing Howard (who was seven years his senior) to be a relatively seasoned professional. When it became clear that he was actually lavishing praise on a surprisingly shy and modest amateur, Hill urged him to consider pursuing comedy as a career: ‘You ought to take it up,’ he insisted. ‘I think you would do very well.’59

Howard, blushing a little and fidgeting with his curly hair, mumbled a clumsily non-committal response – ‘I don’t know, really, you know’ – but he was genuinely touched by the encouragement.60 Indeed, having endured so many curt rejections up to this point in his life, he treasured every single one of the kind words that he now received.

Richard Stone, for one, would discover just how true this was some thirty-five years later, when the star Frankie Howerd, upon hearing a specious rumour that Stone had only grudgingly found a place for him in CSE, asked his former boss to meet him as soon as possible for lunch. ‘It turned out,’ recalled Stone (who had secretly been hoping that the reason for the meeting was to sound him out about acquiring Howerd as a client), ‘that in all the years, through his many ups and downs, he had consoled himself with the thought that there was at least one man in show-business who believed in him. He then produced from his pocket a tired piece of Army notepaper which he had cherished. It informed those whom it might concern that Sergeant Howard was a very funny man, and was signed Richard Stone, Major!’61 The insecurity would never go away.

Throughout that short tour during the winter of 1945/46, however, Howard was a relatively happy young man. The fears of wartime were finally over, and the anxieties of peacetime had not yet begun. All that he was required to do – and all that he needed to do – was perform, and he relished every minute. Then, with the arrival of April 1946, the brief but blessed interlude was brought abruptly to a close. Frankie Howard, after spending six years in uniform, was demobbed, and he returned to civilian life.

Finding himself back in Eltham, ‘with less than £100, a chalk-striped suit, pork-pie hat’,62 and that precious one-page reference from Richard Stone tucked safely away inside his jacket pocket, he felt some of the old nerves start to stir. Now aged twenty-nine, he stood for a moment alone, took in all of the familiar sights, and then thought to himself: ‘What now?’63

ACT II: FRANKIE

They’re mocking Francis!

CHAPTER 4

Meet Scruffy Dale

My agent. He’s a very peculiar man, my agent. He’s got what they call a dual personality. People hate both of them.

It was an extraordinary coincidence. Shortly after Frankie Howard departed from the Army, he met not only the man who would soon prove to be one of the best things to have happened to his early career, but also the man who would end up seeming like one of the worst. These two men were one and the same: Stanley ‘Scruffy’ Dale.

Of all the innumerable managers, promoters and sundry ‘ten-percenters’ who struggled to make a living out of post-war British theatre, none was quite as mysterious, unorthodox and downright odd as Stanley Dale. Invalided out of the RAF after sitting on an incendiary shell that had penetrated his aeroplane (an act of valour for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross1), he had since built a new career for himself in civilian life as a booker for the band leader-turned-impresario Jack Payne.

A whippet-thin man of average height with a sharp-featured face and short, curly hair that swept back over his head in shiny little ripples, Dale was notorious for his unpredictable office hours, his somewhat insalubrious personal habits and, most of all, for his chronically unkempt appearance. ‘Scruffy was scruffy,’ confirmed the scriptwriter Alan Simpson. ‘I mean, nearly every time I saw Scruffy [he] was in bed! He used to conduct all of his office meetings in bed, with a fag hanging out of his mouth – he never seemed to puff it, it always seemed just to burn away until there was nothing there but a sort of grey stick – and he had all of this ash dripping down on to his pyjama jacket.’2

When, however, Dale managed to summon up the effort to rise from his bed and dress (which happened – if it happened at all – only very rarely earlier than noon), he was capable of giving off a certain ‘loveable roguish’ kind of charm, particularly when telling some of his extraordinary tales (many of them tall, a few of them positively colossal) about the remarkable things he had done, the astonishing sights he had seen and the impressive people he had known over the course of his improbably eventful life. Tony Hancock, for one, fell deeply under his spell for a while during the immediate post-war period, sitting around with him night after night, sharing cigarettes and drinks and listening wide-eyed and open-mouthed to his anecdotes about the countless narrow escapes he claimed to have experienced while serving in the RAF.3

A budding young stand-up comic by the name of Jim Smith was another performer who would find himself drawn into Dale’s orbit. After seeing the teenaged Smith on stage at the start of the 1950s and quickly sensing his potential, Dale put him under contract, continued paying him a regular salary during his two years away on National Service, and, when he returned, gave Smith the ‘gift’ of his own surname – so Jim Smith became Jim Dale, and the comedy performer was promptly re-packaged as a pop star.

One of the qualities that friends and clients alike admired in Stanley Dale (at the beginning at least) was the extent of his apparent devotion to their cause. Behind the risibly indolent image lurked a lively and surprisingly imaginative champion of whomever he found worthwhile. If a performer needed someone to transport a cumbersome trunk, set up a prop or simply flick a particular switch, Scruffy, invariably, would agree to do it. If a friend fell into financial trouble, Scruffy would often be the first to volunteer to fix it. If a client required a change of style, Scruffy would go straight ahead and dream another one up. Nothing, it seemed, was too much trouble for Scruffy Dale – just as long, of course, as it did not need doing before noon.

What tended to dazzle people most of all about Dale was his claim to possess a special range of entrepreneurial powers. At a time when many of London’s theatrical agents still seemed mired in the methods and manners of the pre-war Edwardian era, Stanley Dale appeared strikingly and excitingly progressive, buying and selling stocks and shares at both a speed and a level of complexity that rendered the average Variety artiste breathless and dizzy but also deeply impressed. He was regarded, recalled his former colleague Bill Lyon-Shaw, as ‘a whizz-kid of his time’. Any up-and-coming performer would obviously have craved such lucrative expertise, but with Stanley Dale, Lyon-Shaw noted, there was a catch to the whizz-kid’s promise of a boundless supply of cash: ‘He whizzed quite a lot of it into his own pocket.’4

The full extent of Dale’s many deceptions would only be discovered a decade or so later. Back in 1946, he struck most people as merely an eccentric but slyly effective wheeler-dealer, and there was one thing about this unconventional man of which no one was in any doubt: he had a genuinely sharp eye for new talent. It was this sharp eye that would soon spot Frankie Howard.

Howard first encountered Stanley Dale at the Stage Door Canteen in Piccadilly – a bustling little venue (based on the site occupied nowadays by Boots the Chemist) where Service men and women with a passion for performing could ‘meet and see’. Howard, having recently been demobbed, should not, by rights, have been there, but he was already feeling desperate. During the brief time he had been out of uniform, Howard had failed yet another audition – this time at Butlin’s holiday camp at Filey in Yorkshire – and then tramped his lonely way around most of Soho’s well-known (and quite a few of the more obscure) agents’ offices without eliciting more than the faintest hint of sincere encouragement. The problem was always the same: ‘Where can I see you perform?’ each cigar-chomping agent would ask. ‘You can’t,’ came Howard’s stock reply. ‘I’m not working.’5’

It was every young performer’s Catch-22: in order to work, one needed an agent, but in order to get an agent, one needed to work. There was no hope to be found in logic; the only hope to be had was in luck.

Just before Howard met Dale, he sat up in his old bedroom in Eltham and hatched an audacious plan to actively make his own luck instead of continuing to wait passively for its possible arrival. Remembering that one of the most sympathetic (or least unsympathetic) agents he had so far encountered – Harry Lowe – was known to be a regular in the audience at the Stage Door Canteen, he resolved to try to sneak his way in.

Late one morning in the middle of the week, he put his old Army uniform back on, retrieved Richard Stone’s short letter of recommendation, passed politely on his mother’s kind offer of another brown paper bag full of cheese sandwiches, and set off ‘with nervous impatience’ to catch the bus bound for Piccadilly.6 Marching into the secretary’s office in what he hoped resembled a suitably soldier-like manner, he introduced himself as Sergeant Frank Howard and handed over the positive reference from Major Stone. The ruse worked: he was told that he would be on stage next Friday night at seven o’clock sharp. Racing off to the nearest public telephone, he notified Lowe of the news, and Lowe assured him that he would make every effort to attend.

When Friday arrived, Howard – buoyed by the familiar sight of a boisterous military audience – gave what he felt at the time to be the performance of his life.7 Immediately afterwards, however, he was crushed to discover that Harry Lowe had not been present to see it. Fearing that he would probably fail in the future to be as good as that again, he felt that his big chance had already come and gone.

Slumped in a chair back at his home in Eltham, Howard spent the next few days in a ‘state of indescribable melancholy’.8 Then, out of the blue, came a request from the Stage Door Canteen: as there was a shortage of performers for the following Friday night, the message said, would Sergeant Howard mind filling in? At first, he was disinclined to take up the offer, feeling that there would no longer be any real point to further exposure, but eventually, after being encouraged and cajoled by his mother, he relented: he would go, he mumbled miserably, but only in order to give ‘a valedictory performance before abandoning all hopes of a show-business career’.9

Harry Lowe, once again, was not there, but this time Howard could hardly have cared any less. Expecting nothing of any consequence to come from the performance, he went on stage at his most relaxed, and he proceeded to have some fun. The act went even better than it had the last time: every gag, every routine and every semi-improvised comic exchange with certain individuals among the audience seemed to trigger another crescendo of laughter. Howard could do no wrong, and he knew it – and he loved it.